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The Color of Lightning: A Novel
Escrito por Paulette Jiles
Narrado por Jack Garrett
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In 1863, the War Between the States creeps slowly yet inevitably toward its bloody conclusion – and eastern thoughts are already turning to different wars and enemies. Searching for a life and future, former Kentucky slave Britt Johnson is venturing west into unknown territory with his wife, Mary, and their three children – wary but undeterred by sobering tales of atrocities inflicted upon those who trespass against the Comanche and the Kiowa.
Settling on the Texas plains, the Johnson family hopes to build on the dreams that carried them from the Confederate South to this new land of possibility – dreams that are abruptly shattered by a brutal Indian raid upon the settlement while Britt is away establishing a business. Returning to face the unthinkable – his friends and neighbors slain or captured, his eldest son dead, his beloved Mary severely damaged and enslaved, and his remaining children absorbed into an alien society that will never relinquish its hold on them – the heartsick freedman vows not to rest until his family is whole again.
Samuel Hammond follows a different road west. A Quaker whose fortune is destroyed by a capricious act of an inscrutable God, he has resigned himself to the role the Deity has chosen for him. As a new agent for the Office of Indian Affairs, it is Hammond's goal to ferret out corruption and win justice for the noble natives now in his charge. But the proud, stubborn people refuse to cease their raids, free their prisoners, and accept the farming implements and lifestyle the white man would foist upon them, adding fuel to smoldering tensions that threaten to turn a man of peace, faith, and reason onto a course of terrible retribution.
A soaring work of the imagination based on oral histories of the post – Civil War years in North Texas, Paulette Jiles's The Color of Lightning is at once an intimate look into the hearts and hopes of tragically flawed human beings and a courageous reexamination of a dark American ...
A HarperAudio production.
Acciones del libro
Comenzar a escucharInformación sobre el libro
The Color of Lightning: A Novel
Escrito por Paulette Jiles
Narrado por Jack Garrett
Descripción
In 1863, the War Between the States creeps slowly yet inevitably toward its bloody conclusion – and eastern thoughts are already turning to different wars and enemies. Searching for a life and future, former Kentucky slave Britt Johnson is venturing west into unknown territory with his wife, Mary, and their three children – wary but undeterred by sobering tales of atrocities inflicted upon those who trespass against the Comanche and the Kiowa.
Settling on the Texas plains, the Johnson family hopes to build on the dreams that carried them from the Confederate South to this new land of possibility – dreams that are abruptly shattered by a brutal Indian raid upon the settlement while Britt is away establishing a business. Returning to face the unthinkable – his friends and neighbors slain or captured, his eldest son dead, his beloved Mary severely damaged and enslaved, and his remaining children absorbed into an alien society that will never relinquish its hold on them – the heartsick freedman vows not to rest until his family is whole again.
Samuel Hammond follows a different road west. A Quaker whose fortune is destroyed by a capricious act of an inscrutable God, he has resigned himself to the role the Deity has chosen for him. As a new agent for the Office of Indian Affairs, it is Hammond's goal to ferret out corruption and win justice for the noble natives now in his charge. But the proud, stubborn people refuse to cease their raids, free their prisoners, and accept the farming implements and lifestyle the white man would foist upon them, adding fuel to smoldering tensions that threaten to turn a man of peace, faith, and reason onto a course of terrible retribution.
A soaring work of the imagination based on oral histories of the post – Civil War years in North Texas, Paulette Jiles's The Color of Lightning is at once an intimate look into the hearts and hopes of tragically flawed human beings and a courageous reexamination of a dark American ...
A HarperAudio production.
