The First Uniform - Book One

The only thing they could not take was the name he wrote for himself.

Book One of the Freeman Legacy Saga.

Holmes County, Mississippi, 1865. The war is over, and the cotton does not care. Isaiah has chopped it since the light was the color of ash, the way his mother Hagar taught him. Freedom, he learns that first summer, is a country with no roads marked. When the Freedmen’s Bureau man sets up his table outside the Lexington courthouse, Isaiah makes his mark on a contract he cannot read, and the man writes down the planter’s name beside it.

So Isaiah takes the road with Solomon Hale, and a name of his own: Freeman. At the enlistment table of the new 9th Cavalry, it goes into the Army’s book. What follows is the first uniform, the long column west, a frontier fort, the mail road, the fight, and the life the Army’s Black regiments made for themselves on the edge of a country that did not want them, the men the Plains nations would call Buffalo Soldiers.

Generations later, in Liberty Grove, an old man lifts the lid of a cedar chest of letters and a family Bible and sets down what they hold: what he can prove as it happened, and what he cannot as truly as an old man can build it.

Twenty-eight chapters, from the Drennan place to what a free man builds. A historical afterword separates fact from fiction.

EPUB edition. Read it on any e-reader, tablet, phone or computer.