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Category:
Historical Fiction
Publisher: Sarah Book Publishing
ISBN-10: B017AMC9B8
Type: Fiction
Pages: 370
Copyright: Oct 25, 2014
ISBN-13: 9781614563617
Price: $5.00 (eBook)
From 1854-61, Americans were drawn into the vortex of Civil War. Among these unfortunates are John Saxton, only son of a rich Boston shipping baron and his wife Virginia the daughter of a black undertaker.
VORTEX
It contains the basic premise (in that it deals with the struggle of black Americans trying to gain their civil rights denied them by slavery in the South and the Fugitive Act of 1850 in the North.)
Boston, long before the Civil War began, was the nexus of a social/political struggle against slavery in the USA. For example, 'Uncle Tom's Cabin' by Harriet Beecher Stowe was published there in 1852. After the famous 'Tea Party' of 1773 and the Irish immigrations of1849, it is not surprising that Bostonians of all social stripes were considered anti-establishment. However because of the fractions, an insidious social divide between black and whites living there became apparent.
Shortly before the Civil War, Boston's black population became socially estranged from the city's white mainstream. This divide becomes quite evident when the book's white hero marries a black undertakers daughter, the beautiful Virginia Rowland. Their consequent struggle mirrors the social and racist hypocrisy of pre-civil war Boston not only in the white community but in the black (as portrayed by Rev. Benson and his white counterpart Minister Norland.)
Therefore, in book one, ‘VORTEX, the conflict over the issue of basic human tights evolves from the visceral (the throwing of slaves overboard) through the subtleties of social hypocrisy. Eventually civil war erupts between two ideologies so diametrically opposed they are willing to die to preserve them.
Carried along on a tidal wave of hate and destruction are the sub-characters…Alan Pinkerton, Lincoln, Marcus, Belle and Virginia. Much like the desperate slaves aboard the slave ship, the Wanderer, they careen helplessly towards the abyss of civil war. Yet, behind the scenes as chaos explodes around them, these characters plot and counter-plot, their actions leading up to an unforgettable conclusion.
Two main characters form the moral pillars of two diametrically opposed societies, namely John Saxton (an enlightened heir to a shipping fortune) and Marcus Brown (Matari), a former slave/sailor and Maasai warrior (Moran) who amongst other black epitomizes the black dilemma in America.
White trying to retain his Maasai moral compass, Marcus is forced to obey the rules of a socially bigoted white majority in order to survive. This ethical miasma results in a conflict not only between him and those he loves but also between the forces of evil as portrayed by the villainous Horatio Garrow and his hapless confederate Harley Blackstone. Because Saxton and Marcus's morals remain unsullied, their purity of character only serves to make the antagonists appear more evil and depraved.
Excerpt
Chapter One: The Challenge
Low over the eastern horizon, a thread of pearlescent light appeared. The gray plate of Heaven parted to reveal a sailing ship scudding across a ragged sea at over seventeen knots. Somewhere over an oceanic abyss due west of Africa, the clipper Silver Ghost became one with the sea under clouds the size of continents. Above the mainmast, a black and yellow burgee snapped and crackled, pulsating lie a living thing. Bloody wisps of spindrift speckled a sleek coppered hull as it sliced through a soughing line of phosphorescence. Once clear of a cutaway stern, a vortex of death marked the culmination of an event that would forever change the life of a young boy and a nation about to war with itself.
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