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Download Nowhere Else on Earth, Josephine Humphreys, Penguin Nowhere Else on Earth, Josephine Humphreys, Penguin, 2001, 0141002069, 9780141002064, 368 pages. In the summer of 1864, sixteen-year-old Rhoda Strong lives in the Lumbee Indian settlement of Robeson County, North Carolina, which has become a pawn in the bloody struggle between the Union and Confederate armies. The community is besieged by the marauding Union Army as well as the desperate Home Guard who are hell-bent on conscripting the young men into deadly forced labor. Daughter of a Scotsman and his formidable Lumbee wife, Rhoda is fiercely loyal to her family and desperately fears for their safety, but her love for the outlaw hero Henry Berry Lowrie forces her to cast her lot with danger. Her struggle becomes part of the community's in a powerful story of love and survival. Nowhere Else on Earth is a moving saga that magnificently captures a little-known piece of American history.. 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A swamp-bound settlement on the banks of the Lumbee River is the setting for Josephine Humphreys' Nowhere Else on Earth, a novel drawn from the true history of North Carolina's Lumbee Indians. Virtually hidden from neighboring Scots planters and black slaves, Scuffletown suffers severe hardships during the Civil War, facing increasing aggression from a loose collective of whites known as the Home Guard who conspire to send Scuffletown men and boys for forced labor on the vast earthworks at Fort Fisher. Scuffletown's "first family" is the Lowrie clan, whose fortunes intertwine with those of the novel's narrator, Rhoda Strong. As Indians, Scuffletowners are unprotected by the law and instead rely heavily on inter-family ties and the force of a gang led by the nineteen-year-old Henry Berry Lowrie. The Lumbee Indians' lineage and allegiances are central to the novel. In a eulogy for his murdered sons, George Lowrie recounts the Lumbee commitment to the American cause, reminding those assembled that Scuffletowners fought against the British Tories in the American Revolution and were at one time allowed to vote in national elections—a privilege they no longer enjoy. No group-even other Carolina Indians, like the Cherokee—will claim them, and yet it is the Lumbees who may be America's most legitimate colonial heirs. History suggests they may be direct descendants of the first "lost" American colony, Sir Walter Raleigh's Roanoke, a possibility that radically underscores the disenfranchisement they suffer in the nineteenth century. Rhoda Strong is fifteen in the summer of 1864 when the tensions between the Home Guard and the Lowrie Gang begin to escalate. While the Strongs conceal themselves in their house to wait out the Home Guard's latest conscription campaign, Rhoda dreams of love—only to find it realized in the one man her mother has warned her would be a dangerous choice. With local antagonism still running high, Rhoda suspends her hopes while Cee worries that Henry's gang will further sabotage the legitimacy of the Lumbees. An explosive series of events then erupts in the settlement. Brant Harris has taken Rhoda's childhood friend Margaret hostage for a debt she cannot pay and the Lowrie Gang attempts an aborted rescue. The town postmaster, James Barnes, is robbed and he blames the Lowries. Harris is killed, but the Home Guard, led now by his former deputy, Roderick McTeer, continues to harass the Lumbees. In the New Year, the Union Army wins a major victory at Fort Fisher, and the entire settlement feels a now-acute shortage of food and supplies. Barnes is killed in a mysterious fashion after publicly blaming the Lowries for robbing his farm. When Henry Lowrie finds Rhoda alone and caring for a wounded Union soldier, their love affair begins in earnest. But the "lifetime knot" tied by Henry and Rhoda is brutally tested by the events that follow. In a shocking development, Henry's father and brother are killed, execution-style, by McTeer and his men. Sherman's victories consolidate the Union position and Scuffletown looks optimistically for a new peace in the redefined nation. Henry, however, is irrevocably changed. Even though a final robbery by the gang ensures that they will be able to escape Scuffletown and start anew, the victory is bittersweet. Rhoda faces a stark choice: to follow the man she loves, or to let her life be guided by the intrinsic loyalty she feels for a place and a people that count her among their own. Threaded with meditations on love, justice, and sacrifice, and shot through with a sense of the prevailing optimism of the human spirit, Nowhere Else on Earth humanizes the condition of a country at war with itself. Josephine Humphreys is the recipient of the American Academy of Arts and Letters Award in Literature. She is the author of Dreams of Sleep (winner of the 1985 Ernest Hemingway Award for first fiction), Rich in Love (made into a major motion picture), and The Fireman's Fair. She lives in Charleston, South Carolina. I first learned about the Lumbees when I was seventeen, riding a train through North Carolina. A dark-haired girl, just married that morning, boarded the train near Lumberton and took the seat next to me. Still in the white sundress and jacket she'd worn for her wedding, she was the most beautiful human being I'd ever seen. Her new husband was sitting at the other end of the car, she explained, because they were having their first argument: she feared his parents would not approve of their marriage because he was white and she was not. "What are you?" I blurted, and her answer only further bewildered me, because I had never heard of the Lumbees. She enlightened me. For the next hour she told me about her people, and about the central figures in their history, Rhoda Strong and Henry Berry Lowrie. And I was hooked. I promised myself that one day I would write about Henry and Rhoda, but I had no idea that the story would resonate deep in my heart for years, changing my life. I didn't start writing until I was thirty-three, and even then I wrote other novels first, unsure how best to tell Rhoda's story. When at last I worked up my courage, I decided to ground each scene and character in historical fact whenever possible, and then build the fiction with additional imagined details and dialogue. All but a handful of the characters retain their real names. I read two excellent histories—The Only Land I Know by Adolph Dial and David Eliades, and To Die Game by William McKee Evans—but I also read more widely and wildly in order to become as familiar as I could with the fabric of Rhoda's life. I needed to know about North Carolina during and after the Civil War, about turpentine and scuppernongs and bees. I found old letters particularly helpful in shaping the language of Rhoda's narrative; I used maps, paintings, prints, government records, and oral history projects.
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