Book Description

In this “deeply involving” novel set in colonial Florida, a Native American woman is torn away from her husband and sold into slavery (Booklist). Spanish missionaries have settled in the Apalachee homeland on the Florida panhandle, introducing new diseases to the native population and attempting to convert them to Christianity. Despite these changes, the Apalachees maintain an uneasy coexistence with the friars. Everything changes when English soldiers and their Indian allies from the colony of Carolina invade Spanish Florida. After being driven from her Apalachee homeland by the English, Native American wise woman Hinachuba Lucia is captured by Creek Indians and sold into slavery in Carolina, where she becomes a house slave at Fairmeadow, a turpentine plantation near Charles Town. Her beloved husband, Carlos, is left behind—free but helpless to get Lucia back. Swept by inexorable currents, Lucia’s fate is interwoven with those of Juan de Villalva, a Spanish mission priest, and Isaac Bull, an Englishman in search of fortune in the New World. As the three lives unfold, we are drawn into a complex world where cultures meet and often clash. With compelling drama and historical accuracy, Apalachee portrays the decimation of the Indian mission culture of Spanish Florida by English Carolina during Queen Anne’s war at the beginning of the eighteenth century—and the little-known institution of Indian slavery in America. “[A] sweeping novel of Native American life during the early colonial period.”—Publishers Weekly “This richly textured story follows the intertwined lives of Native American, Spanish, and British characters…Clearly a meticulous researcher, Hudson does the reader an additional service by providing notes at the end.”—Historical Novel Society