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Jiles returns to the American west for this novel, specifically north Texas in the 1860s-70s. There are several main characters, the most prominent Britt Johnson, a historical freed man that Jiles ran across in her research for Enemy Women. Britt, his wife Mary, and three children joined a settlement in Kiowa and Comanche territory. While he was working far from home, the settlement was raided, many slaughtered, and Britt's family, one white woman, and her granddaughter were taken captive. The initial details are horrific: Elizabeth watched her daughter being shot and scalped and a grandson killed, the women were repeatedly raped and beaten, Britt's eldest son was shot, and and the youngest children became dangerously ill. The women were enslaved and the children adopted into Kiowa families. Much of the novel focuses on Britt's efforts to free them, in part with trade items supplied by Samuel Hammond, the Quaker in charge of Indian relations in the district, but even more so with the help of a young brave whose life he had saved. Secondary focus in the novel is on Hammond, whose pacifist beliefs are tried by the brutality he sees around him, and James Deaver, an illustrator-journalist documenting the west for readers back east. Latter chapters focus on Britt's transport business. He was one of the few who would risk driving wagons between north Texas towns through dangerous Indian territory.Jiles does an excellent job of bringing this small corner of history to life. She brings in a lot of interesting elements that I haven't seen addressed in other novels set in the west: what it was like to be a black family in Texas once the Civil War was in full swing and the slaves emancipated; the struggle of men assigned by various religious groups the government put in charge of peacefully turning the Plains Indians into farmers and moving them to reservations as white settlers claimed stakes on the land; the army's efforts to protect the settlers while staying in line with treaties; and the Indians' efforts to maintain their traditional way of life. I found it especially fascinating as so many of the persons in the novel actually existed. I've enjoyed all three of her novels. Captain Kidd, a wanderer who goes from town to town reading stacks of newspapers he has gathered, paid by the listeners to keep them informed of what is happening back east, makes a very brief appearance here but emerges as the protagonist of her next novel, New of the World, which I enjoyed even more than this one.
Rating: 4The Color of Lightning by Paulette Jiles is set in frontier Texas, starting out in the closing days of the American Civil War. The war drew many soldiers to battle and away from patrolling the frontiers. The Indians took full advantage to use this time in attacks on the pioneers who tried to settle on the vast plains of Central America. Making war and carrying out raids was the way of life for these plains people and they continued to raid into Texas, murdering and kidnapping until they were stopped in the 1870’s.In the author’s own words, this book is a novel with a backbone of reality. She tells the story of real life Britt Johnson, a freed slave who came to Texas with his family to start a new life. When he was away from home the Comanche came and murdered some and kidnapped others. Among the kidnapped were his wife, Mary, his son, Jube, and young daughter, Cherry. Against almost insurmountable odds, Britt sets out to rescue his family. The story unfolds from various viewpoints, including that of Britt, his wife Mary, and another captive, Elizabeth Fitzgerald. Along with these people, a Quaker, Samuel Johnson is added to the mix as he arrives to be the new Indian agent. The story is exciting, based on real history, but with this author, the reader is also treated to some almost musical prose. Paulette Jiles is a poet and she is able to brighten her writing with the most inventive descriptions. Whether it is describing the wind moving over the prairie or the inside of a tepee, the language is rich and vibrant. The Color of Lighting was an excellent read and the author has elevated this “Western” to a much higher standard.
Rating: 5Having finished this book several days ago the characters have stayed with me. I realized this book was not going to end the way I would have preferred. ....everyone lives to a ripe old age. I realized that if one decided to take their chances by heading to Texas to homestead in the 1860's the odds of you not making it were high. the odds of a child or a woman being killed or abducted was inevitable as the Indians would just not play fair!the characters in this terrific novel were plucked from history and actually this was their story. remarkable in their resilience and determination to overcome the hardships of Indian attacks, food shortages, unreliable military support, and racism is inspirational. I have Bury my Heart at Wounded Knee on my to read again list.
