A CHILD WENT FORTH

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Fiction

The pious are God’s sacred marks.

A CHILD WENT FORTH

By Boston Teran

332 pp. High-Top Publishing LLC

Reviewed by Eric Petersen

Award-winning novelist Boston Teran is back with his twelfth book. The author’s name is a pseudonym, and the curious promotional material claims that his “identity is unknown, yet it is known that he grew up in an immigrant Italian world in the Bronx and describes most of his relatives as ‘gamblers, con men, numbers runners, and thieves.’”

The blurb on the book jacket says of the author, “because of his unique style, [he] has been compared to painters like Picasso and Breugel, the composer Tchaikovsky, and filmmakers like John Ford, Sergio Leone, and David Lean.” How much of this is tongue-in-cheek is debatable.

One thing that can’t be debated is the author’s talent; he’s won many awards, and I wouldn’t be surprised if he wins another for this masterpiece of historical fiction that examines the darkest part of American history – slavery in the United States, a time when Americans freely bought, sold, and worked human beings like livestock.

A Child Went Forth opens in Brooklyn, circa 1855, as the famous abolitionist and evangelist Reverend Henry Ward Beecher – brother of Harriet Beecher Stowe, author of Uncle Tom’s Cabin – meets with a fellow abolitionist named Zacharia Griffin, who is accompanied by his son, 13-year-old Charlemagne “Charlie” Griffin:

“Every artist dips his brush in his own soul and paints his own nature in his pictures. I learned this from you, Mister Beecher. And what is the great canvas of our age? It is America, sir. And the country we paint together will determine the future of this great nation. This is what I teach my son, and what encompasses all that I have learned from your honored self.”

Zacharia Griffin looked at his son with such love, and smiled in that telling way as only he could. They sat in the private office of Henry Ward Beecher, the most famous evangelist of the day. The boy and his father had traveled all the way from Topeka to the Plymouth Congregational Church in Brooklyn with a letter signed by the most famous abolitionists of Kansas. Theirs was an urgent plea to solicit financial aid from the famous Christian foot soldier for their fight against slavery.

Reverend Beecher gives Zacharia money to buy arms for the desperate abolitionists in the Kansas-Missouri Territory, who are under violent siege by pro-slavery militants. What he doesn’t know is that Zacharia is a con man, and the money is going right into his pocket. Later he tells his son Charlie, “The pious are God’s sacred marks. Put here on earth to be served up like supper.”

At 13, Charlie has already proven himself a capable partner in crime, but he hates helping his father swindle people. This latest caper really bothers him, as he has no use for slavery. To make matters worse, he’s given a valuable medallion and told to show it to black people to identify himself as an abolitionist if he needs help along the way – on a trip he has no intention of making. All he wants is to go Cincinnati and see his mother, who is languishing in an asylum there.

Unfortunately, two others covet the medallion and Reverend Beecher’s money – Billy Tule and Handy, two vicious men who wouldn’t hesitate to torture and murder a boy. Tule is a white criminal, Handy a runaway slave filled with psychopathic rage ever since his master cut off his thumbs as punishment.

Tule and Handy end up murdering Zacharia instead, and Charlie just barely escapes from Handy on a train. He makes it to Cincinnati, only to find his mentally ill mother completely unresponsive. The doctor introduces Charlie to a couple he claims can help the now orphaned boy out – a brother and sister named Cassius and Penrose Doral.

Instead of helping Charlie, the Dorals put him in chains, pass him off as a light-skinned black boy, and sell him on the auction block. He’s bought by Erastus Eels, an eccentric undertaker – and notorious militant abolitionist – who pulled a con of his own on the Dorals.

Moved by the plight of blacks at the hands of the slavers, Charlie determines to take up the mission his father used to scam Reverend Beecher and get the evangelist’s money to abolitionists in Missouri so they can buy arms. It’s a mission he will carry out mostly on his own, with some help from Erastus Eels.

It’s also a journey into manhood, as Charlie is pursued relentlessly by those will do anything to stop him, including Tule, Handy, the Dorals, and Dixie Jack – an Oxford-educated professional killer and militant slaver.

Meticulously researched, masterfully plotted, and with a dazzling prose style that captures the time and place so perfectly you’d think it was written in mid-19th century America, A Child Went Forth is a novel to savor. Highly recommended!

Eric Petersen is an administrator and blogmaster for the Internet Writing Workshop, an international, online writer’s group run out of Penn State University. You can reach him by e-mail at EricPetersen1970@hotmail.com