Rhoda Strong Lowrie, half Lumbee Indian, half Scot, claimed two great loves in her life: Henry Berry Lowrie, the local hero who became her husband, and Scuffletown, the place where she lived.

Nowhere Else on Earth is Josephine Humphreys' novel about Rhoda's extraordinary life and how her loves break and heal it. It is a love story, a history lesson and a social commentary about a group of disenfranchised people: the Lumbee Indians.

The story is told by the 41-year-old Rhoda, looking back 25 years to the days when the Civil War was nearly over and she was 16.

"Today the past is lively before my eyes, hot as coals" Rhoda tells the reader. "Mysteries crackle out of it and hiss through the air, and for whole stretches of days I don't eat anything real at all. I am chewing red cinders and sparks. Sometimes I am transported."

Humphreys, the author of Dreams of Sleep, Rich in Love and The Fireman's Fair, writes in a language that is lyrical and graceful but also descriptive. Here's how Rhoda explains how she is drawn in by the past:

"If you have ever seen a milk snake eat a frog, you know it's not accomplished in one swift strike but is a long, slow, miraculous business. Sometimes, if the snake comes from behind, the frog's head and eyes are free to the last, and it struggles but can't see what's happening -- how the snake keeps inching on, not so much swallowing as surrounding."

Scuffletown, the geographic center of the novel and its own universe, is set in eastern North Carolina along the Lumbee River near Lumberton and Whiteville. It is an isolated community by choice, said to be a floating town. Those who live there mostly are Lumbee Indians and people from other races they have married. These are people the government does not recognize as white, black or red, Rhoda says.

"We were called many names but publicly it was Scuffler or Scuffletown Indian, meaning Not-Indian, No-Person, Nothing."

Rhoda describes her home as varying from "six to eight miles wide, on both banks of the river and up and down through the swamps." But Scuffletown wasn't defined entirely by geography. "Wherever we were, that was Scuffletown," Rhoda says.

Rhoda's mother worked in the turpentine camps and her father did a variety of jobs. She had two brothers. There was little material luxury in their lives, and in the last days of the war, they had barely enough food to survive.

Scuffletown was caught between the Northern and Southern armies as the war wound down. Union troops were closing in. Operating throughout the area was the notorious Home Guard, which captured the young men from Scuffletown for the Confederates, not to fight but to work as slaves.

Rhoda searches the past for an understanding of how her life ended up as it did, but her effort to record the past and then make sense of it takes its toll on her.

"I'm starting to wear thin," she says. "This is the price of the years of thinking, the casting and recasting of events and the frantic pen scratching past midnight, the hoarding of paper, the loneliness, the pages accumulating while I myself shrink down."

Humphreys got the idea for Nowhere Else on Earth 20 years ago on a train ride from Charleston, S.C. to Providence, R.I. She sat next to a young bride traveling north to meet her in-laws and feeling nervous about how they would react to the fact that she was not white but part Lumbee Indian. That meeting prompted Humphreys to study the Lumbees and write this lilting novel about them.

Sharon Bond is a Times staff writer.

Nowhere Else On Earth

By Josephine Humphreys

Viking Press, $24.95

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