Defiant: the Story of Robert Smalls, by Robert Edwards

Robert Smalls (1839-1915) was born into slavery in Beaufort, South Carolina. During the Civil War, he was a skilled helmsman on the Planter, a Confederate steamer that carried cotton, weapons, and sometimes troops. One night, the ship’s white officers disembarked to spend the night with their families onshore. At about 3am on April 13, 1862, Smalls undertook a terrifying mission.

The 23-year-old donned a stolen captain’s uniform, a good disguise with murky predawn light hiding his face. He commandeered the Planter, steering it out of Charleston’s well-guarded harbor. When Confederate sentries finally sensed something amiss, they fired cannons at the boat. However, the steamer had slipped out of range.

Smalls, his wife and children, crew members and their families, all of them enslaved, reached Union ships blockading Charleston and thus became free. Besides the Planter, Smalls delivered Confederate cannons, gunpowder, and valuable information about Charleston’s defenses.

Forgotten no more

Smalls’s coup catapulted him to celebrity. In the North, he hit the lecture circuit and received $1500 in prize money (the equivalent of about $47,000 today) for capturing the Planter. His smarts and courage also convinced Lincoln and Union Army officials that allowing Black men to fight could help them win the war.

The Southern press howled. It denounced the three white officers who’d left the ship.

Today, Smalls has largely been forgotten. Defiant aims to change that.

Edwards weaves fact and fiction to recreate Smalls’s extraordinary life, with a narrative incorporating historical documents, interviews, and conversations with historians. (In service of the true story, a footnote explains, some characters, events, and institutions have been added by the author.)

Accessible Afro-futurism

The book starts as Smalls, an old man in 1915, takes his grandson trout fishing and tells him about capturing the Planter. Time shifts back and forth from 1915 to the Civil War era, heightening tension. The relationship between Smalls and his grandson deepens as the 76-year-old Smalls tells his story. The subtext of elders strengthening their families by sharing their experiences shines through.

The lean language, free of dialect and cliches, puts the story within reach of young readers without sacrificing expressiveness. “Dodging cannon fire is not quite as easy as catching trout,” Smalls tells his grandson.

Defiant’s images, by illustrators Sean Damien Hill and Alex Paterson, pop and sizzle. Strength and conviction seem to shoot laser-like from Smalls’s eyes. Smalls and his two co-conspirators stand like pillars near the Planter’s prow, a determined triumvirate. The pictures capture a story rich in emotions. The scene in which Smalls and his sweetheart Hannah jump the broom as part of their wedding ceremony brims with joy.

Elements of Afro-futurism, a movement that uses science fiction, fantasy, technology, and history to represent empowering futures for Black people, add an intriguing layer to the story. A small image of what could be Smalls’s younger self appears on the water while Smalls tells his grandson about how to “read” a river’s surface. At times, white overseers and enslavers have fiery slits for eyes and mouths.

A monumental life

Defiant centers on Smalls’s life in South Carolina, but the Civil War did, in fact, bring him to Philadelphia. In 1864, he piloted the Planter here for an overhaul. During that sojourn, Smalls learned to read and write. In a painful incident, he was ordered to give up his seat to a white passenger on one of the city’s private horse-drawn streetcar lines. Some sources say Smalls—like Frederick Douglass and other distinguished Black Americans—was thrown off the car while some say he left on his own. Such disrespect toward a war hero caused an uproar that helped lead to the passage of an 1867 law desegregating Philadelphia’s public transportation. (This brief history of Octavius Catto’s work to desegregate Philly transit in the 1860s mentions Smalls.)

After the Civil War, Defiant notes, Smalls served as a US Congressman and was an advocate for civil rights and free public education. He also became a businessman and bought the home where he and his mother had been enslaved.

Cate Lineberry’s 2017 book, Be Free or Die: The Amazing Story of Robert Smalls' Escape from Slavery to Union Hero, is an excellent biography of Smalls. However, the images and passion in Defiant give the book unique power.