Many people plan to write a novel upon retirement, but few individuals achieve such an apex. However, Donald Buchanan retired in 2016 from a 31-year career with IBM and set about writing his novel the next day. The plot for “Counting Souls” has essentially been percolating since he visited grandparents as a child in Cherokee County, N.C. There he learned that some of his relatives were counted as part of the 1830 census. “Counting Souls” focuses on a lawyer-farmer who is hired as a federal census taker for an area of the Appalachian Mountains in North Carolina where Cherokee people, settlers, plantation owners, and enslaved people lived.
North Carolina Forebears
“Counting Souls” is, in some ways, a tribute to Buchanan’s ancestors’ way of life, especially his grandfather, a farmer who was satisfied to cultivate his land and never travel or drive an automobile. “To honor him, I had for years been doing genealogy. And, strangely enough, the 1830s census had my family members in it who lived in Macon County. It began to occur to me that whoever the census taker was at that time would have met every one of my ancestors. So, I wondered who that guy was.”Through extensive research, Buchanan learned that the 1830 census taker was a man named Thomas Love Jr., whose family had fought in the American Revolution and had been given land grants in North Carolina and Tennessee. Besides the characters of Thomas Love and Isaiah (a former Monticello slave tasked with running the farm while Love is taking the census), many other characters in “Counting Souls” are named for real people that Buchanan learned about through his research. Yet, the novel is anything but a staid history book. Buchanan’s writing style is “sense of place,” a term instigated by 19th century writer Henry David Thoreau. In essence, the prose conveys the setting in such a way that readers can imagine being there.
Revering History
During his census-taking journey, Love meets a variety of appealing, prickly, and heinous “souls” along the way, befriends a Cherokee tribal member, empathizes with a mother alone in the wilderness, and allays the concerns of plenty who are suspicious of government census-taking. Primarily, however, Love is a history lover, and when he meets Revolutionary War veterans, he is as fascinated as we might be to meet a survivor of World War II, or the Korean or Vietnam War.When he is invited into a family’s home on July 4, 1830, and learns that the home’s owner served, Love tells the man, “It’s an honor to be sittin’ here with a Revolutionary War veteran on Independence Day. … I can’t believe I’m sittin’ in the parlor of a man who … fought under Washington …”
After six months of “counting souls,” Love spends several full days making three copies of the information about the 5,332 individuals in the census-taking area he was assigned. Those census records are preserved for us to view today. Thankfully, there were people like Love willing to risk comfort, and even life, to document for future generations the early years of our United States of America.
