Volume 27, Number 2 · February 21, 1980
The Long and the Short of It
By Irvin Ehrenpreis
Brother to Dragons: A Tale in Verse and Voices (A New Version)
by Robert Penn Warren
Random House, 141 pp., $8.95
Now and Then: Poems, 1976-1978
by Robert Penn Warren
Random House, 96 pp., $4.95 (paper)
In 1811 a nephew of Thomas Jefferson nearly chopped off the head of a young slave named George. The seventeen-year-old boy had broken a pitcher belonging (we are told) to the deceased mother of his master, Lilburne Lewis. The drunken master, with the help of his own brother Isham, dragged George into the kitchen cabin, tied him down, and assembled the other slaves to witness the punishment that followed. Then Lilburne sank an axe into George's neck, killing and almost decapitating him.
Review, 2377 words
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