Call of the Raven

The antebellum United States in the 1840s. Mungo St John returns from university to discover that his family fortune has been taken and that Camilla, the woman he loves, has been enslaved by Chester Marion. The early 1840s setting places the story in an expanding domestic slave economy even after the international importation of enslaved people had been prohibited by the United States.

Mungo pursues wealth and revenge while Camilla survives coercion in New Orleans. Their stories examine how property, race and violence give powerful men legal control over others, and how the desire to recover status can reproduce the cruelty it claims to oppose. Mungo’s pursuit of revenge is repeatedly confronted by Camilla’s lack of legal personhood, making slavery a system shaping inheritance, mobility, family separation and sexual coercion rather than a decorative backdrop.