Gloryland by Shelton Johnson, 2009

Reviewed by Patricia Poland

Elijah Yancey was a Buffalo soldier in the U. S. Cavalry from the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries. Born black in Spartanburg, South Carolina, his coming of age reveals his desire to buck the system and his first attempts to try to break the color barrier. Fearing for his life, his parents ask him to leave and never come back.

He walks and walks and eventually ends up in Nebraska and signs up with the Calvary.

Therein begins a beautifully poetic book, written like a memoir, of Elijah and his ‘coming-to-grips’ with life, the

U. S. Army, God, and eventually love. (Though we must accept that Elijah finds earthly love because he tells us this near the end of the book, it is a spiritual and inner love that is the most apparent for the reader.)

As the years of soldiering give way, so does the anger at how his race has been treated.

It grows into something else - a deep relationship with his ancestors (respect really) and an even deeper understanding of God from the canyons, meadows, stars and even grizzly bears (and mules) of Yosemite National Park.

It is his short time at Yosemite that takes hold of him forever. It is that time and the memories that it creates that help fill the hole of his missing home and family. Elijah’s introspection is surprisingly simple and yet deep, as seen here in his description of his awe at God’s land, from page 198:

In general, we didn’t talk much on patrols, cause the mountains and valleys and meadow kept shutting us up. It seemed like God was usually talking in a big voice here and over there and round the bend yonder, and when God’s talking, you shut up.

Quotations at the beginning of each chapter from the “Cavalry Tactics” manual create a nice balance with the fine prose.

Only someone who has lived and worked at this National Park could portray it in such a personal and beautiful way and Johnson is that person, being a ranger at Yosemite. Johnson also draws from his own family’s history, an ancestor who was a Buffalo Soldier.

Gloryland will give you a peek into the painful time of southern African-Americans from the 1870s and on into the early struggles of desegregation within the U. S. Army. You will be bound to a man who eventually finds himself in a wonder-filled place and learns who he really is. It will leave you yearning for you own Yosemite.