Redwood and Wildfire
Set between 1898 and 1913, between small-town Georgia and Chicago, Andrea Hairston’s award-winning novel casts the Great Migration of African-Americans escaping the Jim Crow South hoping for better opportunities in big-city North as historical fantasy. In the opening scenes, Native-Irish Aidan, who bears the Seminole last name Wildfire, is a helpless witness to the lynching of Redwood’s hoodoo-practicing mother. Thereafter, they combat racism, disasters manmade, natural, communal, and personal with their combined magic to adjust to their changing world. Traditional music and storytelling morph into minstrel and Wild West shows, into vaudeville and then into silent moving pictures, and our heroes and their community adjust the potentials of their various powers to the different media, from haunted swampland to a “city of the future.”
This is an important and beautifully written book. I congratulate the author and publisher on this new release, which gives more people the opportunity to read what was originally published in 2011, when it won the James Tiptree, Jr., and Carl Brandon Kindred Awards.
Not only do we get to see cultural events like Chicago’s World’s Fair White City—its performers from around the world—in a view other than the colonizers’, but we understand how families and cultures outside the mainstream work overtime to bring joy and life to their members without material goods considered necessities today.
