Hey, it's Empire's Book of the Day. I'm Andrew Limbaugh. Today's interview is with David Wright-Falade,

whose historical novel Black Cloud Rising is about a guy named Richard Etheridge. He's a real

former enslaved man who became the leader of a group that tracked and killed Confederate soldiers.

And what's fascinating about this novel is that, for a whole host of reasons that you'll soon

hear in this interview with NPR Scott Simon, Etheridge felt conflicted about the new

power imbalance, about killing white Confederates.

Now, when I first heard that part of the interview, not going to lie, I was a little

confused.

Like, how could someone possibly be ambivalent about this power shift?

But of course, Etheridge was because he was human.

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Black Cloud Rising has been taking shape for a long time in the mind of the novelist David

Wright-Falade. He was a graduate student at Virginia Commonwealth University in the early

1990s when he began to hear about the life of Richard Etheridge, who was born into slavery

on Roanoke Island,

the biological son of the man who enslaved him, and taught how to read and write by his

white half-sister. Richard Etheridge would become a leader of the African brigade during the

U.S. Civil War, a unit that hunted down Confederate guerrillas in North Carolina in the fall of

...