Introduction

For fans of Cold Mountain and The Invention of Wings comes “a tour de force of historical fiction” (Henry Wiencek, author of Master of the Mountain) that follows the epic journey of a slave-turned-Comanche warrior who travels from the brutality of a New Orleans sugar cane plantation to the indomitable frontier of an untamed Texas, searching not only for the woman he loves but so too for his own identity.

I have been to hangings before, but never my own.

Sitting in a jail cell on the eve of his hanging, April 1, 1875, freedman Persimmon “Persy” Wilson wants nothing more than to leave some record of the truth—his truth. He may be guilty, but not of what he stands accused: the kidnapping and rape of his former master’s wife.

In 1860, Persy had been sold to Sweetmore, a Louisiana sugar plantation, alongside a striking, light-skinned house slave named Chloe. Their deep and instant connection fueled a love affair and inspired plans to escape their owner, Master Wilson, who claimed Chloe as his concubine. But on the eve of the Union Army’s attack on New Orleans, Wilson shot Persy, leaving him for dead, and fled with Chloe and his other slaves to Texas. So began Persy’s journey across the frontier, determined to reunite with his lost love. Along the way, he would be captured by the Comanche, his only chance of survival to prove himself fierce and unbreakable enough to become a warrior. His odyssey of warfare, heartbreak, unlikely friendships, and newfound family would change the very core of his identity and teach him the meaning and the price of freedom.

From the author of the New York Times Notable Book Life Without Water, The Life and Times of Persimmon Wilson is a sweeping love story that “is as deeply moving and exciting an American saga as has ever been penned” (Lee Smith, author of Dimestore).

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Excerpt

We were marched through the streets and then locked into a yard surrounded by walls twice my height, and stinking of sweat and human waste. On the other side of the walls we could hear conversations, shouts, and the whistles of steamboats along the river.

For the next week I was fattened and toned for market. I was fed bacon and butter and bread, and five times a day made to run laps around the perimeter of the yard with the other men. Then the day came that I was washed, greased, and walked through a door on one side of the compound to a clean wide room. I was stood up against a wall with other slaves for sale. Women were on one side of the room and men on the other, all of us arranged by height.

I spent three days in that showroom and each day was the same. White men coming along, taking my fingers in their hands and moving them back and forth, checking for nimbleness. They ran their hands up my legs, along my arms, across my chest and abdomen, looking for tumors, hernias, and wounds, anything that would bring my price down or make them decide not to buy me. They pulled my lips back and looked at my teeth. I was told to strip that they might check my back for the marks of the lash. I was told to dance a jig that they might see for themselves that I was spry and able.

I was seventeen, eighteen maybe, I don’t know.

The grease the trader had smeared on my skin made me hot. My skin felt closed up, like my whole body was wrapped in tight leather on a sweltering day. All I could do was stand there, let the white men look, and answer their questions.

“What’s your age, boy?”

“Can you drive a buggy?”

“Ever had chicken pox, whooping cough, measles?”

“Where did you live before?”

“You got a wife?”

“Would you like to come home with me, boy?”

We’d been told what to say. Old men were told to say they were younger. There were skills we didn’t have that we were meant to claim. Our health was good, always. Scars and missing fingers were explained away, not as punishment, but as mishaps with machinery. The farther we came from the less likely we were to run. The same for being unhitched. In answer to that last question, would you like to come home with me boy, the only reply a slave could give was yassuh.

Yassuh, I answered the gravely voiced man who had prodded at me for the last hour. It was then I raised my head slightly, and got my first good look at Master Wilson, the “innocent” man I would kill ten years later. He was short and round. Two days from now I will be dead, hanged for his murder and the kidnapping and rape of his “wife.”

You who find this, I know what you will be thinking. You will want to take thos words, “innocent” and “wife” out of quotation marks. You will think that I, a nigger, a heathen, a horse thief, a murderer, a kidnapper, a rapist, do not know the meaning of what I have just written, but you will be wrong. I know its meaning. Innocent in quotation marks means that he was not innocent, and I tell you, sir, that he was not. And wife in quotation marks means that she was not his wife, and I tell you sir that she was not. She was his former slave, Chloe, and she is dead now.

I write this for Chloe. It is my urgent task these last few days of my life. I write this that she may be known for who she was and not for who you think she was. She was not Master Wilsons’s wife. She was not white. She was a former house slave, and I loved her, and I love her still. view abbreviated excerpt only...

Discussion Questions

1) While on Sweetmore Plantation, Chloe begs Persy to help her escape, yet he is hesitant. Do you think his reluctance is realistic or cowardly?

2) What do you think the likelihood of their escape being successful would have been?

3) Besides Master Wilson and Holmes with their whips and possibly dogs, what were the binds that held them in slavery?
4) Chloe is always presented through Persy’s eyes, or as he believes other men see her. In this way she is never allowed to represent herself. Do you think Persy’s portrait of Chloe is accurate?

5) At the Double H Ranch Persy witnesses Mo Tilly killing Miss Doreen. It is Miss Doreen’s death that finally sets Sedge free. Do you think this was cold ruthlessness on Mo Tilly’s part, or is it a kindness extended toward Sedge?

6) Throughout the book, Persy moves from victim to a man of violence. Does he remain a sympathetic character to you through this evolution?

7) When Persy is captured by the Comanche, they treat him badly, yet later he is accepted into the tribe. How is it that Persy was able to forgive the Comanche their treatment of him, yet never able to forgive Master Wilson?

8) Persy moves from the culture of slavery to the culture of being in the U.S. Military to the culture of being a freedman to the culture of the Comanche. How do you think his behavior was influenced by each of these cultures? Do you think the behaviors of Master Wilson and Holmes were influenced by the culture in which they lived? What parts of Persy’s character remain constant regardless of the culture he lives in?

9) The tribe Persy lives with is surprised in two different attacks by the U.S. Military. These battles are historically accurate. Did you find it difficult to believe that the Comanche would be surprised in such a way? If so, where do you think this belief came from?
10) If Persy had never found Chloe, do you think he would have escaped Palo Duro Canyon during the final raid? And what do you think became of those that did escape? How were their lives changed?

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