Red Trails and White: The Mysterious Life of Caty Sage (review)

Bonnie, Ball. Red Trails and White: The Mysterious Life of Caty Sage. 1988. This straightforward little history could become, as Bonnie Ball says in her foreword, a "stirring historical novel." Instead, this is the very condensed story of a small girl stolen from her family in Virginia, raised by Indians, and discovered fifty years later in Missouri by her brother. Caty Sage, known to the Wyandotte as "SaUy,' cannot speak English and has no clear memory of her childhood , but warmly embraces the knowledge that she does have a real family. Part narrative, part plaintive letters from the Missouri brother, Red Trails and White is a very real chronicle of the westward movement, of the stoic strength of a people who maintained close family ties despite distance, hardship , and the passage of time. Bonnie Ball is also the author of The Melungeons (Their Origin and Kin), first published in 1969 and now in its eighth edition. -Garry Barker Azalea One struggles to grasp that the dry soil of Greenwoodor any dry soil-holds the power to forge such ardent beauty this is truly a burning bush, burning as though a skilled hand had flicked a match into a bush's vapor to shake ash from beauty I don't hear God's promising divine power to lead His people out of and land I witness the radiant Achilles, screaming on the parapet to spark the conflagration of terror in Troian minds or Molly Beauchamp tending the cabin's hearth to symbolize the eternal heat of love's vows So many blossoms of fuchsia fire! yesterday's buds flame as five-pointed stars today seeming testimony from the skilled hand that the few deciduous leaves poking through the sheet of flame tomorrow won't faU to parched earth So many statements about human intensity! the arson of literature, with a skilled hand ordering the words that burn in the mind to shed an evergreen residue and to leave intact the glow of experience -Larry Marshall Sams 70 ...