Beulah Land Author:Lonnie Coleman Beulah Land was a rich cotton plantation in Georgia, and here is the vivid, sweeping story of its golden age from 1820 to 1861. The Kendricks were the white masters of a hundred and fifty black slaves, but who was master and who was slave are questions that have no final answers. The pure and profane loves of Leon and Selma Kendrick provided rom... more »ance and scandal for the whole countryside, reaching from the Davises on the neighboring plantation of Oaks to Savannah, where the beautiful Pennington sisters, Sarah and Lauretta, waited to change the very destiny of Beulah Land-and all who dwelled there and believed it was the world. The hundred and more who populate this big, important novel are people the reader will come to know and love, and never forget.
The men and women
of a great plantation:
. Arnold and Deborah Kendrick: The reserved, artistocratic master of Beulah Land had married a pragmatic, ambitious woman who, some said, was the true master of the plantation.
. Lovey and Ezra, the household harrier and her blacksmith husband: The special favors they could command and their good sense in dispensing them earned the respect of the other slaves.
. Roscoe Elk, the overseer: A part-time Indian freedman with a mysterious background, he knew exactly how to wield his considerable power.
. Selma and Leon Kendrick, the children of the Great House: She, a curiously remote girl, was closer to the plantation's natural inhabitants than to its human ones; he, a coltish and impetuous youth, brought shame on the house with his human involvements.
. Floyd and Pauline, children of Lovey and Ezra: heirs to their parents' special positions and uncommon strengths, they would be the ones the younger Kendricks turned to in time of trouble.
From these intertwined lives-and the scores of other lives that touched Beulah Land-Lonnie Coleman has fashioned a masterful broad-canvas novel of a time and place that was-and is no more.« less