Novel examines life after slavery

As diplomats from around the world meet in Durban, South Africa, at the United Nations' World Conference Against Racism to discuss, among other things, reparations for descendants of slaves and debt cancellation for African countries, it would behoove them to read David Anthony Durham's new novel. \n "Gabriel's Story" is a page-turner about a black family's search for a new life -- and a livelihood -- after the Thirteenth Amendment ended slavery on Independence Day, 1865. \nOf those who left the South, most newly freed slaves packed up what pittance of money and belongings they had, if perchance they had anything other than themselves and what they wore, to head to the North's booming cities in pursuit of work. But in this story, Gabriel's widowed mother chooses to remarry a man who sees virtue in hard-work and dreams of a farm -- in the untamed West. \nSo, Gabriel and his brother head west to Kansas with their mother. They find that their stepfather, Solomon, had been much more generous about the farm's progress than was warranted when he wrote to them in Maryland. \n"'I wish I could be showing you the whole place up and running,' Solomon says, 'but last year was tough, harder than I thought. For everyone, even harder for coloreds.'" \nGabriel balks at life on the Kansas farm, while his mother and younger brother toil on continuously with Solomon, seemingly determined to beat all odds against their success in the new frontier. \nLike most 15-year-old boys, Gabriel and his new friend James hunger for adventure. They meet a band of cowboys, led by a white man named Marshall, who agrees to consider their bid to join his gang, if only they fight each other, he says, because he has only enough work for one of them. \nThe boys reluctantly engage and Marshall chooses them both -- over a white boy whom he'd already hired. \nSoon enough Marshall's group continues on its journey, unknown to the two boys, with stolen horses. Soon, Gabriel and James learn that they've become involved with a band of thieves, rapists and murderers. \nAs the reader follows Gabriel's adventures, Durham occasionally weaves in an italicized narrative of the farm back in Kansas -- an appropriate addition to Durham's impressive first novel, but irritating to read several pages at a time in italics. \nMuch of the novel's seeming purpose is the juxtaposition of Gabriel's family's farming and building a stable home and his own gallivanting across the West on a merciless rampage. Solomon is the epitome of an idealistic, hard-working man intent on making things better than they were. \n"That's what it's all about out here, looking to the future and making it so. This here is a land and a challenge like God intended," he says. \nGabriel eventually finds himself back in Kansas, wiser and more humble and ready to take his place behind the plow he shunned at age 15, and, most importantly, at the family hearth. \nToday's debate on the merits of reparations would be well-served by a quick reading of Durham's book. The role of slavery in American history and even on today's descendants of slaves needs a thorough and robust discussion in America. \nNew York Times editorial observer Brent Staples, himself a descendant of Virginia slaves, writes in that newspaper yesterday that, "The reparations debate is part of a burgeoning discussion about the role of slavery in American history." He says that the story of black people in the United States "is one of extraordinary achievement in the face of gargantuan obstacles. It begins in the waning hours of slavery and continues to this very day."\nThe U.S. government never apologized for slavery or paid direct reparations, with many moderate and conservative elected officials questioning why all taxpayers should be held responsible for 246 years of bondage in which they played no direct part. In 1867, General William Sherman famously promised to provide "40 acres and a mule" to freed slaves, a promise later recanted by President Andrew Johnson. \n"Gabriel's Story" is a welcome addition to the worldwide discussion on the product of slavery. It is at once a well-written novel and a much-needed reminder of a part of American history so many of us seem so easily to forget. The addition of Durham's poetic African-American voice and perspective on history is both needed and appreciated.