Fragments of the Ark

In her first novel since the cult classic Daddy Was a Numbers Runner , Meriwether tells the story of Peter Mango, a slave determined to wrest freedom for himself, his wife and their children. Like Robert Smalls, the real-life African American Civil War hero on whom his character is based, Mango gains liberty, fame--and a price on his head--in the early stages of the war, when he and a crew of fellow slaves spirit a Confederate gunboat out of Charleston Harbor straight into the hands of a Union commander. Once he is free, Mango pilots boats for the Union forces and travels to Washington, where he tries to persuade Secretary of War Edward Stanton and a rather woodenly depicted Abraham Lincoln to allow newly freed slaves and other ``Negroes'' to fight against the hated ``Sesesh.'' In the years that follow, Mango is promoted from pilot to riverboat captain, buys a house which once belonged to his former master and, after the war, is elected a delegate to the Freedmen's Convention in Charleston and even has a hand in ``hammering out an egalitarian constitution for the state.'' Of course, other former slaves had different, less flamboyant encounters with freedom; Meriwether provides a sense of the diversity of their experiences by lacing the narrative with brief chronicles of the careers of Mango's companions. The novel is jam-packed with fascinating facts--so many that they often overwhelm the fairly predictable plot. Moreover, awkward prose sometimes brings the reader up short. (Feb.)