Book Review: One More River to Cross

Title: One More River to Cross

Author: Will Henry

Date: 1967

Publisher: Random House

ISBN: none

Length: 236 pages

Quote: “The war went forward three more summers and a spring. Ines­capably Ned became a part of it, serving as personal forager for his owner, who had taken a commission in a Confederate regiment. A forager in war is many things-—cook, valet, mess boy, runner, jack-of-all-officers—but primarily he is a thief.”

There are stories omitted from both Black and Native American history because they are too painful to remember. What became of regular enlisted soldiers (White) in the Union army is a sufficiently sad and shameful story. What became of the Black, female, and other volunteers who served on the winning side is a disgrace. A few people remember that women and Cherokees served the Confederate side, as a curiosity. What of the Black Confederates? Very few want to remember them.

Will Henry tried, with all the sympathy a White man of his time could muster, to tell the story of a Black Confederate veteran. The story is based on sociology more than history, but it's lively enough to appaal to those who like "westerns."

He emphasizes that what he is telling are legends, not history. He reminds us that he’s putting together odd bits by giving one character four names. One man could use four names in the 1870s. “¿Quién sabe?” was a phrase much used in the Wild West. Anyway, the legends convinced Henry that although they were shadowy figures, there were Black cowboys and gunslingers whose adventures were as wild as their White peers’, or wilder. White and Red people had some family and tribal loyalties, however scattered they were. Black people weren’t always outlaws or criminals—there are records of a few quiet Black farm families—but, if they were outlaws, they were legendary.

There are, however, two valid reasons why this novel gets mixed reviews. It’s a splendid Western epic of a decent man forced to survive by a combination of super survival skills and desperate crimes, in the very best tradition of the genre. Even if you don’t usually like Westerns, this one is lively, suspenseful, and terse enough that you might like it. But Henry’s vision was constrained by his politics. While reading it I thought continually, “Well, the women and Native Americans in this book are a sorry lot, but that would be the Black man’s prejudice at work.”In the final scenes...no. The stories of the Black men of the Old West were told by White men, through their prejudices. Henry’s own prejudice kept him from seeing something that leaped out at me—something that his generation understood well enough that they, too, must have spotted the prejudice.

To preserve the suspense I’ll just list the prejudices that wear the story thin in just a few crucial places. The part where the young Black fugitive never tries to molest the grieving White widow, but kills a White man who does, I can believe; it’s not impossible for young men to be able to recognize when a woman is not interested in them, or for a woman who’s only just buried her husband to be uninterested in any other men. But at least three other details in the book ring false.

1. Henry tells us that the Black man with the four names is handsome in the classic North African way, with relatively straight hair. By now we all know what that looks like; if you don’t know anyone from Morocco or Ethiopia, at least you’ve seen a similar look on celebrities from (young, unscarred) Michael Jackson to Barack Obama. The problem is that, although White and Red slaves were sold in the American colonies, by 1849 a slave baby would not have been born in any part of Africa. Probably his parents would never have seen Africa either. The look is the basic human look that some scientists believe existed before the extreme “Black”and “White”genotypes evolved, but in North America it was most often produced by crossbreeding between those types. This baby was bought by a man who didn’t have even a baby-craving wife, and given that man’s name and his freedom just because he was such a promising child? That might have been the slavemaster’s story. I’d like to have seen a DNA test. My suspicion is that Ned is “given” the name of Huddleston, in chapter three when Colonel Huddleston advises him to go north, because it’s his name by birthright. Probably the farm is his by birthright, too. Ned, like Elvira in Jubilee, knows better than to claim to be the rightful heir, but he is.

2. Later on, Henry tells us that a Black man who has good healthy conformation himself takes an interest in a repulsive Shoshone woman because the woman’s little daughter’s face has the look of a Southern aristocrat. And where did she come by that look? Do young men who’ve never even wanted wives or children of their own really bond with other men’s babies ? ??? I suspect that, in real life, the Southern aristocrat the baby resembled was the Black man’s father.

3. But where the prejudice really becomes annoying is in the final scene. Isom Dart, former slave, and Billy Casebeer, poor White man, were childhood friends. Casebeer is rearing the Shoshone woman’s unexpectedly pretty daughter, whom Isom considers “stupid.” She runs off with a boy who doesn't even leave her pregnant--he leaves her with smallpox. Isom wants to kill the boy; Henry asks us to believe that Isom spares the boy because Rash calls Isom by a hateful name that paralyzes Isom by recalling his slave past. Hoo-wee. I can picture that scene happening and Isom not killing the boy, but I can't believe it would be because the boy threw out the N-bomb. It would be because the boy had smallpox.

Meanwhile, the only woman Henry really characterizes, beyond having a female show up when the men need something to protect, is Tickup, the Shoshone horrorcow, who makes a career of “working as a wife” for one man after another, staying with each one until another comes along, then taking whatever she can carry and moving on with her next victim. Among other things Tickup cuts off her Black ex’s ear—on purpose—but she goes back to him, later.I can believe there were women like Tickup, because there still are men and women like that; education and civil rights may or may not have expanded the number of tricks they dedicate to the Deadly Sin of Avarice. I find it hard, though, to believe that an unprejudiced observer wouldn’t have met a nicer woman than Tickup, even in the West.

So if you’re a woman this book will probably disappoint and very likely annoy you. How could any publisher ever have paid for a book that can be read as one big insult to all of us? That kind of writing was tolerated in the 1960s. It should not be tolerated now. Fictional heroes don’t have to meet women they want to marry; if the scope of their stories is narrow enough, they don’t have to meet women at all; but if they meet only bad women and never good ones, their author probably has not lived long enough to write a book.

Whatever his personal issues may have been, Will Henry was generally acclaimed as a close student of history who was willing to flash a light into its darkest corners.