Tidewater Review Slave Graves, a novel by Thomas Hollyday. Happy Bird Corporation Publishers. 281 pp. This book also opens with a traffic stopper sentence ... “This Goddamned place!” The speaker is a young archaeologist, summoned to make an emergency assessment of the partially exposed remnant of an old shipwreck on the Nanticoke River. If it has historic value, all work on a huge construction project will be shut down for a time, costing umpteen millions of dollars to an impatient real estate tycoon. If the wreck is a run-of-the-mill

old wheat hauler, of which there are many abandoned schooners made obsolete by railroads, it can be covered by concrete and be part of a bridge to connect an island slated to be covered with mini-mansions. Thus begins this tale of good and evil, of African-American legends, of corporate money and arrogance, toadies in the small town adjacent to the island and an annoying old woman who opposes the plan because it will destroy the trees that provide an annual stopover for migrating butterflies. Throw in the boss’s henchman “Spyder,” a black preacher and the (possibly) Mayan marsh-dweller and his swimming cat. On the sidelines there’s a monument to slaves (built

Lu-Ev

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