Knights Crossing

About this book

The year is 1860, in the months before the start of the American Civil War. The industrial revolution has brought railroads for fast transportation. Steamships and riverboats sail the seas and ply the nation's waterways. Telegraph provides instant communication. Machines are beginning to replace much dreary human labor... though mostly in the Northern states. But, thirteen-year-old Skyler Knight returns from a year at a New Orleans school to the tiny Louisiana bayou town of Knight's Crossing -- named after his family -- to find that nothing seems to have changed. This is mostly a relief: there were too many new ideas in New Orleans; too much change happening too fast for his liking. For the first time in his life Skyler had to deal with free black people... blacks who behaved as if they were equal to whites! Skyler, raised on his family's huge plantation of Diligence, was brought up to believe that black people were animals. Intelligent animals, yes, but certainly not human beings. Yet, Skyler is beginning to wonder about that, to at least subconsciously question the morality of slavery. These are dangerous notions for a boy who will inherit a hundred slaves. Still, it's good to be home where things never change. Skyler is looking forward to losing his sissified city clothes and reverting to buckskin trousers; to riding his horse and fishing; to hunting with his big Smith rifle and swimming with the slave kids again. But, something new has come to Knight's Crossing. After getting off the train, Skyler encounters two black boys of around his own age. One …

Themes & subjects

About the author

Jess Mowry

1960