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 Indian settlement of Robeson County, , 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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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 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. Newspapers of the time followed the Lowrie War closely. One reporter from the New York Herald actually interviewed Rhoda and described the interior of her cabin, including the Currier print hanging on her wall. I tracked that print down and bought my own copy of it to hang on my office wall while I wrote. As for food—I got my knowledge of Lumbee cooking by indulging myself time and again at Fuller's Restaurant and at Sally Locklear's house. Sally is a great cook, and she's also Henderson Oxendine's great-granddaughter. In fact, I was fortunate enough to meet the descendants of several of the book's characters, all magically powerful connections that gave me a sense of history's living presence in our lives.

The Lumbee women I know possess a striking dignity and an inner strength combined with grace, wit, and generosity. While I was writing about Cee and Rhoda, I was thinking not only of the bride I had met on the train but also of Louise, Malinda, Sally, Cherry, Cindy, Johanna, and Aunt Jessie—Lumbee women, American women.

I am not sure I ever made that choice consciously. It simply seemed fitting at the time. For one thing, Rhoda actually lived on for many years, more than three decades after Henry was gone. Naturally she would have spent a great deal of time remembering the dramatic events of her youth and pondering their significance. Wisdom comes with the passage of time. I wanted to discover how she might have understood and interpreted her love and her life. The long look back over time is important to us, too, as we re-examine the American past. Henry is a legendary figure now, to be seen in the light of a century's accumulated knowledge.

I meant to suggest, by means of the title, that Scuffletown is a place unlike any other, with flora, fauna, climate, history, and culture unmatched elsewhere—a unique spot of earth. But I could not have entered this place without Rhoda, the individual and singular woman who inhabited it. Curiously, once I had connected with her, and through her to others, I began to understand the book's title with some degree of irony. Maybe Scuffletown is a place like no other, but at the same time the opposite is true. It is like all others. One part of the ending was unresolved until the very moment of its writing. I had collected various theories as to Henry's fate. Many Lumbees believe that Henry escaped to another state, and some even report that he was sighted several times, coming back to see Rhoda. Others think he accidentally shot himself and was secretly buried by his family in a spot that will never be revealed.

If there were no parallels between the past and the present, history would hardly interest us. Scuffletown thrives today, as the town of Pembroke, North Carolina, west of I-95 near Lumberton. Indians have significant power in county government, courts, school boards, and law enforcement. The current Miss North Carolina is a Lumbee. Among all Native American groups the Lumbees have the highest percentage of lawyers, doctors, and teachers. But prejudice dies hard, and enmities smolder. The effects of past injustice and segregation often linger longer than we might suspect.

I knew that Nowhere Else on Earth would be unlike my earlier works. For those contemporary novels, I used my own world as backdrop. Research was unnecessary, because of course I was familiar with every aspect of that world and could call it up automatically. But for the historical novel, I needed to learn another world, and I needed to learn it intimately. Often I decided not to take notes on my research, hoping that the material would simply soak in and then later bubble up as quickly and as easily as if it were my own. Perhaps the most intriguing part of writing this book was, I discovered, the emergence in my mind of a new and different ethics of fiction. At every stage of work there arose crucial choices to be made, questions I'd never had to consider in the contemporary novel. How could I create fiction that remained loyal to truth? How much imaginative reconstruction could I do without misrepresenting the dead?

I love to get up early in the morning—the earlier the better—and go directly to my office in the Confederate Home, once the refuge of Civil War widows, now a residence for women as well as studio space for writers and artists. When I'm being good, I write hard all day every day, and the intensity of the work creates an energy that keeps the fiction rolling. In a different mode, I might write a sentence, look out the window and daydream for several hours, then go home and work in the vegetable garden. I have started two new books, one set in the past and one in the present. Both are waiting, and I will soon have to choose.

The residents of Scuffletown find that being categorized poses certain risks. How do the ambiguous origins of the Indians contribute to the novel's development? What is the impact of Dr. McCabe's discovery that the Lumbees may be direct descendants of Raleigh's "lost colony"? Why does Rhoda herself seem unimpressed by Dr. McCabe's announcement?

