Come August, Come Freedom: The Bellows, the Gallows, and the Black General Gabriel (review)

Trial records and historical scholarship yield a credible account of the 1800 Virginia slave insurrection organized by Gabriel, a literate blacksmith owned by Thomas Henry Prosser. Far less is known, though, of Gabriel's personal life, and here Amateau steps forward with an intense, empathetic, richly imagined novel that explores how love, betrayal, and the rhetoric of revolution in America, France, and Saint Domingue could have impelled a born leader to make a desperate and violent bid for freedom. The structure of Gabriel's known story is intact: his training and hiring out as a blacksmith; his attack on a white man and narrow escape from the gallows through a legal technicality; the intricate recruitment of slaves, free blacks, and a few white sympathizers for the uprising; the betrayals, trials, and executions that brought the aborted event to its tragic coda. Amateau seamlessly interweaves plot threads that supplement political with emotional motivations: Gabriel's enduring love for the slave Nanny, whom he marries and whose manumission he works tirelessly to secure, and a rift between Gabriel and Prosser, who had grown up as "milk brothers" and playmates, drive his quest for freedom as much as his ideals. Amateau's prose is appropriately passionate, but it's tempered with disciplined restraint and moments of startling delicacy. Although the subject of this title will call to historical fiction readers who appreciate such thoughtful works as M. T. Anderson's Octavian Nothing (BCCB 11/06), teens who approach history with the poetic insight of Marilyn Nelson will also find Amateau's chronicle rewarding. The bound book will unfortunately include only a minimal source note, but it points to what's promised to be a more extensive bibliography online.