The novel opens strongly. Our hero, Jeremiah Locke, rides from his Virginia plantation to the White House to meet with President Monroe. It’s three years after the War of 1812, and General Andrew Jackson is agitating for war against Spain, which still controls Florida as part of its sovereign territory. Monroe distrusts Jackson and sends Locke south to befriend him and uncover his intentions. Is Jackson plotting to seize Florida for himself and declare it his own nation? Whittington presents Monroe’s suspicions as entirely reasonable and ominous.
Let me pause the review here: This first chapter is fantastic. There is not a single other review of Embrace the Wind anywhere that I can find, and it has never been reprinted. Frankly, I’d be shocked if many 1985 reader lured in by the Harlequin knock-off cover made it past Chapter One. There’s virtually no overlap between the audience for dense geopolitical intrigue and the audience for bodice-ripper romance art. Whittington never stood a chance.
Back to the story: Locke accepts Monroe’s assignment in part because of troubles at home. He is accompanied by his clever enslaved servant, Cato, implied to be the mixed-race, unacknowledged son of Thomas Jefferson. Cato is a smart-mouthed, quick-thinking sidekick who often sees situations more clearly than Locke.
It takes Locke an exasperatingly long time to reach Florida, and when he finally arrives, he is immediately pulled into a power struggle on Amelia Island off Florida’s northeast coast. There he meets the beautiful Yolanda, daughter of the Spanish governor. She persuades him to escort her to Pensacola, the second center of Spanish authority in Florida. Together they essentially a horseback journey through the Florida panhandle along what would one day become Interstate 10.
A romance develops between Locke and Yolanda, including sex scenes that are slightly less explicit than those in a typical Longarm western. Along their route, they encounter detachments of Jackson’s troops operating deep inside Spanish territory. Whittington portrays these soldiers as brutal, redneck thugs who must be kept in check by Locke and his party.
The Spanish, by contrast, particularly their governor, are depicted as pragmatic and reasonable. After the British withdrew from Florida in 1815, they abandoned a fort on the Apalachicola River along with an enormous stockpile of weapons and ammunition. The fort quickly became a sanctuary for escaped slaves who, now fully armed, had no intention of returning to bondage in Georgia or elsewhere. Jackson demands that the Spanish dismantle the fort and force the refugees back into slavery. Or Jackson will invade and do it himself, international borders be damned.
From there, Jackson continues his consolidation of personal power into Spanish Pensacola. By the time Locke reaches the American camp, Jackson commands a force of 3,000 men. Whittington paints Jackson as a maniacal racist bent on crushing both Native Americans and escaped slaves with maximum cruelty while driving the Spanish out of Florida altogether.
Locke’s journey to confront Jackson carries shades of Apocalypse Now (1979), with Jackson as a rogue military leader who may have slipped the leash entirely. The scenes in which Locke and Jackson verbally spar are among the best dialogue Whittington ever wrote, and Locke’s undercover maneuvering within Jackson’s ranks provides genuine tension and excitement.
In the end, Embrace the Wind is a sweeping, often gripping, piece of historical fiction that deserved a better chance in the paperback fiction marketplace. The book does drag in places and would have been stronger at 244 pages instead of 344, but I still finished it feeling smarter and thoroughly entertained by this flawed but fascinating lost novel. Get the book HERE or HERE
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