The Newer World

Narrated in the first person by an elderly Tennyson Bouguereau, the novel follows his life from birth on a Tennessee farm in the 1840s through decades of loss, music, war, and restless searching across America. Tennyson writes from old age, openly acknowledging that parts of his story rest on family legend rather than verified fact.

Tennyson begins with the story of his father, Chas Bouguereau, a free Creole man of mixed French and Malagasy (Madagascan) heritage who left Louisiana around 1840 and settled near Paris, a small town in West Tennessee. Working as a blacksmith near the Littlefair plantation, Chas falls in love with Cecilia, an enslaved house-girl. He asks Colonel Littlefair, the plantation's powerful owner and likely Cecilia's biological father, to sell her to him. The colonel demands one thousand dollars. Unable to raise the sum, Chas attempts to rob a bank a hundred miles away and is arrested. A visiting judge gives Chas and the pregnant Cecilia a hasty blessing, then turns Chas over to a mob, who lynch him from a tree.

Disturbed by his role in the tragedy, Colonel Littlefair sells Cecilia to his neighbor Luther Magan, a modest farmer. Tennyson and his twin sister Rosalee are born on the Magan farm, where they grow up alongside Luther, his wife Constantia, who uses a wheeled chair, and their grown son Elijah, called Lige. A young lawyer named Briscoe establishes a weekly school for the enslaved children. Rosalee proves fiercely intelligent and independent, while Tennyson develops physical strength and a talent for singing.

In July 1850, Cecilia is shot and killed by Belle Littlefair, a prominent member of the Littlefair family, during an incident in town: Cecilia stumbles off a boardwalk, and a small axe she is carrying strikes Belle's shin, prompting Belle to draw her pistol and fire. Ten-year-old Rosalee and Tennyson spend the following months plotting revenge. They forge a crude knife and attempt a nighttime trek to the Littlefair mansion, but guard dogs chase them home. Rosalee's laughter upon their return momentarily lifts the weight of grief.

When the Civil War begins in 1861, Lige joins the Union army. Confederate soldiers ride onto the farm demanding horses and mules. When Luther refuses, the soldiers confiscate the animals, and a young soldier named Tim Petrie drags Rosalee into a shed and rapes her while the others hold the family at gunpoint. Another soldier strikes Luther with a length of timber. Tennyson is paralyzed and unable to intervene, a failure that haunts him for life. He begins a mental list of people who must answer for their crimes.

With Luther bedridden, Tennyson and Rosalee struggle to keep the farm running. The lawyer Briscoe helps sell their tobacco harvest, and Luther eventually recovers enough to hold a ceremony freeing the twins, assigning them ten acres and promising wages. He gives Tennyson a Spencer carbine, a repeating rifle. Near the war's end, retreating Confederate soldiers hang Tennyson from a hickory tree and drag Luther into the woods. Rosalee cuts Tennyson down, saving his life, but Luther is found hanged and dead.

Lige returns from the war aged and wounded. Thomas McNulty, a small Irish immigrant and Lige's former army comrade, arrives with John Cole, a tall man of partial Indian ancestry, four mules, and a young Lakota woman named Winona whom they rescued from a battlefield years before. The group rebuilds the farm together. When Tach Petrie, Tim Petrie's uncle, leads a gang to raid the property, Tennyson kills Tach with a hundred-yard shot from the Spencer. Thomas praises Tennyson's singing voice, the first such recognition since childhood.

As former Confederates regain political power in Tennessee, violence against Black people intensifies. Three hooded men ambush Tennyson on the road, beating him so savagely he cannot speak for nine months. The lawyer Briscoe arranges for Tennyson to attend a freedmen's college in Nashville, arguing that staying in Henry County will get him killed. Rosalee insists he go, threatening to whip him if he refuses.

At the college, Tennyson's roommate, Pompey "George" Jorgensen, a former Union soldier from Mississippi, bathes him, clothes him, and becomes his closest friend. The Reverend Smith, the college's choirmaster, hears Tennyson sing a short song about Rosalee and recognizes a rare gift. Tennyson also falls for Minnie Aime, a singer from Louisiana. He spends a year studying Greek, Latin, and Homer, and reads in a primer called the Blue-Backed Speller that revenge is the lowest instinct of mankind, a maxim that challenges the list of vengeance he carries.

The choir embarks on a concert tour. A disastrous debut in Louisville, where the audience hurls cabbages, gives way to a triumphant voyage to England, where a duke hosts them and a London concert before four thousand people produces a standing ovation. George's voice cracks irreparably during a later performance, ending his singing career, and a valuable thimble disappears from the duke's collection, casting suspicion on the choir.

Tennyson makes his most consequential decision: He will leave the choir and follow George, who plans to rejoin the army. Minnie protests, but Tennyson cannot explain why George's vulnerability compels him more powerfully than anything else. Instead of enlisting immediately, they descend into years of alcohol addiction in Nashville's poorest quarter. They emerge one morning as if by mutual, unspoken agreement and consider themselves reborn.

They enlist in the 9th Cavalry, a Black regiment, and are posted to a fort in New Mexico. When the regiment musters six hundred men to pursue the Apache leader Black Bear, warriors launch a night raid to stampede the horses. In the chaos, George is killed. Tennyson buries him at dawn in desert clay.

Transferred to Dakota Territory in 1890, Tennyson witnesses the Wounded Knee massacre. The army, seeking to suppress the Ghost Dance, a spiritual movement through which the Lakota seek the return of their ancestors and the buffalo, opens fire with mountain guns and kills approximately three hundred people, mostly women, children, and old men. During his remaining service, Tennyson learns that the lawyer Briscoe and Lige have both died, Lige of yellow fever. Without a will or a lawyer to intervene, the Magan farm is auctioned and the Petries buy it. Thomas, John, and Winona depart for the gold rush in Fortymile, Alaska, but Rosalee refuses to leave, saying she cannot abandon her ground. George's soldier's will leaves Tennyson a substantial sum in accumulated pay.

Discharged, Tennyson returns to find Rosalee living alone in a cabin relocated to a half-acre by a creek. She produces a letter and small package left over a year earlier by Minnie, now married as Minnie Kinderman to a railroad worker. Minnie writes that she traveled to Paris out of worry when Tennyson stopped writing, and that in a better world he would have been the man for her. The package contains the duke's stolen thimble, which Minnie had taken and now returns.

Setting out again, Tennyson encounters Tim Petrie on horseback and follows him through the woods with the Spencer, poised to kill. But Petrie is singing an old work song with an angelic voice, and Tennyson cannot shoot a singing man. Weeping, he throws the rifle into the trees, abandoning the list of vengeance he has carried since childhood. Three militiamen arrest him for "walking without purpose," but he pays the fine with George's bequest, boards a train, and contemplates the long journey to Alaska. He carries George's hat, Minnie's letter, and the duke's thimble, meditating on whether the races of life are for the winning or just for the running.