"Band Of Angels" is a 1955 novel by Robert Penn Warren, one of the handful of American writers who was never awarded a Nobel Prize and probably should have been. But he was awarded two Pulitzer Prizes, one for his novel "All The King's Men", and the second for his poetry. He was also a Rhodes Scholar and taught at both Vanderbilt University and Yale. He also worked as a Consultant In Poetry for the Library of Congress. He was an amazingly prolific writer and produced 12 novels, 15 non-fiction books on a variety of subjects, 3 children's books, 2 major dramatic versions of his novel "All The King's Men", 1 short story collection, and 21 collections of poetry.
"Band Of Angels" was made into a 1957 movie which starred Clark Gable, Sidney Poitier, and Yvonne de Carlo. The heroine and narrator of the book is Amantha "Manty" Starr, a woman who was raised by her father on a Central Kentucky plantation in the years preceding the Civil War. Her mother is dead and buried near the house instead of in the plantation cemetery some distance farther away. Her father who pampers her, apparently loves her deeply, and regularly takes her to Cincinnati to meet his friends there. He also enrolls her in Oberlin College in Oberlin, Ohio. But he never tells her much about her mother, and the primary female influence in her childhood is an older slave woman. The father dies suddenly while Manty is still in college and, when she returns to the plantation just in time to see the end of his funeral proceedings in the cemetery, she learns that her mother was a slave, that she was never freed by her father, and is seized, as part of his personal property, at the graveside by a local loan shark who has loaned her father large sums of money. She is shipped to New Orleans to be sold as a slave in the slave market there and bought by an older man who pays $2,000 for her to keep her from falling into the hands of a young southern ne'er do well. She becomes the mistress of her owner who turns out to be a former slave trading ship's captain. He also owns a unique male slave who is the actual overseer of his plantations but has been raised much like his son and holds a great deal of power over the other slaves.
This book is full of one surprise twist after another and flows with wonderful prose which is the trademark of Robert Penn Warren. Modern readers, especially readers of color, are likely to be deeply offended to the prolific use of racial slurs in the book which are not just limited to the "N" word. But it is an accurate book for the times which it describes in the slave holding south both before and after the Civil War. Manty is eventually set free, marries a former Union Army captain, and lives for a time in New Orleans high society. She also eventually joins her husband in a long westward migration as he seeks a career as a lawyer but finds one reason after another to fail in town after town. There is a great deal to love in this book along with a somewhat sizeable portion of things some readers will hate. But it has survived, as every word Robert Penn Warren published has and should have survived. It's arguable weaknesses are clearly overcome by its powerful strengths. Put aside any negative emotions you might have for Warren's broad usage of language which is historically accurate but despised today and read the book. In fact, I would say that any reader who likes to read broadly of the best writers in the world would be remiss to avoid reading Warren as broadly as possible. He is one of America's great masters of literature.
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