Rating: 4Extraordinarily well written novelistic treatment of a real heroic character: Britt Johnson. He is a freed slave who takes his wife and children from civil war torn Kentucky to North Texas to settle and rescues his wife and two of his children after they have been captured by Kiowa Indians in a raid. The wife had been repeatedly raped and the oldest son killed. Amazingly, Jiles is able to portray the Indians in a sympathetic and believable way, even though they are violent warriors. The novel follows the wife in her tortuous struggle to survive and protect her remaining children, and become accepted as a useful member of the Kiowa household where her daughter was adopted. There is a paralled story of the Indian agent of the government, a Quaker, who attempts to convince the Indians to settle in one place and farm, and stop raiding and killing. His idealism collapses in the attempts and he recognizes his failures bitterly. I found the stories of the Johnson family and its relationships with the Indians who enslaved them and/or helped them to be fascinating and beautifully done. I thought the separate chapters about the Quaker and his struggle were less interesting and I would have preferred them in a separate book.
Rating: 4I loved News of the World but I haven't been able to get through any of the author's other books. This book had too much detailed violence for me.
Rating: 2Britt Johnson was a real person. This book is just full of lies!
Rating: 1I only discovered the novels of Paulette Jiles this past February when I attended her presentation of her 2016 novel News of the World at the San Antonio Book Fair. That novel went on to become a Book Chase Top Five at the end of 2016, and it is a novel I still think about from time to time. Jiles is an adopted-Texas writer who writes the kind of serious western fiction that I’m always hoping to find, so I knew I had to read more of her work. I am pleased now to report that 2009’s The Color of Lightning is another high quality western with an unusual plot based upon a real life figure from Texas history.Britt Johnson and his family left Kentucky for Texas in 1863 with Moses Johnson, the man who owned all of them. By the time they arrived there, Moses had signed their manumission papers and the family was free. Britt and Mary brought their children to the western edge of settled North Texas country, to Young County (approximately fifty free blacks were already living there) where Britt planned to raise cattle and Mary hoped to start a school for the county’s children. But the Comanche and Kiowa warriors who considered all of Texas theirs to raid and exploit any time the spirit moved them to do so, would have plenty to say about what kind of life Britt and his fellow Texans would be allowed to enjoy. It didn’t take long for things to go very, very wrong for Britt and Mary because, while all the settlement’s men were in Weatherford buying supplies, a 700-man army of Kiowa and Comanche warriors rushed into the Elm Creek community and virtually destroyed it. By the time Britt made it back to his little ranch, his eldest son was dead and the raiders had taken the rest of his family captive. And Britt would not rest until he got them back or made someone pay for their ultimate fate, whatever that fate might prove to be.Jiles largely tells her story from three points of view: the women and children who have been taken captive; Britt Johnson as he searches for his wife and children; and Samuel Hammond, the prominent Philadelphia Quaker sent west to assume the role of agent of the Office of Indian Affairs. As she recounts Britt’s patient struggle to reclaim his wife and children, Jiles exposes the utter brutality of life in much of Texas during the 1860s and 1870s, a period during which two very different cultures, neither of which understood the motivations and desires of the other, claimed the same homeland as its own.The historical fiction of Paulette Jiles often includes rather incredible plots, but the most incredible thing about those plots is that they are based upon Jiles’s meticulous research of real life historical figures. Britt Johnson really was a man whose family was, for all practical purposes, destroyed by a raiding army of Comanche and Kiowa. The traveling newspaper reader and central character of News of the World (who makes a cameo appearance here in The Color of Lightning) was a real man who made his living traveling from community to community reading the latest newspapers he could get his hands on. Jiles’s books are an entertaining blend of fact and fiction that, in the end, provide a realistic picture of what “the good old days” were really like.If you haven’t already discovered the work of Paulette Jiles, you really need to fix that.
Rating: 4Set in the wild west this offers a different perspective telling the story of a freed slave and his family as they try to settle into a new life in Texas. The author has based this novel on oral histories of an actual family’s experiences in Texas.
