NewSouth

Behold, This Dreamer
Charlotte Miller
NewSouth Books
510 pages

By Peyton Bobo

"There was as much pride within Janson Sanders as there was in any man in Eason County, though few people saw in him any reason for pride. Pride had no place in patched overalls and calloused hands, in a remade shirt and sunburned skin, or in the mixed blood that showed so clearly in his face and his coloring."

So begins Charlotte Miller's debut novel, Behold, This Dreamer. It is a story of a young halfbreed man in rural Alabama and Georgia in the early 1920's.

The son of an Irish farmer who scraped enough money together to buy his own little plot of land in Pine, Alabama, and a Cherokee Indian mother, Janson discovers the grinding poverty and caste system into which he is born at an early age. However his Irish pride and Cherokee dignity will not allow him to accept that the owner of the cotton gin, general store and most things in Pine is superior to him.

But after the death of his parents and a year of struggling against all the odds to keep up the mortgage payment on his few acres, he has to admit defeat. Broke but unbroken, he leaves to find greener pastures--but not before vowing to return and reclaim the land that was his legacy from his father.

Janson hitches a ride on a freight train to Endicott County, Georgia, but there he finds that the status of his birth and humble origin follow him. He winds up working on the farm of Mr. William Whitley, who "owned more land, more property, worked more sharecroppers, produced more cotton" (than anyone else in Endicott County).

"Mist' William" also had a secret side--bootlegging whiskey during this time of prohibition. Also a fiery tempered son and a beautiful daughter.

Does it sound like a prescription for disaster? Well, its not long in coming. In short order Janson is involved in running whiskey and with his employer's daughter, Elise Whitley, who has just been expelled from a fancy college (actually no fault of her own; she just wouldn't squeal on her best friend for cheating.)

"I want to kill you--William (Whitley) thought as he crossed the library rug toward Janson Sanders, seeing the proud, defiant look that remained on the boy's face. . .if I see you near her again, your life is ended.". . .

Charlotte Miller's subject and style has been compared to Erskine Caldwell's, and there is plenty in her writing to justify such a comparison, but there is also something of William Faulkner. She sketches a scene and then returns to it, with a fuller brush and yet again with even more descriptive detail until the canval looks like that of an old master, full and ripe with color, complete to the most minute item, with every nuiance of setting and action captured.

Ms. Miller was born in Roanoke, Alabama in 1959. She began Behold, This Dreamer while attending Auburn University. She is currently working on her third novel, which will complete the trilogy begun with Behold, This Dreamer.

She has published a short story in Ordinary & Sacred as Blood: Alabama Women Speak. She is a member of the Alabama Writers' Conclave and the Alabama Writers Forum and Creative Writers of Montgomery. --Peyton Bobo