Award Winning Canadian Poet turned Author George Elliot Clarke’s
GEORGE & RUE is about a death that brims with fierce vitality and dark
humor. Infused with the sensual, rhythmic beauty that defines Clarke’s writing,
this is a literary debut that is marked by celebration—and controversy...
George Elliot Clarke was thirty-four years old when,
shortly before his mother’s death, she told him for the first time the story of
his matrilineal first cousins, George and Rufus Hamilton. In a robbery gone
wrong, the brothers committed a “slug-ugly”crime on
January 7, 1949, drunkenly bludgeoning
to death a taxi driver for the money in his wallet. The brothers, partly
descended from African-American slaves and native Mi’kmaq, were both hanged for
the killing later that year.
GEORGE & RUE shifts seamlessly back into the
killers’ pasts, recounting a bleak and sometimes darkly comic tale of victims
of violence who became killers, a black community too poor and too ashamed to
assist its downtrodden members, and a white community bent on condemning all
blacks as dangerous outsiders. Written in a lyrical, bluesy style that Clarke
calls “blackened English,” GEORGE & RUE is an extraordinary debut novel
about death that brims with a fierce vitality.
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