Book captures the fragile hope of the freed slaves

'Forty Acres and Maybe a Mule' by Harriet Gillem Robinet

February 16, 2000
Web posted at: 3:29 p.m. EST (2029 GMT)

by Nancy Matson

(CNN) Harriet Gillem Robinet's historical novel, "Forty Acres and Maybe a Mule," winner of the 1999 Scott O'Dell Award for historical fiction, follows a makeshift family of recently freed slaves as they experience the possibilities, and the limits, of their new freedom.

12-year-old Pascal couldn't be happier when his long lost brother Gideon shows up at the plantation where Pascal is enslaved to tell Pascal that slavery is no longer legal. With Pascal's friend, 8-year-old Nelly, in tow, the two brothers head off to find a Freedmen's Bureau -- an organization set up to give freed slave families a rumored "forty acres and maybe a mule." Along the way, they pick up an older man calling himself Mr. Freedman, and his granddaughter, Gladness.

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Robinet's novel -- newly released in paperback -- captures the fragile hope of the freed slaves during the Reconstruction era, as well as the seeming impossibility that that hope will ever be realized. While Gideon talks big about how the daisies on his future land will bow down to him and the boll weevils wouldn't be brave enough to invade his cotton, Pascal has a hard time imagining any of it could ever come true. After a long, hard journey, they find a Bureau and a man hands over hoes, seeds, and most exciting of all, a piece of paper describing the group's new piece of land.

The sudden change to a post-slavery society doesn't suit everyone as well as it does Gideon and Pascal. The new farm is under constant threat from hostile white people who roam the area -- the night riders. An angry mob's destruction of the nearby town, populated with ex-slaves, scares the brothers, their new family, as well as all the people they've hired to work the land. But with the help of their white neighbors, the Bibbs, they do manage to avoid trouble for a long time. The children in the town, of both races, also manage to get an education from some missionaries who open up a school in town. But even there, racism persists. It's the white children who receive slates to write on, while the 'colored' children are forced to write their sums and letters in the dirt.

The events of Robinet's book convey the confusion of the time that the freed slaves must have experienced in the period immediately following the Civil War. While slavery techically no longer existed, many former slaves didn't have the courage to strike out on their own after the Emancipation Proclamation was passed. Those that did met obstacles at every turn, from abuse to lynching. While land was given away to those that claimed it, and African Americans briefly attained the right to vote, these opportunities did not last, and many wrongs done to African Americans right after Reconstruction were not to be corrected until the Civil Rights Era.

"Forty Acres and Maybe a Mule" is a window into a unusual period; an informative read for anyone who imagines that society provides continual progress towards social justice, instead of sometimes moving one step forward while taking two steps back.