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(More customer reviews)This book is a masterpiece! A brilliant new author has arrived!
On the surface, Gloryland brings to life some important and exciting history - that of the African-American "Buffalo Soldiers" who were not only courageous campaigners, but recently were re-discovered to have established Yosemite National Park and served as the first Park Rangers there, as well as build the trails to the top of Mount Whitney - the highest mountain in the lower 48 states (14,505 feet).
But far more than that, Shelton Johnson is a spell-binding and magical writer, linking the world of nature and that of African-American young men to whom freedom was but a recent acquaintance, weaving this tale with lyrical threads that in places read like a stream of poetry. Dig a little deeper, and the reader cannot help but consider the relationship between the deepest of concepts - beauty, happiness, freedom, love, hope.
Though coming from entirely different times and cultures, somehow I could only compare Johnson's writing to that of Yasunari Kawabata - Japan's greatest modern novelist, whose prose was also known for its intimacy with the natural world and spareness of expression.
It has been a long time since I have read such magnificent work!
I welcome the young Mr. Johnson - and hope that we will hear much more from this uniquely gifted voice!
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Born on Emancipation Day, 1863, to a sharecropping family of African and Indian blood, Elijah Yancy never lived as a slave, but his self-image as a free person is at war with his surroundings: Spartanburg, South Carolina, in the Reconstructed South. Exiled for his own survival as a teenager, Elijah walks west to the Nebraska plains and, like other rootless young African-American men of that era, joins the U.S. Cavalry.The trajectory of Elijah's army career parallels the nation's imperial adventures in the late nineteenth century: subduing Native Americans in the West and quelling rebellion in the Philippines. Haunted by the terrors endured by black Americans and by his part in persecuting other people of color, Elijah is sustained only by visions, memories, prayers, and his questing spirit-which ultimately finds a home when his troop is posted to guard the newly created Yosemite National Park in 1903. Here, living with little beyond mountain light, cold rivers, campfires, and stars, he becomes a man who owns himself completely, while knowing he's left pieces of himself scattered along his life's path like pebbles on a creekbed.Elijah's narrative voice-poetic, rhythmically cadenced, ranging freely through time-makes this novel a literary meditation on finding a self and a spiritual home, while unveiling a little-known chapter of America's past.
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