Seven Islands of the Ocmulgee

These seven river stories, written after the author canoed the Ocmulgee and its tributaries, draw on European American, Native, and African American traditions and relationships with the upper river between the confluence of the Yellow, Alcovy, and South Rivers under Jackson Lake and Macon, Georgia. Set from the 1810s to the present, the stories follow characters as their inherited or adopted perspectives on the river--and their ignorance of it--are altered by their personal experience of the watershed's danger, power, and life. Each story engages a specific place, among them Pittman's Ferry, the Seven Islands, Smith Shoals, the levee in Macon, and the Ocmulgee Mounds of the Mississippian people. A middle-aged woman who has lost her father and the pawn shop she inherited from him kayaks a wild Seven Islands rapid, looking for solace or self-destruction; an orphaned boy finds purpose and a path toward self-definition through borrowed Native culture and gar-fishing; the river baptism of a scarred, violent man tamed by a stroke revives a congregation even as it reopens old wounds; a long-exiled, past-her-prime call girl returns to Macon to uncover a surprising sense of belonging; Towaliga River memories carry a Navy sniper through his grim wartime duty. Canoe-camping on the Ocmulgee, subject to its weather and flow, and seeing how its force shaped the landscape, Gordon Johnston recovered a sense of time grounded in geology. ""Humanity is small and new in the long life of the watershed,"" he says. ""I wrote these stories with that humility in mind.