After Andrew proposes to Flora Sampson, Rhoda says, "I tried to see her good fortune as a tiny bright ray, a little hopeful scrap—but I failed....Was it only a man's love that could keep girls safe?" In the novel, does a man's love provide safety and refuge? In what ways do the women have to provide for themselves, and at what cost?

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.

Although not a single cannon is fired in Josephine Humphreys's quietly ambitious Nowhere Else on Earth, the lives of the inhabitants of Scuffletown, a poor Indian settlement on the Lumbee River in North Carolina, are in every way affected by the Civil War. The demand for turpentine, their principal industry, has dwindled to nothing. When they are not fending off or involuntarily "supplying" Union soldiers and marauding gangs, they are hiding their sons from the macks, their hostile Confederate neighbors (pink-faced Scottish farmers with names like McTeer and McLean), who are rounding up Scuffletown boys for forced labor in forts and salt works, from which few have returned.

Sixteen-year-old Rhoda Strong has seen both her brothers disappear into the woods to join this gang, headed by the handsome, charismatic Henry Berry Lowrie, the hope of Scuffletown--who keeps the young men alive through a series of crimes that inevitably escalate to match the cruelties of the macks. To her mother's distress, and to her own, Rhoda finds herself falling in love with Henry Lowrie, so obviously a marked man. When he notices her, and returns her love, she too becomes marked, dubbed the Queen of Scuffletown by her enemies and drawn into a larger history of suffering and revenge.

Writing from the vantage point of middle age, Rhoda resurrects the past, "hot as coals," in an obsessive act of remembrance, having studied and pondered her story for over 20 years. One dog tooth is gone, and my monthly flow has dwindled to a spatter. I'm not as full as I used to be, my wrists are skinny, my knuckles are knobs. I'm starting to wear thin. This is the price of the years of thinking, the casting and recording of events and the frantic pen scratching past midnight, the hoarding of paper, the loneliness, the pages accumulating while I myself shrink down. Rhoda's richly detailed and beautifully sustained fourth novel will recall, in the best ways, Charles Frazier's Cold Mountain (also set in North Carolina, the most "Union" of the Confederate states), although Humphreys has given her heroine a fresh, strong voice, and in turn given a voice to Scuffletown. --Regina Marler --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

While Humphreys has been justly praised as a writer with her fingers on the pulse of Southern culture, she surpasses even her previous novels (Dreams of Sleep; The Fireman's Fair; etc.) in this spellbinding story of a largely forgotten remnant of Indians caught between opposing sides during the Civil War. Scuffletown, on the banks of North Carolina's Lumbee River, is home to the mixed-blood descendants of the original Indians in the area, desperately poor but hardworking families who eke out a living in the arduous turpentining trade. Other nearby residents are "the macks"AScots planters who hold the money and power, and own black slaves. During the last months of the Civil War, the lawless Home Guard, led by sadistic Brant Harris, conscripts boys from Scuffletown into forced labor building Confederate fortifications. Teenage narrator Rhoda Strong, daughter of a Scots father and a Lumbee Indian mother, relates the circumstances that lead her brothers to join renegade Henry Berry Lowrie, charismatic scion of Scuffletown's most respected family, in hiding out and defying Harris and his henchmen. In a narrative layered with indelibly memorable scenes, Humphreys depicts the moral ambiguities that beset Scuffletown's residents and the ironies of their precarious position; the sympathies of many are with the Yankees, yet they endure the depredations of Union troops as well as of marauding Confederates. The major irony, however, lies in Henry Lowrie's fate. Pursued by the profiteering hoodlums he has thwarted, Henry eventually becomes a thief in order to survive, and in time, an outlaw hunted for murder. He is arrested in the midst of his wedding to Rhoda, whose coming-of-age is the frame on which the novel rests. Humphreys constructs her intricately wrought plot with understated eloquence, and she breathes life into the landscape of this piney, swampy rural area. Each of a large cast of splendidly realized characters is informed by her understanding of the subtleties of human relationships when race is a factor. Most impressively, she illuminates a largely unknown facet of the Civil War, finding universal resonances in the suffering and quiet heroism of a beleaguered remnant of marginalized Americans. In its historically accurate delineations of the violence, greed and betrayal engendered by internecine conflict, and of corresponding bravery, sacrifice and heartbreak, this novel makes a powerful statement. (Sept.)

