Based on family lore, Red Tears is the untold story Prudence Mims, her mother, and brother’s narrow escape when two worlds collided on August 30, 1813, resulting in the worst massacre by Woodland Indians in American history - forever changing the framework of a continent.
Prudence flourished as the youngest daughter of a prominent planter in the frontier wilderness of the Tensaw Delta in present-day Alabama. Her father, Samuel Mims, came to the Mississippi Territory as an Indian Trader during the American Revolution. Acquiring a land grant from the governor of Spanish West Florida, Mims built a home for his family and for years they lived in peace in the ancestral home of Creek Indians. While living among with the Southern Native Tribes, Mims learned their language and customs becoming friends with many prominent Creek Chiefs including Chief Alexander McGillivray and Chief William Weatherford. However, everything changed when the United States exerted their territorial claims to the southern region of the American frontier, and the push of settlers from the former British Colonies began. Unfortunately, the Creek Indians were in the way.
In 1799 the boundary survey between the Mississippi Territory and West Florida moved south putting the Mims Plantation squarely in lands claimed by the United States. Before long, the violence between settlers and the Woodland Indian Tribes escalated from the Great Lakes, across the Ohio River Valley, and into the Southern Frontier. From this turmoil, a Shawnee Prophet emerged. The Prophet Tecumseh began preaching that the unification of all Native American Tribes was the only way to stem the tide of white settlers into their ancestral homelands. Many Creeks became followers of Tecumseh, calling themselves Red Stick. Many Creeks came to believe that a return to the “old ways” by purification of the Creek Race was their path restore their tribe to its former power. Red Sticks believed that the only way to achieve this was to rid themselves of the white influences. Before long, Red Sticks began to punish Samuel Mims’ Creek neighbors in the Tensaw who’d become “too Americanized”. In 1813, Mims built an eight-foot wooden picket fence around his home to protect his property from Red Stick aggressions. In time, the Mims Family would become collateral damage in a game of cat and mouse when the Mississippi Volunteer Militia set up camp at what would become known as Fort Mims.
A debut historical novel re-examines the Fort Mims Massacre.
In 1813, 14-year-old Prudence is the youngest daughter of Samuel and Hannah Mims. They own a plantation in the Tensaw delta, near Mobile, Alabama, which—not yet a state—is in Mississippi territory. One day, Prudence and two of her brothers, David and Alex, await a ferry that will take the family to Fort Stoddert to visit their sister Henrietta, who is married to Maj. Benjamin Smoot. When they arrive, the fort is sweltering, and Hannah determines that it is no place for her pregnant daughter to deliver her third child. She convinces Smoot, a martinet who’s aloof to his wife’s needs, to let Henrietta travel to the more comfortable Mobile area for the baby’s arrival. Weeks later, when Henrietta and her family near the plantation for a much anticipated reprieve from traveling, they discover that Maj. Daniel Beasley has set up the Mississippi militia on the Mims property. Beasley hopes to confront Creek Red Stick warriors, who have raided and burned farms and supposedly want to start a slave revolt. Samuel finds the idea preposterous, knowing after years of amicable relations with the Creek tribe that the greedy, land-grabbing United States government is responsible for any violence. Now the Mims family must suffer food shortages, spoiled water, and drunken military commanders who may or may not be able to protect them from a Creek assault.
Parten, descended from Prudence, uses her family history to craft this tense saga and bring “a little humanity back to the legend” of the Fort Mims Massacre. Readers are correct to assume that a novel set on a plantation about vengeful Native Americans is going to prove a difficult emotional journey, especially for the teenage narrator. The first African-American readers meet is Jacob Miller, a ferry operator and freed man who is friends with Samuel. But the first use of the word “slave” is followed by the disquieting line “I always hoped that our way of life would last forever.” Thankfully, as Prudence’s interior life is explored—as a girl who is often an afterthought and nuisance to her brothers—her naïveté regarding the family’s financial situation melts away. She learns that “Papa made an effort to buy whole families who were born in this country.” Nevertheless, the notion of “good slaveholders” always “seemed like an oxymoron.” History buffs should love Parten’s transporting depiction of the era, which evokes the Mississippi Delta as a place populated by those who didn’t necessarily want to join the United States. Despite the narrative’s march toward brutality—which is only described in the Afterword—tenderness is the author’s tone of choice (“All the grace and beauty my mother imported to this place had vanished because of forces that were beyond anyone’s control”). And like any successful historical novel, the work will impart readers with a craving to learn more about the events.
An American tragedy treated coarsely in history books receives an invigorating new account.
