The Rhythm of Grace on Standalone Mountain by Jeffery L. Deal
Two young girls separated by half a millennium must summon every ounce of cunning and strength to save themselves and their loved ones from spiritual and physical annihilation in Jeffery L. Deal’s wonderfully imaginative The Rhythm of Grace on Standalone Mountain.
A blend of fiction and history, the novel’s backdrop is Standalone Mountain (also known as Currahee Mountain) near Toccoa, Georgia, which sets the stage for two dramatic and intertwined stories: that of Martha Morris, a young girl struggling to escape a fanatical religious cult in the mid-1970s, and Atsila, oldest daughter of a Native American chief during pre-Columbian times. Both share certain similarities: they each suffer from a cleft palate and the ostracization it brings, and both have a beautiful younger sister they will do anything to protect.
A Young Girl’s Bravery
Deal uses the true-life failure of the Kelly Barnes Dam in Stephens County, Georgia, and the resultant flooding that killed 39 people in November 1977 as fuel for Martha’s mad dash for freedom from the Fellowship of Faith, a small, isolated compound under the shadow of Standalone Mountain.
Led by its dynamic yet diabolical spiritual leader, Dinah Whiten, Martha fears for the physical and emotional safety of her ebullient and lovely sister, Eve. Escaping on the night of the dam’s failure, Martha’s goal is the Toccoa Falls Bible College a few miles down the Tugaloo River where her Aunt Myrtle resides, and help awaits. Still:
“She felt sure they suspected she would run tonight. She was never good at lying or keeping secrets. The only thing guarding her thoughts was that the others could only stand to look at her for a few seconds; her ugliness was her shield.”
An Unexpected Mystery
Stephens County Sheriff Tom McClain, meanwhile, came out of retirement three years previously when his wife, Carol, disappeared without a trace. He still searches for clues, and when intensive rains cut off a small island in the Tugaloo River, he and a deputy motor out to check for anyone trapped in the rising waters.
What they find is chilling: a large outline in the shape of a rock eagle sketched out in colored ash along the ground, along with two freshly dug graves. Soon, Sheriff McClain has two new murders to solve, in addition to several other bodies that have been found up and down the length of the river over several years.
Seamlessly Blends Two Worlds
Deal packs serious action into this small novel, as the focus veers from the countdown to the dam’s failure in the 1977 storyline to the evocative tale of Atsila more than five hundred years earlier.
Here Deal reveals his wealth of insights and experience as an anthropologist describing Atsila’s fictional tribe, the Abittibi, whose world he borrowed from histories of the Iroquois, Creek, and Apache. In it, Atsila is a force of nature, whose strong will and quest for power to avenge her family knows no bounds. Acknowledging her deformity, she makes her limited choices clear: “since I could not know love, I would know fear and power, and the trade was enough.” Deal’s prose is fleet-footed, seamlessly inhabiting modern and premodern worlds and voices in alternating chapters.
A Rare Literary Gem
Juxtaposing Martha’s escape and discovery of an ancient cave with a monstrous tenant with Atsila’s adventures and final, costly choices, Deal cleverly designs an ending that ties the two girls together in spirit. At the same time, he delivers a believable and familiar sounding (Waco, anyone?) apocalyptic showdown between the Fellowship of Faith and the law, represented by the conscientious McClain — who wants to save lives — and the gung-ho FBI agents eager to contain the threat while President Jimmy Carter visits the flood-damaged Bible college down the road.
With an illuminating eye into the people, geography and topography of the region, not to mention a taut plot with pitch-perfect pacing, The Rhythm of Grace on Standalone Mountain is a gem of a novel that entertains as it educates. Readers can only hope Deal follows up with another entry sometime soon.
Jeffery Deal is a physician, anthropologist, inventor, and renowned speaker. His work as a tropical medicine specialist has taken him to South Sudan during its wars, Liberia during the Ebola pandemic, and dozens of other developing countries. He earned a master of arts in anthropology from the University of South Carolina and a doctorate of medicine from the Medical University of South Carolina. While a US naval officer, he completed a residency at Walter Reed Medical Center and later earned a diploma from the London School of Tropical Medicine as well as a fellowship in the Royal Society of Tropical Medicine. Dr. Deal has contributed to numerous professional journals and newspapers and has published two novels, Toccoa: Dark Secrets of a Small Georgia Town and The Mark, as well as an ethnography of the Dinka of South Sudan, A Land at the Centre of the World.
