"Red Clay"

Charles B. Fancher is a writer and editor, and a former senior corporate communications executive for The Philadelphia Inquirer, Philadelphia Daily News, and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. He also worked as a journalist for The Philadelphia Inquirer, the Detroit Free Press, and WSM-TV, as well as a publicist for the ABC Television Network. Fancher was previously a member of the School of Communications faculty at Howard University and the adjunct faculty at Temple University. He lives in Pennsylvania's Pocono Mountains.

Fancher applied the Page 69 Test to his new novel, Red Clay, and reported the following:

Early in Red Clay, John Robert Parker, a southern Alabama plantation owner, believing the Confederacy will lose the Civil War, concocts a scheme to save his fortune, which results in his death and makes Felix, an enslaved boy, the keeper of a powerful secret that, if revealed, could destroy the Parker family and endanger Felix’s family as well.

On page 69, Marie Louise Parker, John Robert’s widow, is coming to grips with what the future holds now that her husband is dead. What lies ahead for her daughter and two sons as the Civil War grinds to an end? She is fearful that the boys will be drafted as cannon fodder in a futile last effort to thwart inevitable defeat, and she is worried that even if they survive, the older son’s personality and interests are ill-suited for life in the agrarian South.

Although the Page 69 Test is a questionable fit for Red Clay, it nevertheless might lead a browser to buy it for three reasons: 1) it sets up a pivotal moment in one of the novel’s key plot turns; 2) it demonstrates the complexity and insightfulness of one of the main characters; and 3) it provides a browser with a feeling for the book’s style and pacing.

A strength of Red Clay, as a work of historical fiction, is that it uses complex interpersonal relationships, often asymmetrical, to provide readers with insights into a formative period that spans the final months of the Civil War, the Reconstruction era, and the arrival of Jim Crow through two very different lenses—that of the white planters and bourgeoisie on one side, and that of the Black formerly enslaved on the other—as they try to understand their lives in a world in which all of the old rules have changed. It is a complicated, dangerous, and loving story of a period that helps to explain who we, as Americans, are today.

Visit Charles B. Fancher's website.

--Marshal Zeringue