The Chaneysville Incident

John Washington is a young Black historian teaching in Philadelphia when word comes that Old Jack Crawley is dying. Old Jack, a backwoods hermit and an old friend of John's father, helped raise him after that father, Moses Washington, died when John was a boy. John drives home to the mountains of western Pennsylvania, near Chaneysville in Bedford County, in a late winter storm in March 1979, and stays. Moses was a moonshiner and property speculator who knew the secrets of every white man in the county, and he left behind a folio of papers. Working through them with a historian's methods, John follows his family back to his great grandfather, C. K. Washington, who kept open a little known branch of the Underground Railroad through those hills before the Civil War.

What John finally reconstructs is the incident of the title. C. K. was caught helping a party of twelve runaway slaves, and rather than be taken back into slavery, the fugitives and C. K. chose to die together, and in John's telling it is Harriette Brewer, the woman C. K. loved, who gives him the courage to lead them. The discovery explains his father's death too, which John comes to understand as a deliberate act tied to that same ground. He tells all of this to Judith, the white doctor he loves, and the novel ends with John burning the cards and notebooks of his research.

This is a long, dense, demanding book. John is sour, cynical and hard company, and much of the history arrives as his monologue to Judith, a device Kirkus found "contrived." The same review granted that the history has real depth, and readers with the patience for it get a mystery, a family saga and a hard argument about how history is known, all in one. It suits readers of Toni Morrison or Ernest Gaines, and anyone interested in the Underground Railroad beyond its familiar routes.