"Nowhere Else On Earth" by Josephine Humphreys, One Helluva Novel!

This is a tremendous novel! This is one of the best novels I have ever read! This is, by far, the best novel I have read since I read "Wilderness" by Robert Penn Warren. I haven't had enough time to read everything I have ever wanted to or should have read. But it still amazes me that I never heard of Josephine Humphreys until I blundered into this novel by accident. The novel is a story of the late Civil War and Reconstruction just as is "Wilderness" and a couple of other things I have read and written about on this blog lately. But I have not set out on any conscious effort to read a lot of novels about the Civil War. It just happens by accident when I am not deliberately reading for a research based purpose. But I have never been more pleased to find a great writer by accident. Humphreys novel is a masterpiece of southern literature. Her plot work is astounding in this book. Her character development is tremendously detailed, written into the flow of the novel with purpose and without visible intent. It just happens which is what great writers do when they are writing at their best. The novel is set in the late years of the Civil War in coastal North Carolina and the heroine is a daughter of a Lumbee Indian woman and a Scotsman. She is intelligent, hard working, committed to her family and her place in the world. She is in love with a fellow Indian man who is becoming the leader of the local resistance to both the Union and the Confederacy in a community which they call Scuffletown. Scuffletown is one of the great names ever created for a place where poverty is king, starvation common, discrimination a daily reality, and the development of what we victims of discrimination like to call "backbone" is the one essential quality which will keep you alive. In those ways,Scuffletown is a sister to every impoverished coal camp in Appalachia, every row of slave cabins on every plantation in the Deep South, and every ghetto in a northern metropolitan area. The people of Scuffletown know how to survive, how to adhere to each other in tough times which are guaranteed to get tougher, and how never to mistake collusion with an enemy as cooperation. Most of the people in Scuffletown live in one room cabins scattered throughout a pine woods swampy world where turpentine making from pine trees is the one way to make a living in a better way than just being a hunter gatherer or scavenger or robber. Scuffletown is located not far from Hell but always has a bit of Heaven in it. It is a place where Love of Place, loyalty to your peers, and generosity no matter how poor you are is a fact of life.

Rhoda, the heroine, falls in love with Henry Lowrie, a young man her own age who grows up to lead the local resistance to both the Union and Confederate forces neither of which has any respect for the locals. As the war degenerates toward Lee's surrender, times just keep getting harder and Henry and Rhoda's two brothers become key members of the resistance with Henry assuming the top position. They are opposed by a local sheriff, his top deputy, and a group of their henchmen who will stop at nothing to maintain control of the populace and pillage as much as they can. The resistance fighters leave home to live in the swamps and strike whenever and wherever they can in order to feed both themselves and those who are dependent upon them. The novel is regularly improved by an event of such striking oppression, suppression, and sometimes resistance to the other elements just mentioned that the reader is spellbound. It is realistic and true of nearly every war of oppression ever waged in the world. In the end, Henry is branded as an outlaw and a reward of $20,000 is placed on his head with the production of himself or his dead body as necessary to collect the money. The war ends before the novel but it does not improve conditions in Scuffletown. Bad goes to worse! One of Henry's loyal men is hanged and Rhoda takes her children to proceedings where she stands in front of the gallows with the condemned man's mother as he falls to his death. But that is not the end of the story. I have never seen a novel I am more happy to recommend. It is a beautiful and often chilling piece of work. This author, Josephine Humphreys is a tremendous writer. I realize full well that one novel is not sufficient platform on which to build monuments to a writer, but this novel is a fine start of the foundation. If her other work is as strikingly wonderful as this novel, she deserves to have her name mentioned in the same breath as Flannery O'Connor, Hemingway, Pearl Buck, and Steinbeck.