Excerpt from The General and Julia by Jon Clinch, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

CHAPTER 1: 1843

The Canary

How large a box shall be required?

The canary is the smallest of creatures, three inches long if that. To take its precise measure would be indelicate regardless of his good intentions. So he bends to it upon its bed of linen, and he touches its cool, dry, brilliant feathers with his finger, and he subtly gauges its length against the count of his knuckles. That will be measurement enough.

What is its color? The very shade of a lemon.

How much does it weigh? Little more than its own last breath.

Birdie's sudden passing breaks her heart. At sunup he was his usual cheery self, welcoming the morning to her bedroom with his repertoire of peeps and chirps and burbles. His song, his color—indeed, his very pulsing presence—were all so lovely and so familiar as to be utterly beneath notice. Now their absence pains her. His cage hangs empty, its black shadow a ragged latticework stain upon the blue wall.

Her father looks up from his soup plate, notes the little cloud of linen on the sideboard, and fixes it with a furious eye. "Jule," he barks in the direction of the kitchen, "come here and dispose of that wretched bird."

But before the slave girl can pass through the kitchen door, his daughter stops her, touching a hand to her upturned arm. In this position the colors of their skin are nearly indistinguishable.

"Did you hear me, Jule?" says the father, old Frederick Dent. "Are you bringing my tray? Will you dispose of that bird at last? I swear, it's put me off my appetite."

"Yes, sir," says Jule, with a desperate glance at the hand that blocks her without exerting even the slightest pressure. The intent alone is enough.

"Jule has her hands full," says his daughter. "I'll see to Birdie myself."

"I require no excuses for that girl's shortcomings. Especially from you." The old planter—known in these precincts as "the colonel," although he has never served in any army known to God or man—coughs around the stem of his pipe. "Birdie," he mutters into his mustache, giving his head a little shake, as if the poor lump of feathers and flesh does not even deserve a name. It won't make a meal, so it had best be disposed of before it draws vermin.

He shakes his head again. Birdie. Ridiculous.

The colonel is no native to these parts. He comes from Maryland, where as a young man he found employment in the fur trade and forged a deep and unexamined sympathy with the Southern cause. White Haven is the name he gave this rich tract of Missouri farmland, and a white haven it is. Its acres yield up wheat by the bushel and corn by the wag along with every fruit known to grow upon twig or vine or bush. Its population of chickens and sheep and milk cows is constantly in flux and thus without accurate number. The Gravois Creek runs sparkling through its heart, teeming with fish. To maintain this Eden requires the ceaseless toil of thirty-six black slaves, to say nothing of the colonel's occasional contributions in the way of general oversight.

The daughter and the slave girl are nearly the same age, and by coincidence they are both named Julia. The black girl goes by "Jule," the last two syllables of her Christian name having been lopped off in the service of clarity. She makes now for the head of the table where the colonel waits, his lower lip jutting and his round belly keeping him a few inches farther from his plate than is entirely convenient. He puts down his pipe and harrumphs in her direction as she draws near, and then he harrumphs once more toward Julia as she approaches the sideboard. Jule takes up the colonel's empty soup plate and replaces it with his entrée—fried chicken, biscuits with gravy, quivering slices of some kind of aspic—while Julia takes up the linen bed holding Birdie and squares it bravely at the level of her heart.

Excerpted from The General and Julia by Jon Clinch. Copyright © 2023 by Jon Clinch. Excerpted by permission of Atria Books. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.