Red Clay is definitely a 2025 favorite for me. We learn the stories of a formerly enslaved family and the family that owned them through a shared oral history that takes place in 1943 after the death of Felix Parker. Addie Parker, now 90, was a member of the Parker family who owned Felix. She seeks to share the story of his life up to his early manhood with his family and to learn of his life as a free man with a family and a carpenter shop. Most of the novel is about the past. All of the historical pieces we learn about are the stories each family has learned through direct experiences or as passed down to them. In the novel, they are told from a third person omniscient point of view and so we are in each period of the lives of the various characters. Although the book is told in multiple timelines, it chronologically runs from the last year or two of the Civil War to 1943, when Felix dies.
As the Civil War is plainly drawing to a close, John Parker, owner of Roads End Plantation carries out a plan to ensure his family’s future when his slaves are likely to be freed and the family’s wealth seriously impacted as a result. The plan involves little Felix, the only remaining child of Elmira and Pleasant and burdens him forever with a dark secret. Felix’s older brother and sister were recently sold. Felix’s family has the “easier” life of working in the house. His mother is the cook, his father a kind of factotum to the master. Felix, a favorite of Addie, the spoiled only girl child of the Parkers spends each meal sitting on a stool behind Addie while she fees him table scraps. The family’s view of the people they enslave is somewhat tempered by the mistress, Marie Louise, who grew up in New Orleans where there are free Black people, many people of mixed race. Make no mistake, Roads End has wicked overseers, works their slaves as hard as any plantation and whips and disfigures those who try to run. When the master dies, Claude, the son who is most interested in and capable of taking over the plantation does so, although not in the way he expects. Yet, the master wishes to leave ten acres of land to Pleasant and these wishes are passed on to Claude through his mother when she passes away after her husband. That ten acres plays its own role in the story over and over again.
The Roads End enslaved population learns of their freedom while Claude is master. He takes steps to establish sharecropping for those who want to stay. In what he views as a savvy and very generous decision, Claude moves Pleasant, Elmira and Felix to the former overseer’s house to work for wages. The complicated relationships between freed people and the town of Red Clay, Alabama evolves during postwar reconstruction to the violence perpetrated against Black people viewed as acting above their station. Fancher deftly illustrates both the petty and the deadly actions of the local plantation owners. The change influences Claude, who could be “benevolent” when he was in control, to an angry man who wants and cannot fully have control anymore.
While Claude manages Roads End after his father passes, his mother takes Addie to New Orleans. Addies life ends up exposing her to a broader view of the world, an unconventional turn related to her traveling abroad and a shift in her views of the formerly enslaved residents of Road’s End and elsewhere. As she shares her story with Felix’s descendants and they share his, the depth of their understanding and respect for one another grows in a lovely way.
Red Clay Alabama and the trajectory of its white and black populations never quite becomes stereotyped, but it is vividly drawn and at times, unbearably drawn. And that is as it should be. That there were people like Addie who grew and changed and brought a new perspective to the post-war south is indisputable and Fancher also keeps that real. Addie was a spoiled brat who would hurt Felix, the enslaved. Through life experience, she ends up at his funeral in 1943. He had lived a life that was by no means free of terrible suffering and danger due to her father’s and brother’s actions both during and after the times of slavery in the United States. While Fancher spares us nothing, he brings us much to ponder and appreciate about the possibilities that were there and that some achieved. Those enslaved people lucky enough to learn a trade let them fare better than others when they ventured off the plantation into post-slavery life. It is plain that those left to sharecropping were vulnerable to the quality of their harvests and were much more likely to lose everything.
In sum Red Clay shows us the varied stories about how people changed, for better or worse, when slavery ended, and does it to perfection. I have read a lot of history of this period and other historical fiction about this era. This book deserves a lot of attention. It is well researched, beautifully written and a nonstop compelling read. I read the audio version. The narrator, Dion Graham is astoundingly good. I looked him up and quickly realized I’ve listened to him narrate many other works of fiction. I need to add more of his work to my library. I strongly recommend that people who, like me, enjoy audiobooks read this one through Graham’s narration, which is, as usual, impeccable.
They Called me Bookworm 