A tale of three in Civil War Chapel Hill

Chapel Hill writer Joanna Catherine Scott demonstrates great ambition in her third novel, "The Road from Chapel Hill." Here she tackles the dual subjects any writer on the American South must eventually face: the region's history of race relations and the legacy of the Civil War. Each is tangled with the other in a web of pain, misunderstanding, heartache, loss and occasionally, redemptive love. And so they are in Scott's novel.

Scott focuses upon three young characters, each a Carolinian, each living in strikingly different circumstances during the period just before Lincoln's election in 1860 through the Confederacy's collapse in April 1865.

Eugenia Spotswood is a white woman whose fortunes have plummeted. Because of financial circumstances beyond the control of her widowed father, Eugenia has fallen from her perch as a member of the slave-owning Wilmington smart set to a despairing, worn-out drudge who cooks and cleans for her father at the mines in Gold Hill. Eugenia despises her father for his ineffectualness and fall from affluence.

Some distance away, near Chapel Hill, live the Brickets, a poor white family who own an elderly black slave called Old Mary and her son Tom. Though Tom is considered lazy and simple-minded, he dreams of freedom and makes a dash for it one day.

But he doesn't get far before he is discovered by the book's third central character, Clyde Bricket. He's a teenage boy who dreams of becoming a slave-patroller someday: to ride a horse, gather a posse, bark orders and be admired as a leader among men. Upon raising the alarm about Tom's whereabouts and then seeing the runaway shot and captured, Clyde has mixed feelings when he goes to tell Old Mary -- who has shown him only kindness. Maybe being a slave-catcher isn't all he had imagined.

Now considered a troublemaker, Tom is sold in faraway Gold Hill, eventually becoming Eugenia's servant. From this point "The Road from Chapel Hill" portrays how Tom, Eugenia and Clyde wrestle through changes in how they view each other and life, learning that one must actively strive for knowledge, love and freedom to live fully.

This aspect of the novel is brought home effectively in a brief scene after Eugenia secretly sets Tom free, first handing him a handwritten certificate of manumission. As the war rages, Tom heads north, eventually encountering a black man, Robert, who shepherds runaway slaves to Union-held New Bern. Tom proudly shows the guide his certificate from "Miss Genie," but Robert isn't impressed: "You sit there on your backside, tellin' me you a free man, but I say, you want freedom, boy? You got to do somethin' about it. Freedom ain't some gift this Miss Genie lady give you. It ain't no gift at all. You got to hunt it down and catch it. You got to snatch it in your hand. Did no one tell you that before?"

A similar moment of revelation comes to Eugenia as she reflects upon her unfortunate father: "Too late, she saw him as a man battered by exigency. Too late, she understood that a man cannot be blamed for what the heavens throw down on his head. From the moment they left Wilmington ... She had spent her whole time looking at herself, seeing no one but herself, her suffering, her humiliation, her ruined hopes for happiness. Not once had she considered how her father must be suffering ... To have a wife die, to lose everything he owned. From his daughter he had needed sympathy and love. She had given him the bitter herb of spite."

Eugenia's rumination on her father reflects on Tom (and in time, Clyde) too: "And yet she asked herself, does not everyone need love, even a slave? In that, Papa and Tom had been alike. Alike, too, in that they had no one else but her to love them." Which is true; but on this and related, key matters the believability of "The Road from Chapel Hill" flickers.