Nancy Peacock, a fine North
Carolina writer, has won first place for Mainstream Fiction in the 22nd annual
Writer’s Digest Self-Published Book Awards for her novel, THE LIFE & TIMES
OF PERSIMMON WILSON. (NancyPeacockBooks.com)
Peacock’s first novel, LIFE
WITHOUT WATER, was a New York Times Editor’s Choice and her second one got a
stellar review in the New York Times Book Review, which noted Peacock’s “simple
prose that possesses a rhythmic,
repetitive, almost biblical cadence.”“I have been to hangings before, but never my own…”
PERSIMMON WILSON begins with
this unforgettable sentence, “I have been to hangings before, but never
my own…” He is a former slave who was secretly taught to read and write by a
white woman. While he waits to be hanged for the murder of his former owner, he
writes his story. It begins with slavery on a Louisiana sugar plantation where he falls in
love with Chloe, a light-skinned house slave. Their owner takes her for his own
sexual pleasure and Wilson
is helpless to protect her. As the Union troops move through the South,
plantation owners are packing up their slaves and animals and what possessions
they can manage and heading for Texas .
Chloe believes Persimmon is dead; Persimmon eventually joins the Comanches but
looks for Chloe wherever he goes. When he finds her, she is passing for white
and being put forward as their former master’s wife. To tell more would be to
spoil the experience for new readers. Suffice it to say that this is a book
well worth moving toward the head of your reading list.
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