Elizabeth’s Exile, a Novel of a Cherokee Refugee, by Stan Rice, part five. What Is Faith?

 

Author Stan Rice has just published the second of three novels (Elizabeth’s Exile) in the series Trail of Tears: Novels of Cherokee Identity. Because Kindle has unreliable availability and formatting, the author has also posted a free PDF download. This second novel is about a Cherokee woman, Elizabeth Hilderbrand Pettit who, in middle age, walked with a contingent of other Cherokees on the infamous Trail of Tears from the Appalachians to what is now Oklahoma, after losing their land and possessions. As Rice’s novel explains, this was totally illegal, as the law under which Andrew Jackson prosecuted this Trail of Tears was declared unconstitutional by the Supreme Court.

Of course Rice, a botanist and evolution author, would revere Asa Gray, the Harvard botanist who was Charles Darwin’s main defender in America. Gray promoted Darwinism even though he was a conventionally and seriously religious Christian.

And Gray promoted the protection of Black people as far as he could in Boston. While even white Northerners were prejudiced against Blacks (they thought slavery was wrong, but had no particular love for Black people), Gray taught Sunday School for Blacks.

But Rice totally made up the stuff about Asa Gray being a leader in the Underground Railroad, which escorted escaped slaves to freedom. This is perfectly credible—especially since Gray would have had the perfect excuse to be in the borderlands of the Union and the Confederacy, searching for new plants—but it just didn’t happen. This is fiction; there has to be something that is not completely historical. Rice also invented the part about Elizabeth Hilderbrand Pettit being an Underground Railroad leader.

But Rice gives us some insights about the Christian faith in these examples. Elizabeth had to lead some of the slaves blindly in the darkness without any assurance that their rescue would be successful. That is, her journey was based on faith, not on evidence. As the Bible says, we walk by faith, and not by sight. One of Elizabeth’s sections of the novel ends with these words: “This is faith. I walk where I cannot see, leading people I do not know, toward a salvation that may not be there.”