NewSouth

Behold, This Dreamer
a novel by
Charlotte Miller
Montgomery, Alabama; NewSouth Books, 2000
510 pages, $27.95, cloth

By Ruth Rogers

Because I am a lifelong student of family history, I have discovered several American Indians in my lineage. Family legend tells that one, at least, was on the Trail of Tears, the death march that ravaged the population of eastern tribes as they were forced to emigrate to reservations in the West.

That is why reading Charlotte Miller's Behold, This Dreamer became a very emotional visit to the past for me. I grew in understanding and sympathy for my own ancestors.

Although the Trail of Tears is not the setting for her work, Miller's story allows me to imagine the abuse, social stigma, and prejudice my own native and half-native ancestors suffered.

Miller writes about Janson Sanders, a young man proud of both his Cherokee and Irish ancestry, whose strengths of heart allowed him to dream forbidden dreams that most whites in the pre-Depression era South were not willing to grant him.

Miller plants the seed of her novel in the first two sentences. The reader can begin to sense the likelihood of desires denied, love forbidden and lives at risk when reading: "There was as much pride within Janson Sanders as in any man in Eason County, though few people saw in him any reason for pride. Pride had no place in patched overalls and callused hands, in a remade shirt and sunburned skin, or in the mixed blood that showed so clearly in his face and his coloring."

A poor, proud, hard-working man of the Alabama soil, Janson is the only child of Henry Sanders (with his Irish ancestry) and Nell (who is Cherokee).

The small family works hard in their cotton fields, hoping to hold on to their small farm. The first challenge comes from locally enforced price controls. The power-hungry local cotton buyer--Walter Eason--wants control of every field in Eason County.

But when the Sanders family is forced to sell their crop elsewhere to obtain a few more cents per pound--or lose the farm--the consequences are devastating. Eason will have his way or else.

Miller's way of portraying the mother's tender love for her son, a tenderness contrasted against the harsh realities of the social landscape, becomes the real source of strength for the story.

It is something every reader identifies with, whatever race or gender.

The value of family, home and devotion to those we love is the truth this book whispers over and over until at the end, the whisper grows to a shout. Janson will risk his life for that love.

He begins his search when, determined to return someday to reclaim his lost farm, Janson leaves Eason County, jumps aboard a train, and travels to Georgia looking for work.

After settling down to work as a plantation field hand, Janson's life takes its most dramatic turn the night he saves the owner's beautiful daughter from the attack of a drunken rapist. Of course, she is the woman who eventually steals his heart.

They both dislike each other for many years, his dreams and hers seeming always to clash. But in the end, they admit their love--and for that the wealthy father threatens Janson with death. No halfbreed will marry his daughter!

Tension heightens when, in his determination to make his dream a reality, Janson is tempted to cross the line between right and wrong.

Although Miller's book tells a captivating tale, offering the reader an opportunity to weigh the lessons one only gains by surveying a lifetime of dreams and decisions, there are a few weak spots worth noting.

In the beginning, Miller's writing seems repetitious. She makes her point about Janson's pride over and over in the first few pages, excessively so.

And at the other end of the story, as the plot draws to a close, there is a similar repetitive quality, but this time I found myself thinking. "This is not plausible. The young lovers keep postponing the day they will flee the father's control and attempt to make their dream a reality--far past the point of plausibility."

In spite of those flaws, the story grips the reader's heart with a breathless intensity.

In historical fiction at its best we have history--not composed just of statistics, wars, politics and heroes--but a history which peeks into the human soul, examining the motives and passions which are behind the events that march across history's stage.

Charlotte Miller's Behold, This Dreamer is such a book, and once it gains entrance into the reader's heart, it refuses to let go.

Reading Miller's book is a walk into the past, the years before and during the depression in the rural south, but the stories of the heart that Miller explores are timeless, relevant as much for Janson Sanders and for my own ancestors as they are for readers today.