An Antebellum Oz (Choice Press 2025) by Joseph Eldredge is a boldly reimagined The Wonderful Wizard of Oz in which six friends—three free siblings, three enslaved youths—on a Mississippi farm at the beginning of the Civil War find themselves uplifted in a hurricane and set down in Oz. The story is inventive, thought-provoking, and engrossing with vividly creative adaptations of the original Wizard of Oz cast.
The story and the characters are compelling, but the format is something different. Part five-act play, part epic poem and with enough footnotes to almost qualify as an academic piece, An Antebellum Oz requires readers to pay close attention amidst complex formatting and numerous footnotes. The author calls it a “romance.” The publisher calls it “a work of literature.” Antebellum Oz also borders on a so-called mash-up novel in which the classic The Wonderful Wizard of Oz is “mashed up” with magical realism and supernatural phenomena. It also has an allegorical quality, spiced with entwining smaller parables, and though there is darkness in it, there is also light. In the end, maybe it is just best to say it’s wonderfully imaginative and original.
Publishers Weekly, which can be hard to please, says this: “Poet Eldredge (An Andrew Jackson) offers an audacious reimagining of L. Frank Baum’s Oz, employing the framework of the quintessential American fantasy to reveal the darkest of American truths: what life was like in the American South in the years just before what one character, Harriet, calls ‘de Freedom War.’”
The story opens on April 11, 1861, on “The Master’s Farm,” which is described as a “little share-cropped sugar plantation that lived on a little neck of the Mississippi.” On this farm, six teens named Dorothy, Tom, Jon, Harriet, Jim, and Ferdinand live and work. In some ways mirroring the paradox of Southern history, white youth Tom hopes to one day build “a great Plantation on this riverbend! Free, where none are slaves but to industry.” Yet he also owns up to being willing to use the “the quirt in my hand.”
Slave Ferdinand wants to run away toward freedom with Harriet, and Harriet admits as much to Jim. The “master” (who is the father of Jon, Tom, and Dorothy) falls off a roof and appears to be seriously injured. Dorothy, loyally, elects to stay by her injured father’s side, as do Jon and Tom. But it isn’t long before Tom warns them all: “A hurricane, a hurricane is coming / Hurrying through the sugar cane!”
The hurricane lifts the cabin into dark clouds and deposits it in the land of Oz at night. The six youths are separated, with Dorothy and Ferdinand soon encountering seven dwarfs who thank the two of them for crushing a witch with their cabin. Ferdinand has this to say of the event: “This’ but the lip of the abyss… I surmise, / Landed on a witch’s head, this witching night / Will only wickedly end.” Dwarfs tell Dorothy and Ferdinand that to get home again, they must seek the help of Oz, who lives in a place called Uncle Sam Plantation.
Meanwhile, Jim and Jon land together and a mysterious woman soon tells them if they wish to get home again, they must kill the man called Oz. Tom and Harriet wake in a corn field, and Tom suffers a “crookedly broke left arm.” As the six set out on their various journeys to find the mysterious Oz, they will encounter a scarecrow named Jim Crow, a tin man called the Klan Man, and a bloodhound called brer-Lion “cuz I’m the biggest Hound in the House.” And, yes, there are flying monkeys and witches too!
Within An Antebellum Oz, there are passages that read like a catalogue of the South’s great sins, both antebellum and post-antebellum. Some major historical figures of the South appear with either their real names or facsimiles—Nat Turner, John Brown, Jefferson Davis, and Uncle Remus among them. Thus, history is incorporated as part of the An Antebellum Oz allegory. The result for the six youths is a fearsome journey in their quest to return home. The introduction admits this nightmarish quality: “Joseph Eldredge’s vision is a nightmare of an old chivalric South that most certainly did exist in all its violence & racism…”
Eldredge should be congratulated on revitalizing Southern clichés and tropes by placing his characters and their story into a boldly reimagined Oz and using lyrical language and poetry to convey their tales. There is rhythm in its iambic pentameter and music in the black and white words that suggest this would make an engrossing musical on a stage.
Joseph Eldridge
Joseph Eldredge is a poet, teacher, and scholar who lives in Colorado in the heart of the Rocky Mountains. He is the author of A Town of James and An Andrew Jackson.
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