SANCTIFIED by Joe Edwards
A novel of race, justice, music, and the mountain that holds them all.
On Cherokee Ridge, in a small Appalachian mountain town where three peoples — White, Cherokee, and Negro — have made their uneasy peace, a cross burns in the night. It is the opening act of a story that will shake the mountain to its roots.
At the center of Sanctified is Minnie Fletcher, a white healer who lives at the edge of town, grows her garden, keeps her cow, and quietly serves everyone who comes to her door — White, Cherokee, and Negro alike — in the order they arrive, no exceptions. Her place is the only fully integrated institution on the mountain. She is also, in the eyes of some, a problem.
Around her moves a cast of characters as vivid and particular as the mountain itself: Johnny Wolf, the quietly formidable Cherokee leader who has foresworn the pursuit of money to pursue his mission — and who, when the Klan comes to burn a Cherokee farm, is ready; Judge Jonathan Wesley Steadings, a man of genuine honor who buries his dog with the same shovel he used to drive off a California bully, and who will one day be forced to make the most agonizing decision of his judicial life; Dr. Arnold Fulton III, the mountain's chief surgeon and its most dangerous man, whose pride cannot survive his daughter's defeat at the hands of a twelve-year-old Negro girl at the piano; Tammy Allison, that girl — a musical prodigy whose gift, on the night she plays, makes stars fall on the mountain; Deputy Burt Reedus, a man of fierce personal honor who once pled guilty to beating a child molester half to death and would do it again; Charlie Caswell, a night wanderer, reader, and friend to the judge, who happens to be in the right place at the right time with a pencil and a notepad; and Blair Fulton, who drinks her bourbon and watches her husband's evil with a cold, satisfied smile.
Sanctified is a novel about what happens when the law works — and when it doesn't. When an all-white jury convicts a white surgeon for the first time in the mountain's history for a crime against a Negro child, and the judge is then compelled by the Constitution to set aside that verdict, the mountain erupts. The Cherokee and the Negroes — who now have plenty of guns, courtesy of the colored churches — are united in their fury. Even the white people are mad. And the judge, alone in his study, turns to his poetry.
That poetry is Book Two of this novel — the long poem Homo, fifty years in the making — which the author invites you to read or skip, but promises will change everything if you do. It is the judge's inner life, his philosophical spine, the source from which he draws the courage to do what must be done.
Book Three brings the resolution — back from Chicago, back to the mountain, back to the question the novel has been asking all along: What does it mean to be sanctified? By suffering? By community? By the stubborn, costly act of doing right when the law cannot?
Sanctified is a novel of the American South that is funny, heartbreaking, morally serious, and deeply human — full of courthouse drama, mountain storytelling, vernacular comedy, racial courage, and moments of grace that arrive, as grace does, without warning.
Publisher: Cara Press ISBN: 978-0-9836530-1-1
Joseph Edwards (1945 - ) was born in Tampa, Florida and grew up in the coastal plain of eastern North Carolina. He earned his first university diploma in 1965 at the University of Lyon, France. He later studied at the University of Lausanne in Switzerland, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, the University of Toledo, Ohio (Juris Doctor, 1988), and the University of Brussels, Belgium (LLM - International and Comparative Law, 1990). He has been writing for over fifty years. Sanctified is his first published novel. He lives on a farm with his wife near Cookeville, Tennessee, where he practices law and writes. His practice is limited to federal criminal defense.
