Jasmine Houston, a widow with a young son, agrees to harbor former slaves at her horse farm outside of Lowell, even though her father, a plantation owner, supports slavery. When a boardinghouse keeper unwittingly becomes involved with a traveling peddler who sells something infinitely more valuable than shoes, Jasmine is devastated to discover that her son and the former slaves have been kidnapped. Jasmine's determination to free them threatens to...

"Set during Reconstruction-era New Orleans, this new work from the acclaimed author of Between Earth and Sky is a powerful story of human resilience--and of the unlikely bonds that hold fast even in our darkest moments. "The dead can't hurt you--only the living can." Effie Jones, a former slave who escaped to the Union side as a child, knows the truth of her words. Taken in by an army surgeon and his wife during the War, she learned to read and write,...

"In the waning days of the Civil War, brothers Prentiss and Landry, freed by the Emancipation Proclamation, seek refuge on the homestead of George Walker and his wife, Isabelle. The Walkers, wracked by the loss of their only son to the war, hire the brothers to work their farm, hoping through an unexpected friendship to stanch their grief. Prentiss and Landry, meanwhile, plan to save money for the journey north and a chance to reunite with their mother,...

"In Sweet Taste of Liberty, W. Caleb McDaniel focuses on the experience of a freed slave who was sold back into slavery, eventually freed again, and who then sued the man who had sold her back into bondage. Henrietta Wood was born into slavery, but in 1848, she was taken to Cincinnati and legally freed. In 1855, however, a wealthy Kentucky businessman named Zebulon Ward, who colluded with Wood's employer, abducted Wood and sold her back into bondage....

It's 1924 South Carolina and the region is still recovering from the infamous boll weevil infestation that devastated the land and the economy. Gertrude, a mother of four, must make an unconscionable decision to save her daughters from starvation or die at the hands of an abusive husband. Retta is navigating a harsh world as a first-generation freed slave, still employed by the Coles, influential plantation proprietors who once owned her family. Annie...

Set in 1885 in an Old West culture of bad whiskey, low morals and high adventure, the story follows four men on a collision course with a destiny they neither expect nor welcome. Ex-slave Honey Boutrille runs a New Orleans bordello called the House of Rest for Weary Boatmen. When he kills a white man for mutilating one of his girls, Honey must flee west to escape the hangman. Meanwhile, in San Francisco, former Civil War bushwhacker Twice Emerson,...

Separated from his friend Isabel after their daring escape from slavery, fifteen-year-old Curzon serves as a free man in the Continental Army at Valley Forge until he and Isabel are thrown together again, as slaves once more.

Red River Valley, 1869. Hordes of ex-Confederate soldiers have emerged from the piney hills and swamps of the Lousiana backcountry in a final, bloody show of defiance. Captain Douglas Owens of the 4th Calvary is ordered to reclaim the God-forsaken land from its murderous outlaw gangs. By his side is Huff, a former slave, and Basil Dubose, an ex-Rebel gunslinger for hire. With his options dwindling, Owens takes a squad of soldiers under his command...

After a journey on the Oregon Trail, recently widowed Matthew Penny joins a handful of lawyers practicing in Portland, a riverfront town in 1960. He agrees to help Worthy Brown, a newly freed slave, rescue his fifteen-year-old daughter, Roxanne, from their former master, a powerful Portland lawyer. Worthy's lawsuit sets in motion events that lead to Worthy's arrest for murder and create an agonizing moral dilemma that could send either Worthy or Matthew...

This biography profiles the life of Bass Reeves, a former slave who was recruited as a deputy United States Marshal in the area that was to become Oklahoma.