Saturday Review: “A Story to Tell from North Carolina’s Past” a review by Kristina L. Knotts of David Wright Faladé’s Black Cloud Rising (2022)
In this “historical novel by David Wright Faladé,” writes Knotts, it is apparent that “there is much more to learn about the heroism of black Union soldiers” than was “portrayed in the 1989 film Glory.”
Following Sergeant Richard Etheridge, who was a real soldier in the Civil War and a member of the Pea Island Lifesavers, as he fights for the Union Army under the command of General Edward Wild, the novel “covers a month of Etheridge’s Civil War service from November 1863 to Christmas Eve 1863.” As he enters hostile territory with his fellow soldiers, Etheridge is portrayed as “going into the community to find relatives and friends and bring them into the protection of the Union Troops.”
Throughout this all, Etheridge wrestles with his past, with slavery and racism, with war, all while encountering “a variety of people: hostile Home Guard types, defensive Confederacy empathizers, black men and women who joyously greet the troops, and the free black people who . . . live by their own rules and creeds.” Knotts astutely points out, “Faladé’s storytelling gift is that he reveals the complexity of those in the South, black and white.”
Read the review and buy the book from Bookshop.org or from your local independent bookstore.
