Raising Holy Hell by Bruce Olds

Raising Holy Hell by Bruce Olds

The story of John Brown is disturbing in a democracy. We comfort ourselves with the belief that, despite our differences, we are a humane and sensitive society that makes the need for violent actions unnecessary or even insane. Bruce Olds jolts our complacency in Raising Holy Hell, a historical novel about John Brown and his raid on Harpers Ferry on the eve of the Civil War.

In this novel, Olds methodically probes the question of whether John Brown actually was insane or merely a political inevitability in an unjust system (Olds, 1995). Was it chemical imbalances in Brown's brain or the harshness of a slave economy that led to the 15 deaths at HarpersFerry? Thomas Jefferson wrote that "the tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of its patriots. It is its natural manure." In Olds' insightful treatment of John Brown, Jefferson's words nag at us with their kernel of truth.

Raising Holy Hell is a complex novel with a simple format. Olds writes from a variety of points of view. He effectively melds statements from Brown's wife, children and contemporary notables such as Frederick Douglass, Harriet Tubman and Abraham Lincoln. A picture emerges of the factors in Brown's life and prewar society-including mental illness, politics, morality and ambition-that finally led to Harpers Ferry. Olds holds the reader's interest well by using varying perspectives. His poetic touch with language adds immensely to the complex tale being told. To understand John Brown, one must understand slavery.

Accounts of both old and new slavery provide evidence that contradict this three-point logic (Olds, 1995). On the first, the exclusion of slavery from modernity, Olds in 2003 pointed to the scale, scope, and central economic significance of antebellum slavery in the United States and its embeddedness within what was even then a global and modern economy. He showed how historians of Atlantic slavery argued for slavery's inclusion within modern capitalism and proved its relation to modern organizational forms and processes. Bales does a similar job for new slavery. He points to the exploitation of slave labor at various stages of global supply chain and provides examples of slave organizations as components of apparently modern economies, including those in the First World. In this novel, cases include the people trafficking associated with First and Third World prostitution and with cheap labor in agriculture ...