Rating: 3Britt Johnson was a former Kentucky slave who, along with his wife, Mary, and their three children, went to Texas in 1863 searching for a new life. Little is known about them, other than that Mary and the children were taken in a Kiowa raid, that Britt found the camps where they were held and ransomed them. This is a fictional account of his life in North Texas from 1863 to 1871.
Interspersed with Johnson’s story is that of the U.S. government’s efforts to enforce a peace treaty that the tribes didn’t feel applied to them. Jiles does a good job of painting the landscape and giving the reader insight into both sides of the issues – the pioneers who saw opportunity in this vast new landscape and wanted only to be able to work their land vs the Native tribes who felt the land belonged to no one and that the gods provided the animals, water, grain for their use. One side drew boundaries on a piece of paper; the other recognized only natural barriers and freely crossed them to follow the herds of buffalo or the best pasture lands for their horses.
I was interested in Britt Johnson’s story and that of his family. Not so interested in the plight of the Quaker appointed as the Indian Agency chief. While I understand the need to include this historical background, I didn’t think that Jiles handled the transitions between story lines very well. It was slow getting started and I lost focus, though was fully engaged by the second half of the book. All in all, this is more than just a western, it’s also the story of one man’s courage and devotion to his family.
Rating: 3Interspersed with Johnson’s story is that of the U.S. government’s efforts to enforce a peace treaty that the tribes didn’t feel applied to them. Jiles does a good job of painting the landscape and giving the reader insight into both sides of the issues – the pioneers who saw opportunity in this vast new landscape and wanted only to be able to work their land vs the Native tribes who felt the land belonged to no one and that the gods provided the animals, water, grain for their use. One side drew boundaries on a piece of paper; the other recognized only natural barriers and freely crossed them to follow the herds of buffalo or the best pasture lands for their horses.
I was interested in Britt Johnson’s story and that of his family. Not so interested in the plight of the Quaker appointed as the Indian Agency chief. While I understand the need to include this historical background, I didn’t think that Jiles handled the transitions between story lines very well. It was slow getting started and I lost focus, though was fully engaged by the second half of the book. All in all, this is more than just a western, it’s also the story of one man’s courage and devotion to his family.
This is a great tale of the U.S. containment of the last western Indian tribes in the 1870s, but with a twist. Basing the character of Britt Johnson on a real-life freed slave and his wife Mary, the author follows their trek west as they travel from Kentucky to north Texas, as far away from the Confederate South as they can get. In an raid by a renegade Apache band the oldest son is killed, Mary is raped and, with their remaining two children, taken captive. Unafraid and undaunted by grim tales of Apache cruelty, Britt sets out on a mission to recapture his family. Perhaps because of his race and his former life, he is able to relate to the Indian in a way most white men could not. He manages to make friends with a Kiowa who knows the tribe that has his family, and begins to understand and communicate through this man. Britt Johnson's remarkable quest to get his family back moves concurrently with the arrival of the new Indian Affairs agent at Fort Sill, Samuel Hammond, a devout Quaker who does not believe in using military force. Hammond sets out to recapture all white captives, and is dumbfounded to learn that it many cases, these individuals have no wish to return to white society. His lack of success and struggle with the reality that he will never be able to turn the wild tribes into peace loving farmers, is interestingly played out against Britt's successful recapture of his family and his establishment of a freight delivery business. Author Jiles manages to paint a realistic portrait of this dark period in our history as our government moved ever closer to the dissolution of the Indian way of life without being judgmental. In her account there aren't good guys and bad guys—rather, we are made aware of the desires and glimpse the trials, sorrows, and cultures of all the characters as the story plays out. A most interesting and satisfying read about a difficult time.