Set in the swampy, piney backwoods of North Carolina at the close of the Civil War in 1864, Josephine Humphreys' passionate, beautifully written novel evokes a time of struggle and helplessness in a proud insular community whose members trace their ancestry back to the Indians. Derisively dubbed Scuffletown by its "mack" neighbors (Scottish farmers mostly), known as "the settlement" to its inhabitants, the area subsists on turpentine manufacture, which has come to a halt with the war.

As the story opens, Rhoda's mother, Cee, keeps the family inside their one-room, windowless ("because Cee said we're only inside at night and what good is a window then? Just one more thing to lock up.") cabin in the heat of summer to protect them, especially Rhoda's two brothers, from the Home Guard. The Home Guard is made up of "mack" neighbors, determined to spare their own boys by conscripting Scuffletown youth for forced labor at the Confederate forts and salt works.

It's a lawless time in the backcountry and the sadistic head of the Home Guard rules with impunity. After he kills two boys who escaped from the work gangs, Scuffletown's young men take to the woods, under the leadership of Henry Berry Lowrie, a charismatic, focused young man admired by the whole community, secretly loved by Rhoda.

I know that anybody who liked Cold Mountain will love Nowhere Else On Earth. The details here are even more finely written and complex. The wrenching plot builds on the history of a fascinating, underexplored corner of the East Coast--a mostly Lumbee Indian community in North Carolina--and a perspective on the Civil War I had never even pondered before. Surprising and very eye-opening. I just love Josephine Humphrey's knack for beautiful speech, especially the way it reflects the colors and metaphors of Southern talk. At the same time the characters she creates (esp. Rhoda Strong) are so astute about human nature, and so wise, I'm always wishing I could meet them. THose of you who enjoyed Dreams of Sleep and Fireman's Fair will go crazy over this one. I think the historical novel really shows off her strengths as a writer.

There is mischief in her narrator, the curious Rhoda Strong. She is game even to examine and question the true nature of history, racial prejudice and scapegoating, all described in such a way as to render today's incidences of ethnic violence comprehensible: ". . . it wasn't an English that sliced him . . . [it was] his own neighbor! . . . We were neighbor against neighbor."

In fictional terms the characters and events are portrayed with grace, subtly, and depth. Gaps in the story are filled by citing period newspapers. Yet there is an irony here as when, after drawing considerably from the press, Rhoda points out the divergence between the life she actually leads and the one portrayed by the media.

In the Prologue, supposedly written on November 3, 1890, the feisty and wise Rhoda sets out her intentions and hopes for her narrative and outlines her view on the nature of history, stating that nobody will ever be able to render the story of Scuffletown complete and objective, "just as a soldier can never describe a whole battle - only his piece of it . . .Read more ›

In 1864 Scuffletown, many mixed-breed descendants of the native Lumbee Indian Tribe laboriously toil at the turpentine business. The group is extremely poor but work hard to help their families survive. Living nearby are wealthy and powerful Scottish plantation owners who still own black slaves. As the Civil War winds down, the residents of Scuffletown struggle with the Home Guard that conscripts their young males into building for the Confederacy. The Union soldiers are as ugly to town residents. The townsfolk want the war to go away so they can move on with their lives.

For defying the Confederacy, local citizen Henry Lowrie and some other men hide in the nearby swamps to escape his fellow Carolinians wrath. Eventually, Henry turns to robbery to survive and ultimately is accused of murder. As Henry makes love with teenager Rhoda Strong, his gentle father is hung as retribution for Henry's actions. He seeks revenge, but finds time to marry his beloved Rhoda before fleeing from the area during Reconstruction. http://edufb.net/753.pdf http://edufb.net/2308.pdf http://edufb.net/1335.pdf http://edufb.net/20.pdf http://edufb.net/363.pdf http://edufb.net/1804.pdf http://edufb.net/775.pdf http://edufb.net/551.pdf http://edufb.net/465.pdf http://edufb.net/2167.pdf http://edufb.net/1445.pdf http://edufb.net/1635.pdf