Stand the Storm: A Novel
by By Clarke, Breena
Category: Fiction , Historical

Even after Sewing Annie Coats and her son, Gabriel, have managed to buy their freedom, their days are marked by struggle and sacrifice - to the extent that Annie sometimes secretly recalls with a perverse nostalgia times spent back on the plantation.Washington's Georgetown neighborhood, where the Coatses are seeking to build their new lives - with Gabriel, a tailor, producing uniforms for soldiers and fine suits for pompous politicians, and Annie, a seamstress and laundress, catering to the nearby brothels and stately homes - is understood to be a safe haven, a "promised land" for former slaves, but is effectively a frontier town, gritty and dangerous, with no laws protecting black people.Through fortitude, luck, and abundant hard work, the Coats family grows and prospers, only to find its status compromised anew when the District of Columbia's emancipation efforts put Gabriel's three young daughters (each of them born free of free parents) at risk of becoming the property of the Coatses' former master.The remarkable emotional energy with which the Coatses surmount the obstacles they face - as they negotiate with their former owner, as they assist other former slaves en route to freedom, as they prepare for the encroaching war, and as they struggle to love one another enough - is what fuels this novel and makes its startling denouement so powerfully affecting.