Rating: 4Reason for Reading: I love historical fiction that takes place in the late 1800's Wild West. The Black man/Indian perspective was also intriguing.This is the story of Britt Johnson, a true-life black man, and the story of his life just after the Civil War. Britt was a freedman with a wife and 3 three children. Not much is known of him in hard facts, though his story has lived on in oral tradition throughout the ages. When he was off with the other men of his homestead area getting supplies in town, the Comanche and Kiowa came in a raided their homesteads. Killing, raping and taking captives. Britt's wife was raped and suffered a major head wound, his eldest son was killed, while his wife and two younger children were taken captive along with a neighbouring white woman and her two little granddaughters. We see this story from Britt's side, from Mary's side, from the children's side, and from various Indian character's sides as well. There is also introduced a Quaker man who becomes the agent of Indian Affairs for these two violent Native groups and he wrestles strongly with his peaceful Quaker ways and the violent kidnapping of children & women by the Indians as he becomes the only man with enough power to help those being violated but he must go against his religious philosophies to do so and yet his moral self will not allow him to not help stop the atrocities.A fine book that brings deep perspective to a dark period of American history. Indians are being sent off their land and made to live on reservations to learn to farm when it is not their way, but in return their way is raiding and war, scalping, raping, enslaving others. Many wrestle with the morality of it all. Britt is a hero on the white man's side as he risks his life to find Indian captives and bring them back home to their own culture, but what to do with the ones taken as babies who know no other way of life. It is wrong that they have been stolen and yet they do not want to leave what they consider there homes. While Britt is a respected man for what he does, he's never allowed to forget the colour of his own skin as he enters city centres and must use back doors or cannot even enter certain establishments at all. A gripping, thought-provoking book peopled with real life figures from history.
Rating: 4This was a hard book to get into. My first problem was the opening scene of a gory massacre. My second problem was Jiles' use of short descriptive phrases that didn’t make complete sentences. I wondered if she was one of those modern authors who deliberately don’t punctuate, or if the edition I was reading was a proof before any editing. I felt that Jiles just couldn’t be bothered to develop her images. In some places she did manage to develop the images, tho they were not always relevant to the story. For example, telling of Samuel and Lewis walking up a city street, she describes some shoppers struggling with heavy skirts and packages on the steps, and, fancifully, “…white curtains were sucked out of the open windows and gestured frantically with embroidered hems.” In a few places, I could see how the use of phrases adds to the portrayal of the character’s emotional state—disconnected from self and focused outward to escape from personal hardship—such as on p. 52 “Overhead vultures wheeled high…in an airy mobile… a heavy fog…every limb adorned with lines of tiny drops and the grass wet.” On this same page, Jiles uses a foreign word “ekasonip” with no explanation. Later she does give the definition for this Comanche word. I wonder: does she think this mimics how someone immersed in a new culture would learn language—hearing the sound first and making sense of it later? If so, I would imagine the first words learned would be those more useful to a captive’s life than grass.Pushing past the opening slowness, you are treated to an interesting story, tho you aren’t always sure whose story this is. Jiles states she wanted to write the story of Britt Johnson, but she jumps around telling parts of the story of several people without fully telling Britt’s. Obviously she had few facts to go on, but since this is fiction she could have developed him more as a character. Perhaps she really wanted to write a saga.One final criticism is that she didn’t provide justification for certain characters who wanted to remain with the Comanches. The only glimpse we’ve been given of their lives as captives does not seem very enticing, and they’d only been with the Comanches less than a year, it seems. While it is true that many concurrent accounts of captives confirm that they often wanted to remain with the tribe who took them, there were more positive interactions going on in their lives than we see happening in this book
Rating: 3Britt Johnson is a free black man with a family in Texas near the end of the Civil War. 700 Comanche and Kiowa are waging war on all intruders and capture his wife, son and daughter and neighbor women. Johnson ransoms his family and other kidnapped settlers. Historically accurate. Rec commend S. C. Gwynne's Empire of the Summer Moon: Quanah Parker and the Rise and Fall of the Comanches, the Most Powerful Indian Tribe in American History to readers seeking in depth history on this era and cause and effect of encroaching westward expansion.
