Two slaves, Joe Cudjo and his wife Janie, run away from a Georgia plantation, taking a small boat down the river into Florida. There on the riverbank was the “Negro Fort,” a stronghold of runaway slaves and renegade Indians.
At the fort, Joe becomes a soldier in its army. He and Janie begin a new life in a prosperous community of a thousand free blacks. But when an American invasion is mounted to destroy the fort, Joe and the others must fight to save their dream.
Based upon fact, NEGRO FORT is a story that has never been told.
Review Excerpts:
The best historical fiction tells you a tale from the past that shocks you, surprises you, and educates you to something you knew absolutely nothing about. Paul Allen’s Negro Fort does all of that and more. It’s so well written that it plays like a movie in your head, so filled with vivid characters that they’ll haunt your dreams, so driven toward its climax that you cannot resist its momentum and will keep reading long after you’d planned to go to bed. You will read it quickly but remember it forever.
— William Martin, New York Times Bestselling Author of Citizen Washington and The Lincoln Letter
The most exciting historical fiction is based on true events and conflicts that have somehow slipped beneath the radar of official history. NEGRO FORT is set in post-Revolutionary, pre-Civil War Georgia and Florida and tells the story of a little-known dramatic struggle for freedom, when hundreds of runaway negro slaves, with some Indian and mixed-race allies, formed settlements on the frontier of northern Florida (then Spanish territory) and took over Prospect Bluff, a fort abandoned by the British after the war of 1812, to defend their new life of freedom. This became known as “Negro Fort.”
We enter the story with Joe and Janie, Negro slaves, passionately in love, when they run from a Georgia plantation and head south downriver to find the rumored community of Negro Fort. The odyssey of Joe and Janie is full of heart-stopping suspense and thrilling action-adventure, through the exotic and challenging virgin forests and rivers, teeming with plant and animal life – and the internecine wars between the colliding cultures who fight for control of the land: white American settlers; warring Indian tribes of Seminoles and Creeks; British adventurers plotting to enlist Indians against the Americans, Americans hunting down escaped slaves, and the American army hell-bent on destroying the Negro Fort that is a threat to America’s sovereignty.
Make no mistake – Paul Allen’s novel is a page-turner that takes you over completely with its cinematic mix of unforgettable characters in a world of beauty and terror. You can no more put this down than you could walk out of “Spartacus,” “Dances with Wolves” or “Braveheart.”
— Frances Doel, motion picture story editor and script consultant