In 1863, the War Between the States creeps slowly yet inevitably toward its bloody conclusion—and eastern thoughts are already turning to different wars and enemies.

Searching for a life and future, former Kentucky slave Britt Johnson is venturing west into unknown territory with his wife, Mary, and their three children—wary but undeterred by sobering tales of atrocities inflicted upon those who trespass against the Comanche and the Kiowa. Settling on the Texas plains, the Johnson family hopes to build on the dreams that carried them from the Confederate South to this new land of possibility—dreams that are abruptly shattered by a brutal Indian raid upon the settlement while Britt is away establishing a business. Returning to face the unthinkable—his friends and neighbors slain or captured, his eldest son dead, his beloved Mary severely damaged and enslaved, and his remaining children absorbed into an alien society that will never relinquish its hold on them—the heartsick freedman vows not to rest until his family is whole again.

Samuel Hammond follows a different road west. A Quaker whose fortune is destroyed by a capricious act of an inscrutable God, he has resigned himself to the role the Deity has chosen for him. As a new agent for the Office of Indian Affairs, it is Hammond's goal to ferret out corruption and win justice for the noble natives now in his charge. But the proud, stubborn people refuse to cease their raids, free their prisoners, and accept the farming implements and lifestyle the white man would foist upon them, adding fuel to smoldering tensions that threaten to turn a man of peace, faith, and reason onto a course of terrible retribution.

A soaring work of the imagination based on oral histories of the post–Civil War years in North Texas, Paulette Jiles's The Color of Lightning is at once an intimate look into the hearts and hopes of tragically flawed human beings and a courageous reexamination of a dark American history.

2. How does paper and writing figure into the story? What does it mean to different characters? A few ideas to consider are Britt's freedom papers, the children's writing lessons, and Dr. Reed's cough that sounded "like the burning of paper," (pg. 34).
3. When the Comanche and Kiowa raid Elm Creek, Jiles doesn't spare the reader gruesome details. Why do you think Jiles chooses to be explicit in her descriptions of the attacks, both in this scene, and in others throughout the book?
4. How does author use details of the environment in anchoring a scene? Compare Samuel and Lewis Henry Morgan walking through Philadelphia to Britt riding through the plains to the Red River?
5. We first meet Samuel Hammond in Chapter Three, a chapter that opens with the line, "the men who decided the fate of the Red Indians lived in the east, under roofs of slate and shingle." Much is addressed in this single sentence; why do you think this is the way that the men of the Society of Friends Indian Committee are introduced?
6. What is a 'direct scene' and what is narrative summary? What are the effects of these techniques? Is the opening scene direct, or narrative summary? Find other examples.
7. In the book, we read that Lewis Henry Morgan spent fifteen years researching Indian tribes to write a report for the Smithsonian entitled Systems of Consanguinity and Affinity of the Human Family. Like many of the characters in this book, Morgan actually lived; he was an anthropologist who published this work in 1871. It was the first major study of relationship systems within Indian tribes, and Morgan demonstrated the centrality of "kinship" relations across these many tribes. Kinship, it was revealed, was an important key for understanding cultures. Why do you think this paper is noted in the book? What does kinship have to do with the story?
8. Furthermore, in their conversation on page 26, Samuel Johnson cannot recall the complete title of Morgan's paper; why do you think Jiles makes a point of noting how difficult the title is to say?
9. What are the symbolic functions of mirrors? Find three examples. How does each 'reflect' a finding of the self?
10.  When Dr. Reed is discussing plans for the Society, he tells of the Shawnee wars, the murder of Moravian Indians, and the small-pox infected blankets. He ends by asking, "What treaty have we not broken with these people?" What does this statement say about peacemaking? Do you think there is usefulness to a treaty?
11. A ship-owner states on page 32, "So much violence has been used against the red man. The Texans will be coming home from war, inured, accustomed to scenes of slaughter and violence we still have trouble comprehending. They have driven the red man from his own hunting grounds before the war, and they will continue to do so after it." What does being "accustomed" to slaughter do to the relationships between parties in the book? What views are presented about using violence as a means to making peace? When is it successful, and when is it not?
12.  Britt Johnson was an actual man whose story is documented to be true, and Jiles wrote The Color of Lightning based on her research of his life and surrounding events. What was your understanding of the relations between people in the US following the Civil War? Did it change after reading this? If so, in what ways?

This book is on these lists:

• January 2012 Indie Next List
• December 2011 Indie Next List
• November 2011 Indie Next List