GFS presents Caravan Of Dreams
Some stories write themselves. Others wait more than a hundred years to be told. Both
scenarios were true for Thomas and Victoria Williams, whose family saga has been
fictionalized recently. Tracing lives, loves, and aspirations of these English-born Gypsies
arriving in mid-nineteenth century America, Caravan Of Dreams is a love story, a rare
insider’s view of a mysterious culture, an uneasy truce with wealth garnered from the
Civil War, a mother’s excruciating bereavement, and the emotional cost of loss and
injury.
The story behind the novel’s development is intriguing in itself. In 1996, author Beth
Lapin read a newspaper clipping about Victoria’s death on the railroad tracks in East
Hartford, Connecticut, a hundred years prior. The article described her as the widow of
Thomas Williams, King of the Gypsies. Beth’s curiosity was piqued by the presence of
Gypsies, royalty no less, in her home state. Though more than a dozen years passed
before she had time to pursue it, this story remained pocketed in the back of her mind.
Lapin was impressed with newspaper articles from the time describing Thomas and his
family. They were horse dealers with stellar reputations, honest dealings, and good
citizenship. At Thomas’s death in 1895, the New York Herald wrote, “Everyone knew…
[he] did not deal in knock-kneed and spoiled nags, but that in all his dickerings, ‘his
word was as good as his hand.’”
Woven throughout Caravan of Dreams are descriptions of the nomadic life, birth and
death rituals, marriage traditions, and foraging of a people who found solace in the
forest. It was a time of freedom, mobility, and opportunity in America, which drew the
Romanichal across the Atlantic. Yet, there was struggle and loss, grief and conflict with
other cultures.
Lapin hopes that Caravan of Dreams, available on Amazon http://www.amazon.com/Caravan-Dreams-Beth-Lapin/dp/1503197565), will provide a
more balanced view of English Gypsies in the United States in the 1800s. “Horses were
an integral part of everyday life, the mainstay of transportation, farming, Civil War
cavalry, and racing,” she explained. “I had no idea these English Gypsies played such a
pivotal role in our history.” It might have taken more than a hundred years, but Thomas
and Victoria’s story has now been told.