When Stars Align
by
Book Cover & Preview Text
The setting sun drifted across the rutted dirt road grooved from repeated attacks of rain, hooves and wagon wheels...Rose’s body ached…She nestled the unfamiliar tiny breathing mass in her arms...a baby boy, blue-eyed with a soft downy mocha skin. She would never forget being thrown onto the ground, her legs being pushed apart and staring into the icy blue eyes of Henry Rogers. She tried to scream but he slapped her. Moments later he let out a gasp, stood and smiled…
As the small buggy and its cargo rode closer to the house it pulled to a stop. Two women waited at the side of the path.
“Hand him to me,” Sarah said, reaching her arms up.
“I don’t wanna’ let go of him. He a part of me. He look at me and he knows I is his mama.” Rose’s voice began to quake.
“Rose, just give me the baby.”
A horned owl left its perch, disturbed by the noise below. As it soared over the trees seeking an evening meal, its mournful sounds blended into a plaintive duet with the infant’s sobs. Soon the wagon stopped and the driver ordered Rose to get down…The young girl obeyed as if in a trance and squatted on the ground where she landed. Her body hung motionless in the black moonless night as her soul screamed with the maternal hunger of eons. She had lost her first born child.
Formats
Book Details
About the Book
The love that Thaddeus and Amy feel for one another can get them both killed. He is colored, an ex-slave, and she is white. In 19th century Louisiana mixed race relationships are both illegal and unacceptable.
Moss Grove, a large Mississippi River cotton plantation has thrived from the use of slave labor while its owners lived lives of comfort and privilege. Thaddeus, born more than a decade earlier from the rape of a young field slave by the heir to the plantation, is raised as a Moss Grove house servant. His presence remains a thorn in the side of the man who sired him.
Deepening divisiveness between North and South launches the Civil War and changes Moss Grove in ways no one could have anticipated. With the war swirling we see the battles and carnage through Thaddeus’ eyes. The war ends and he returns to Moss Grove and to Amy, hoping to enjoy their newly won freedoms. With the help of Union soldiers, schools are established to educate those who were formerly prohibited from learning to read. Medical clinics are opened and businesses begun. Black legislators are elected and help to pass new laws. Hope flourishes. Perhaps the stars will now finally align for the young lovers.
In 1876, however, the ex-Confederate states barter the selection of President Rutherford B. Hayes for removal of all Union troops from their soil in the most contested election in American history. Within a decade hopes are dashed as Jim Crow laws are passed, the Ku Klux Klan launches new violence, and black progress is crushed.
‘When Stars Align’ is a soaring novel of memorable white, Negro and colored men and women set against actual historic events.
About the Author
Carole Eglash-Kosoff lives and writes in Valley Village, California. She graduated from UCLA and spent her career in business, teaching and traveling. She has visited more than seventy countries. An avid student of history she researched the decades preceding and following the Civil War for nearly two years, including time in Louisiana, the setting for When Stars Align. It is a story of war, reconstruction, and racism. Most of all it is a story of hope.
This is her second book. In 2006, following the death of her husband, she volunteered to teach in South Africa. Her first book, The Human Spirit – Apartheid’s Unheralded Heroes, are the non-fictional stories of an amazing array of men and women who have devoted their lives during the worst years of apartheid to help the children, the elderly, and the disabled of the townships. These people cared when no one else did and their efforts continue to this day.
Her third book, Winds of Change, is due to be released Summer 2011 and follows the characters of When Stars Align into the decades that closed out one century and led us into the next, decades that saw the automobile, the airplane, the Spanish-American War and World War I.