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Critic's Corner
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Last year when the Conovers moved to the Chickasaw Nation, Matt's son, Ben, had helped with clearing land and erecting the buildings, but the family finished the house after he went back to Texas to work for Uncle Prent to finish paying for his wagon and team. While he was gone, the rest of the family had raised the cotton from plow time to harvest. Now, Ben was returning with no little dread to becoming involved with his big noisy family to help pick the cotton and to spend the winter preparing new ground. He pulled his team to a halt and stared directly in front of him to a clearing sloped downward toward a creek. "In its center stood a sixteen by twenty-foot log house, log sheds, a brush arbor, and a half-dugout that formed the essentials of a beginning farmstead. Fields of cotton flanked the house on either side stretching in quarter-mile long rows parallel to the creek." His intention was to help the family, then it was back to Texas for good. Like most well-intentioned plans, Ben's fell under the wheels of a cantankerous fate. Soon Ben meets Esther McMasters and falls in love at first sight before he discovers she is his brother Jed's sweetheart. But Jed has other problems that turn his relationship with Esther upside down, and puts his family into a disgraceful situation. Buford, unlike his brothers Paul, Jed, and Ben, has a way of falling in with the wrong crowd regardless of where he lives. As his family strives to make a homestead and raise cotton, Buford meets up with the Sexton brothers who are known trouble makers and thieves. Buford along with the Sexton boys add to the suspense, which leaves one of the Conover brothers dead and the family thrown into such turmoil that Matt is afraid it will send his frail wife, Lillie, back into deep depression. "As each adult in the family copes with grief differently, Matt says, ‘This move up here was probably the worst decision I ever made in my life.'" Matt has more problems when his eldest daughter Flora elopes with Plez Wilson, a fine young man who is half Native American. The resolution of this part of the story is pure fascination. Shipley, using perfect vernacular for the times, and characterizations as deft as any I've reviewed, gives her readers a family saga that honestly depicts life in Oklahoma Territory during the early days before statehood. Homesteading was, at best, not an easy life and Shipley shows it all—the good and the bad. "This Raw, Red Land," not only entertains but it informs and no one can ask for more from an author. Voncille Shipley was raised in Healdton, Oklahoma, a town near the area depicted in her first novel. Today she lives in South Central Oklahoma not many miles from that location. She and her husband, John, have an acreage on which they raise pecans and hay. Shipley is working on a sequel to this saga that promises to be as stimulating as "This Raw, Red Land."
Jones is a published writer, and a book critic for The Tulsa World newspaper Copyright May 12, 2003 Patricia Ann Jones To comment on this review you may email pattij777@aol.com |
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