Maiden Lane — Randy Lee Eickhoff

Cuffee, a highly-educated house slave in 1712 New York City, carries a burning resentment for his bondage toward his highly mercurial master despite repeated warnings from his “auntie” a voo-doo priestess, who tries to make him understand that he runs the danger of being sent to the dreaded island where slave owners send their “troublesome slaves” to be broken. When a new shipment of blacks arrives to be sold at auction, he meets Lilly, a beautiful and haughty woman who carries a fiery hatred for slavery, and Cuffee's desire for freedom bursts into flame as the two begin a passionate affair. When Sookie, a 12-year-old “weak-mind” child, is forced into their master's bed, becomes pregnant and dies in childbirth, Cuffee begins to recruit a small band of disgruntled slaves for a planned rebellion as his master falls under the spell of a beautiful and powerful witch who uses black magic to retain her beauty and entrap Cuffee's master. When Sookie's ghost appears in Litzie's cabin, she caves in to Cuffee's dream of freedom and initiates him into her voo-doo “coven”. Fuled by Sookie's manifestations and her young child, Despair, gifted with “second sight”, and Litzie's voo-doo rituals, Cuffee leads a doomed revolt in Maiden Lane that is quickly defeated after nine whites are killed and six more severely wounded. Twenty-two of the seventy blacks who had joined with Cuffee's band, twenty-on are convicted and executed by hanging, being burned at the stake, or hoisted in cages and left to perish. Based on the earliest slave revolt that took place on Maiden Lane in New York City, Randy Lee Eickhoff's deeply researched novel, written in rich, Faulknerian prose, paints a vivid account of slavery and a desire for freedom that echoes through the centuries to modern times. Readers are reminded of Toni Morrison's Beloved and William Styron's The Confessions of Nat Turner.