THE WINTER'S COAST

Realism rules in THE WINTER'S COAST--a tale of murder and justice undone. While most accounts of early America, and the American slave trade, are standard and melodramatic, the captain's log that begins The Winter's Coast is stark and bluntly economic, as in fact the trade in human flesh was. The second section, called The House of Sellers, is exactly that, an account of the Americanization of a slave and the place he found reserved for him in society. But not until we reach the final section of the book, and an account of a trial for the murder of the slave known as Cuff Fry, do we find out that the economic forces that drove everything in colonial society do indeed have a human face. And that it's as ugly as any other kind of racism.