• Art and Writing by Randy Michael Signor
FICTION
Osawatomie
A Novel By Randy Michael Signor
Overview:
Randy Michael Signor’s novel, Osawatomie, couldn’t be more timely in today’s complex racially divisive world. Though much of the action takes place in the 1850s and, later, in the mid-1950s and 1960, the issues are immediate and encompassing: today’s racial divide is nothing new and Osawatomie confronts our nation’s failure to live up to its promises. It is about otherness and exclusion and fears of the unknown; but it is also about young adults figuring out their way in a world in which our humanity is both our burden and our salvation.
Osawatomie is a small Kansas town seventeen miles west of the Missouri border. It was home to John Brown and his family and followers up until they fomented the attack on Harper’s Ferry in West Virginia. The novel takes place in and around Osawatomie over 100 years, told by several voices, two the same character at different ages.
The story starts in 1854 and ends in 1960. A sixteen-year-old Sarah Dawson narrates the oldest sections about her family’s move from Tennessee to the Kansas Territory to start their lives over after too many failed crops, taking advantage of pro-slavery supporters who paid families to resettle in Kansas—and thus tip the upcoming election whether the territory would be a free or slave state. The part of the novel that takes place in the mid-1950s is narrated by a young John David, a grade-school student who claims to be a proud descendent of John Brown; an older John David narrates the 1960 parts, relating mostly to a trip to Kansas City with his best friend to catch the burlesque and what then happened when they were diverted to a bar with a young black woman who later insisted they take her to Osawatomie.
There are family secrets and mysteries and all go back to the turbulent pre-Civil War violence that ravaged the Kansas Territory, earning the sobriquet Bloody Kansas.
The following are short excerpts from each storyteller’s voice.
