|
 Apalachee tells the story of Hinachuba Lucia, a Native American wise woman, caught up in the rapidly changing world of the early colonial South. The novel was written by Joyce Rockwood Hudson, wife of retired UGA anthropology professor Charles Hudson Jr.
Apalachee portrays the decimation of the Indian culture of Spanish Florida at the beginning of the 18th century and reveals the little-known institution of Indian slavery in colonial America. When the novel opens, Spanish missionaries have settled in the Apalachee homeland in the eastern Florida panhandle, ravaging the native population with disease and altering its culture with Christianity. The Apalachees maintain an uneasy coexistence with the friars.
Everything changes when English soldiers and their Indian allies from the colony of Carolina invade Spanish Florida. After being driven from her Apalachee homeland by the English, Lucia is captured by Creek Indians and sold into slavery in Carolina, where she becomes a house slave at Fairmeadow, a turpentine plantation near Charles Town. Her husband, Carlos, is left behind, free but helpless to get Lucia back.
Lucia’s fate is interwoven with those of Juan de Villalva, a Spanish mission priest, and Isaac Bull, an Englishman in search of fortune in the New World. As the three lives unfold, the reader is drawn into a morally complex world where cultures meet and often clash.
|
|
