Friday, September 28, 2012

Coffee with a canine: Gigi Amateau & Biscuit and Cola

Today's featured trio at Coffee with a Canine: Gigi Amateau & Biscuit and Cola.

The author, on how she was united with Biscuit and Cola:
We fell in love with the redbone breed years ago when we met a dog named Gus at our favorite mountain retreat in Rockbridge County, Virginia. We keep horses about half an hour outside of town. At the horse farm they also raise redbones and black and tans. Four summers ago, my daughter had a job of socializing the hound puppies and that’s when we met Biscuit, on the day she was born!

Cola is a rescue-girl. My daughter found her at Animal Control and pretty much...[read on]
About Amateau's new book, Come August, Come Freedom: The Bellows, The Gallows, and The Black General Gabriel, from the publisher:
In a time of post-Revolutionary fervor in Richmond, Virginia, an imposing twenty-four-year-old slave named Gabriel, known for his courage and intellect, plotted a rebellion involving thousands of African- American freedom seekers armed with refashioned pitchforks and other implements of Gabriel’s blacksmith trade. The revolt would be thwarted by a confluence of fierce weather and human betrayal, but Gabriel retained his dignity to the end. History knows little of Gabriel’s early life. But here, author Gigi Amateau imagines a childhood shaped by a mother’s devotion, a father’s passion for liberation, and a friendship with a white master’s son who later proved cowardly and cruel. She gives vibrant life to Gabriel’s love for his wife-to-be, Nanny, a slave woman whose freedom he worked tirelessly, and futilely, to buy. Interwoven with original documents, this poignant, illuminating novel gives a personal face to a remarkable moment in history.

An 1800 insurrection planned by a literate slave known as "Prosser’s Gabriel" inspires a historical novel following one extraordinary man’s life.
Learn more about the book and author at Gigi Amateau's website.

Read--Coffee with a canine: Gigi Amateau & Biscuit and Cola.

--Marshal Zeringue