In a new novel, William Least Heat-Moon delves into the past to confront the present

An agitating dream woke Dr. Nathaniel Trennant, a Cambridge-educated British physician, in the early morning hours. He went on deck and gazed out into the black ocean outstretched beyond the ship carrying him to America. It was 1848.

Trennant had signed on as the ship’s physician because he wished to see the grand American experiment, a nation predicated on the single principle of liberty. Back at the ship’s rail, the physician who had yet to set foot on American soil was already expressing grave concern about the sustainability of it all.

“Is America alert to the inescapable threats to its continued existence as a body politic?” Trennant wondered. “Threats not from without but from within? A mansion may fall not from storm or fire but from the insidious jaws of unseen termites and wood beetles gnawing the interior outwards until foundational timbers collapse, to leave residents and their beds and pots and kettles buried in dust.

“The second President (John Adams) has written: ‘There never was a democracy yet that did not commit suicide.’”

These words resonate today. Can our grand experiment endure? How can we salve those centuries of grief and dismay associated with the nation’s great sin of slavery? How can we bring us all together?

Trennant is the protagonist for a new novel by Kansas City-born author William Trogdon, who is known more widely by his pen name, William Least Heat-Moon. The book, “O America: Discovery in a New Land,” is available Feb. 24 from the University of Missouri Press. It was born of the author’s own worries about the fractious nature of this grand experiment of America.

One of America’s most celebrated nonfiction writers, Heat-Moon is in his 80th year. This is his 10th book, his second novel. All remain in print. His legacy, most would agree, is already set. And it’s significant. His most well-known work, “Blue Highways,” was introduced to America on the cover of The Atlantic magazine in 1982; the book’s initial cover carried a quote from Robert Penn Warren, the only writer to ever win a Pulitzer Prize for fiction and for poetry. The quote: “A masterpiece.”

Heat-Moon, in a recent interview in his adopted hometown of Columbia, Missouri, described how his new book, unlike his others, poured out of him in a year or less as he observed the turmoil fueled by the nation’s deepening divisions, especially over race.

Heat-Moon said he set out to write a book about the nation’s great need to heal those scars of social injustice and racial distress. He wanted to portray a story of how men of different races and backgrounds grew together in companionship. It was a story, for certain, that a lifetime of exploration and writing of America would inform.

For those familiar with Heat-Moon’s writing, this book breaks new ground. It’s fiction, of course. But this one is propelled by a quick-moving plot and evolves into a story of friendship and love among three traveling companions. It’s a buddy movie waiting to be made.

The setting of this book, though, is a violent time. It’s 1840s, when slave trade in America was still in motion. Trennant stumbles into it almost immediately after stepping onto an American shore. And he hardly hesitates before he saves, befriends then guides an escaped slave, Nicodemus, or Deems, into the American West. Later in their journey they meet Two Hearts, an American Indian elder, a sachem reminiscent of a character from Thomas Berger’s “Little Big Man.”

“O America” vividly itemizes the violence of 1848 America. George Hancock, an administrator of the St. Louis medical school that has invited Trennant to speak, tells the doctor and Deems that an escaped slave would not be allowed to address students about the need to educate black people in medicine.

“What you’re advocating is a volatile issue,” Hancock said. “Only six years ago, six Negro men were hanged, decapitated, and their heads displayed in the window of Corse’s druggist shop. That location is across the street from where we sit.”

Deems asked, “How in God’s name did we ever get this to this place?”

Hancock responded: “Who’s we? And what’s this place?”

And Deems said: “We is America, and this place is now.”

In the interview in Columbia, Heat-Moon noted that one early morning, he believed it was in September, he kept waking on the hour to a digital clock. 4:00. Then 5:00. And a third time he looked up and it was 6:00. He later took it as more than coincidence. “It was a reminder to go write,” he recalled. Many incidents in the book he researched from his own library of more than 3,000 books about travel in America.

“I wanted to write a book about what is happening in America today,” he said. And, in so doing, maybe help to heal it.”

Toward the end of “O America,” the British doctor and the escaped slave express their affections, having helped each other in a variety of ways on their travels. They’ve escaped the slave hunter, thanks to Two Hearts, and they’ve each found a future direction. “Know that I love thee,” the doctor yells to the escaped slave.

It’s a simple, common expression. But, Heat-Moon says, it’s the answer to all that afflicts our nation today. Know that I love thee.

Michael Mansur was a reporter for The Kansas City Star for 25 years and, during that time, traveled with Heat-Moon on the journey that served as the basis for the author’s book “River-Horse: A Voyage Across America.”

This story was originally published February 24, 2020 at 5:00 AM.