Notable

A WOMAN CALLED MOSES by MARCY HEIDISH 308 pages. Houghton Mifflin. $9.95.

As Harriet Tubman crouches behind a stand of trees that edge the slave quarters of a Maryland plantation, her song wafts across the dark night. "Who's that yonder dressed in red?/ I heard the angels singing./ Looks like the children that Moses led./ I heard the angels singing." The plaintive melody is a mythic signal, readily understood: she is the "Moses" who is leading her people out of bondage. Moments after Harriet's song has ended, the passengers join her on the Underground Railroad, moving North to freedom.

In Marcy Heidish's fictionalized narrative, the heroine recounts her role as hope to the "bondfolk" of the South, terror to plantation owners (the reward for her capture rose to $40,000) and major figure in the abolition and women's suffrage movements. Harriet Tubman, a short, muscular woman, was born into slavery around 1820 on Maryland's Eastern Shore. At 15, she suffered a severe head injury when an overseer threw an iron weight at her. The blow left Harriet with permanent brain damage; for the remainder of her life, she would suffer periods of unconsciousness.

She suffered no such lapses of responsibility. After fleeing to free territory, she organized 19 forays into the South, bringing out 300 men, women and children. But she continued to worry about the unreachable. In Heidish's stream of conscience, Tubman murmurs: "I began to dream continually on numbers . . . Three million the abolitionists said there were; that figure loomed large in my brain, nearly blotting the others out. I was unable to picture what a million or two or three million looked like, so I dreamed instead of fingers, counting them, fingers spread, pointing, webbing together, locking at the knuckles, breaking apart, stretching."

In this evocative first novel, the rescuer emerges as an invincibly courageous woman, guided by a deep, mystical religious faith and a tenacious vision. Harriet Tubman used her great intelligence in the service of a passionate love for her people. She was, to the end of her days, illiterate. But she did more than read or write a book. She inspired one--and millions of followers, down to the present.

THE AUCTIONEER by JOAN SAMSON 239 pages. Simon & Schuster. $7.95.

Perly Dunsmore is an auctioneer with the suave, hypnotic ease of a political campaigner. Settling into the little New Hampshire town of Harlowe, he begins his auctions with a benefit for the one-man police force. But he is not in town for charitable purposes. Before long, the townspeople's most precious possessions--including, eventually, children--fall under Dunsmore's hammer. Wisps of evil drift through the book, perceived through the eyes of the Moores, a proud old farming family. "You'll pay worse if you try to say no," warns Mim Moore. "Somebody--some head guy somewhere's bound to catch on and put the lid on the whole thing," a friend counters. "This is still America." But when Mim's husband John finally protests to the authorities, he is dismissed as a crank.

Though Joan Samson's first novel owes its resonance to Shirley Jackson's American-gothic short story The Lottery, the book tends to provoke rather than frighten. The author's poetic imagery highlights the New England scene and characters: "Beneath the high wind, a tongue of water rang against the scoured stones like the wooden clapper in a bell, warning that they were slippery." The Auctioneer becomes less a tale of suspense than a parable of politics. The open questions it poses are as old as society itself: What is the nature of power? What makes people cede control over their own destinies to the glib, the avaricious, the contemptuous?

THE ASSASSINS by JOYCE CAROL GATES 568 pages. Vanguard Press. $8.95.

The somewhat too prodigious Joyce Carol Gates, 37, whose fiction has exploded with gunshots, stabbings and bombings, also sets off booby traps in the mind. Her seventh novel is a meditation on assassination and the violence that lodges in the American heart. This is her roughest, most repetitious read, yet it is difficult to suggest a briefer way to tell such a complex tale.

When Andrew Petrie, a former right-wing U.S. Senator, is assassinated in his sprawling New York farmhouse, the list of possible left-wing assassins is all but endless. A reactionary advocate of population control, Petrie was also the nettlesome gadfly editor of a scholarly monthly journal. At the time of his murder, he was composing a treatise on the failure of the American experiment. The reader is compelled to ask if the megalomaniacal Petrie was 1) a mere crackpot, 2) a latter-day Henry Adams or 3) a pernicious William F. Buckley minus the charm. The novel is slowly unraveled by three highly inflamed, profoundly disturbed minds. Each version of the events needs the other two to make literary and psychological sense.

Author Gates is best understood alongside the 19th century's great moral improvers. She is sister-in-arms to Melville, Hawthorne, Twain and Mrs. Stowe. All wanted their writing to better the public they were writing for--even when they despaired of civic improvement. Gates has yet to write a book that liberates as fully as it lacerates. But she cares about the national identity as no other living American novelist does. If she can steady her grip on her terrifying, transmogrifying wit, there may yet be a great novel in the already vast Gates canon.

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