Rating: 4Britt Johnson, former Kentucky slave, moves his family to Texas to find a new life far away from the Civil War. The Color of Lightning has a violence that shook my sensibilities, but is simply the author telling the truth of the times. Plains Indians captured and enslaved white settlers and settlers gave in kind with violence back. The book was historically informative and disturbing. Britt's indefatigable insistence on finding and releasing the captives is inspiring.
Rating: 3Sockless. This author knocked my socks off! Giving fair treatment to both sides of the Indian/Settler conflicts in North Texas during the times right after the Civil War, this story reads like the real-life adventure it is. It covers the conflict between the Plains Indians nomadic life and long history of warring, raiding and killing from their northern homes in Oklahoma south to Mexico vs. the incoming settlers farming and ranching on fixed plots in between. The dilemma of good men in government who would have liked for Indians to be free to pursue their chosen lifestyle if only they would give up their raids and killing of settlers. The frustration of settlers trying to keep their families safe, and of Indians trying not to give up their ways. It tells, too, of what befell their captives; the degradations they faced (tactfully written), how they coped, adapted, and changed.In the Author’s Note at the end of the book, she tells which characters were real persons. She says also: “The story of Britt’s journey to rescue his wife and children from captivity is beyond doubt, as are the brief accounts of his life afterward. . . . This book is a novel, but it’s backbone – Britt’s story – is true. Britt’s story returned to me repeatedly as I read through north Texas histories over the years, and I often wondered why no one had taken it up. And so I did.” Around this brave man, a former slave, the author has created a fascinating story encompassing the real life events of the Elm Creek raid of 1864. Unlike those authors whose writing says “look at what all I learned while I was working on this story”, Jiles seamlessly knits together her historical research, with excellent story-telling. I’m going to put my socks back on and find another of her books.
Rating: 5Great read. Not only was the story engrossing, the writing was beautiful, the characters finely drawn. It's everything a good book should be. It told the story of the perils and hardships endured by the settlers of Texas both during and after the Civil War, not the least of which was Indian raids by the Comanche and Kiowa Indians. When raiding Indians took Britt Johnson's wife and children captive, the black freedman set off to do the impossible; bring them home. It would have been easy to write this from the perspective that the Indians were barbaric, cruel monsters or from the other perspective, that they were put-upon victims of white aggression. Ms. Jiles managed to bridge the gap between the two. She showed us, rather than told us, what happened to these people and why. There are two sides to every story and she masterfully presented both.
Rating: 5"The Color of Lightning" is based on the true story of Britt Johnson, a freed slave who journeys with his family to Texas near the end of the Civil War to make a life of his own. When Britt goes on a journey, his family, along with that of a nearby neighbor, is attacked and taken captive by a band of Kiowa Indians. Britt embarks on a mission to get his family back, and to build a life and a business for himself in this dangerous time in history. The novel beautifully illustrates the tragedy of the conflict between settlers and Native Americans, without ever choosing a "side." The U.S. government is also implicated in the novel for its gross mishandling of relations with the Native Americans, which, even if sometimes well-intentioned, was doomed because of complete ignorance of Native American culture.The writing is very vivid and descriptive, yet sometimes feels inconsistent. Most parts of the novel are gripping and captivating, but some others seem to drag and get bogged down in details. While the characters were fascinating, it was somewhat difficult to connect to them. There were several different, interconnected storylines and at times it seemed the novel couldn't decide what it was truly about. Several interesting themes abounded: the psychological impact of captivity, race relations, the displacement of Native American tribes; but it seemed the novel could never quite decide what its true focus was going to be.Nonetheless, the story overall is quite compelling and is a snapshot of a tumultuous time in American history. There were several moments that were so emotionally charged that my stomach flip-flopped. The descriptiveness of the writing pulls the reader into the story such that you can imagine the scenes as if they're unfolding right before your eyes. The author researched the history thoroughly and overall, this is a very worthwhile read.
Rating: 4