A Page Straight From Rudy Thomas - #apagestraightfrom

Journeys

by

Rudy Thomas

“Home is not necessarily where you belong,” Cry said, “but where you were born, the faces you first saw around you, and the place where you only cry when you are hurt, physically or emotionally.
Tell me a story, Alyx. Tell me your story.”
“My father owned a farm in Kentucky,” she began. “It joined my
grandfather’s farm and our house fronted the Green River. My mother was a slave; bought at auction. Her father was white. Her mother had a white father. All my grandmothers going back to 1733 or 1734
when there were slave uprisings in Jamaica—four, maybe five generations back had white fathers.”
“That would have to make you white, then…”
“It makes me a slave,” she said. “Five, six, or seven generations back or maybe even before that, my mother said I had a grandmother’s family and they were found living east of the Shannon river when Cromwell invaded Ireland. His quest was for the Irish Revolutionaries and their families who dared oppose the British. The English had seized Jamaica to set up British plantations. The punishment for my family’s crime, living where they pleased, was either death or slavery for
women in the West Indies and death, banishment, or imprisonment in New Zealand or Australia for the men. I don’t know the woman’s name, but she was Irish. The masters on their island, English plantations made white Irish female servants like her sleep with a black to get pregnant or marry one so she and her children would become black Irish slaves.
He looked at Alyx. Even in the dress they had given her at the slave market before the sale that never happened because Nathan Bedford Forrest bought every slave, horse and mule, she was beautiful. Guilt flooded through him again like a river out of its banks. He could not imagine how she must feel knowing she was neither black nor white—knowing she had no possessions of her own except the dagger…




Journeys is a novel about a young man who goes to Nashville before the Civil War to buy a horse for his father. It is also a story about the horse and a young slave woman. The young man, Cry, gets recruited by General George Thomas. As a member of General Thomas' intelligence network, Cry gives the reader an accurate, historical account of one of the most successful Generals of that conflict.

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