![]() ![]() “Who was the bigger coward,” he wonders, “the boy for dying without courage, or George for not being able to tell the boy’s own mother that she would never see her son again?” He died in a moment of panic, running “toward the Union line as though they might pity his screams of terror, might see him through the glut of smoke and grant his surrender and not shoot him down with the rest.” Now the father’s shame is compounded. ![]() He’s just received word that his only son, who enlisted with the Confederacy, was killed in the final weeks of battle. But the end of the War Between the States brings him no joy. ![]() A Northerner brought to Georgia decades ago as a child, George never developed any sympathy for the Southern cause. George Walker is wandering through his 200-acre wood. And he explores this liminal moment in our history with extraordinary sensitivity to the range of responses from Black and white Americans contending with a revolutionary ideal of personhood. His prose is burnished with an antique patina that evokes the mid-19th century. That this powerful book is Nathan Harris’ debut novel is remarkable that he’s only 29 is miraculous. Union soldiers have marched through the state telling enslaved Black people they’re free, but that freedom exists in the ruins of a white society seething with resentment, determined to maintain its superiority. “The Sweetness of Water” – the latest Oprah Book Club pick – unfolds in Georgia during the murky twilight of the Civil War. ![]()
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