Historical Amnesia?

FREEDOM ROAD -- Howard Fast --Duell, Sloane & Pearce ($2.75).

"What's this voting?" the bewildered Negroes asked. "Where this voting is? You done bought the voting? How many them voting you find along down by the white folk? How big them are? How many?"

When Gideon Jackson told them, the freedmen of Carwell Plantation said "Hallelujah," and relaxed their fears of this first mysterious repercussion of freedom. But the fright in the giant frame of Gideon was greater than it had ever been in battle. The Voting had made him a delegate.

When the South Carolina State Constitutional Convention assembled in Charleston in 1868, Gideon Jackson was one of 76 Negroes among the 124 members. Scorned by the sulking gentry, berated by the press, abysmally confused, most of them despaired of accomplishing anything.

But like Gideon, who slowly learned to read and write, the Convention slowly caught on. By the time it adjourned, it had fashioned a sound basis for a democratic community of whites and Negroes. It had provided for equality at the polls, compulsory education, the breakdown of the plantation system.

From this point on, Author Fast's latest historical novel argues with his customary expertness and conviction that the South Carolina experiment did not fail, but was destroyed after it had succeeded.

Under Gideon's leadership, the poor whites and Negroes of Carwell joined forces to buy the land they lived on. Seldom molested by the Ku Klux Klan as long as Federal troops were around, they worked and prospered. Nine years after the Convention, they had their own homes, schools, mills, ideas. Gideon's eldest son, Jeff, was back from Scotland with a medical degree, and Gideon himself was a Representative in Congress.

Their decline began with the election of President Hayes, which, Gideon heard, involved a deal to withdraw the troops from South Carolina and Louisiana. Knowing it was too soon, Gideon appealed to the incumbent Grant. Denied, he returned to Carwell to wait in despair.

The end was not long coming. Even before the troops left, Klansmen beat the wife of one of the farmers, then beat the farmer until he lost his mind. Failing in their efforts to organize a militia, the whites and blacks of Carwell barricaded themselves inside the big plantation house. Marcus, Gideon's youngest son, was shot while trying to get help. Jeff was murdered after answering an appeal under truce to help some wounded Klansmen. In a brief three-day siege, the plantation house and all its contents were destroyed.

In his earlier novels ( The Unvanquished, The Last Frontier, Conceived in Liberty, Citizen Tom Paine), Author Fast established a reputation for giving history a square deal. But readers whose knowledge of Reconstruction is confined to textbook tales of carpetbaggers and scalawags will be astounded by his new thesis. Anticipating disbelief, Fast declares in an afterword that the truth of his story is documented, but "the very memory was expunged" by powerful forces which "did not hold it to be a good thing for the American people to know."

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