Mass' George: A Boy's Adventures in the Old Savannah
Mass' George: A Boy's Adventures in the Old Savannah
When young George Bruton loses his mother, his father carries him away from England to the Georgia frontier, to a world of cypress swamps, roaming alligators, and the violent uncertainties of mid-18th century colonial America. Here, amid the sweat and cruelty of plantation life, George finds something unexpected: a friendship with Pomp, an enslaved boy his own age, bound together by boyhood adventures that dare not speak their name in a world built on ownership. Fenn populates his vivid frontier with floods that drown livestock, Indigenous peoples who trade and threaten, and the daily moral gymnastics of a man who loves his son but lives off stolen lives. This is adventure fiction with a conscience, where the warmth between two boys hints at what the institution surrounding them cannot bear to name. It endures not as propaganda but as a window into how thoughtful people once grappled, however imperfectly, with the moral earthquake beneath their feet.
