by Sutton E. Griggs · 1902
Historical Fiction · Classics
Sutton E. Griggs's novel of Black ambition and the "race problem" in the South after Reconstruction, told through the lives of its young characters.
Content note: Written around the turn of the twentieth century, this book uses the language of its time, including racial terms that are outdated and offensive today, and describes racism.
AN ANGLO-SAXON'S DEATH.
Gently the midsummer breezes rustled the green leaves of the giant oaks and towering poplars that stood guard over the Dalton house, which, as though spurning their protection, rose majestically above them and commanded a splendid view of the Tennessee fields and woodlands, stretching far out on either side of the leisurely flowing Cumberland.
The subdued whisperings of the winds, their elf-like tread as they cautiously crept from tree top to tree top, tended to create the suspicion that they were aware of the tragedy which their mother, Nature, was so soon to enact within the walls of the house around which we now see them hovering.
In a sumptuously furnished room of this magnificent structure, Maurice Dalton, the present owner thereof, lies dying; battling heroically yet losingly in that last, inevitable conflict which he had been summoned to wage with the forces of decay. The head of this dying Anglo-Saxon rests, in these its last moments, on the bosom of Aunt Catherine, an aged Negro woman, who was his first and loving nurse in infancy, and has been his one unswerving friend and worshipper in all of his after life.