Red Tears by N.K. Parten tells the story of life on the frontier in the early 1800s, from the perspective of Prudence Mims, a fourteen-year-old girl, who recounts the family’s trials in the face of hardships during early Native American battles with the military. Prudence was born during a time in history when women did not have rights, but Prudence’s parents raised her and her siblings to be strong and self sufficient. The Mims’ family plantation had been renamed Fort Mims and was being overrun with militia and settlers seeking refuge, helping themselves to the buildings already on the land and building more barracks for shelter as well as depleting the Mims’ food and water supply, which was getting harder to replenish. As Americans gained control over more territories that had belonged to the Spanish as well as the Native Americans, the Red Sticks begin fighting back, getting revenge for past battles and grievances and intent on reclaiming their land, with the Mims' family plantation now a militia camp caught in the cross-hairs of an impending attack.
Red Tears is without a doubt one of the best accounts of life on the wild frontier. The plot is interlaced with plenty of old ideas and fears that lend weight to how drastic those times really were. I love how N.K. Parten boldly chose to tell the story of Red Tears through the eyes of a fourteen-year-old girl caught in the middle of the events that take place, and this helped convey the story in a very interesting light. I recommend Red Tears to be added to the library of any reader. I honestly got lost in the pages, transported to an historical place and time filled with mixed emotions. I will definitely be looking for more stories like Red Tears in the future. N.K. Parten is a wonderful author with a talent for weaving a story that I would categorize as a ‘must-read’.
Red Tears by N.K. Parten is one of those rare historical fiction books that is so based in actual events that you wonder at times, as a reader, whether the author’s fictionalization of the event did indeed actually happen, exactly the way described. The time is the turn of the seventeenth century in the southern United States, where colonial interests are coming into conflict with the burgeoning new nation of the United States. In southern Alabama, the Mims family have fashioned a good lifestyle on their plantation, just north of Pensacola, in what was then Spanish Florida. We see the events unfold principally through the eyes of the young teenager, Prudence Mims, who watches, in trepidation and then horror, as the family’s relaxed lifestyle is overtaken by events. When the local Native American population of Creek Red Sticks seeks revenge for an attack on their tribal lands, the Mims family residence quickly becomes Fort Mims, overseen by a drunken officer of the Mississippi Volunteer Militia. When the attack on Fort Mims finally came, it was both brutal and devastating to the Mims family, some of whom would escape south to Mobile, as the inhabitants of Fort Mims were massacred.
Red Tears is obviously very personal to author N.K. Parten. As a distant, yet direct descendant of the participants in this action, the author has a vested interest in the story and that shows in the writing. This vested interest showed through the strength and frailties of the two main female characters, Prudence and her mother. Prudence, unusually for a young woman of that time, was forthright and independent and wanted more from life than to just be married off to some southern gentleman or military officer, as had her sisters. She was prepared to question the role of women in the early 1800s and more especially the rights or wrongs of slavery. Although the Mims family was known to be “good” slave owners, the very moral question of the rights of one human being to own another was something Prudence was prepared to debate and question. The writing style of this story is easy and flowing and, apart from giving the reader a good basic knowledge of the time period and the events of the massacre, it is an excellent action adventure in its own right. Although the many maps and photographs sprinkled throughout the book were not brilliantly reproduced in the Kindle version, I have no doubt they would greatly aid a reader in a paperback version of the book. I love historical fiction and I loved this story. Its closeness to reality and attention to historical detail made it special in my mind.
Red Tears is a deeply involved work of historical fiction by author N.K. Parten. The story is paced as the run-up to a terrifying massacre, going some way to explain the particulars and history around the event and how it came to be that several hundred people, soldiers and civilians alike, suffered a terrible fate at the hands of a Creek Red Stick war party. In Mississippi, 1813, we meet Prudence Mims, the youngest daughter of the Mims family, who lives at what was dubbed ‘Fort Mims’, a plantation caught between the white Americans and the woodland Indian tribes who sought to cleanse themselves of any white influence. As tensions rise politically and locally, we follow the Mims family and poor Prudence to the moment where the war party attacks Fort Mims, bringing red tears down on the land.
This is a harrowing fictionalized exploration of the conflicts that went on and the conversations that led to such a horrifying event. N.K. Parten has certainly done much research on the subject from both sides of the fight, and lends a particular compassion and sympathy to the poor civilians stuck in the middle of it, particularly Samuel Mims who is simply trying to protect his family and keep his livelihood. The political and geographic factors leading to the conflict are well explained but not over explained, keeping the overall page count of the novel readable and enjoyable. Overall, Red Tears will certainly appeal to those who enjoy well-researched historical fiction, however grisly the truth of it may be.
