Can't wait for your novel to be done! Make sure you post here when it's available! I gravitated to your story because my ancestor also ran away from the plantation in SC at 22 to join the military. He fought with the Union's 21st U.S. Colored Infantry from 1863 to 1866. Upon discharge, he went back home to the same plantation from which he'd fled with a small Civil War pension.

I'm still working through all the details I've found and am working with a cousin to do a documentary on our very large family. I've documented the above with ancestry records. I'm 66 now and a lot my family's passed on, but there are still three of my grandmother's 15 children (an aunt and two uncles) still alive helping me fill in the blanks they lived.

What's remarkable about the story is that 33 years after that discharge and working the farm, he fell ill and his daughter, in 1899, using what they'd earned from selling what they grew and what they saved, purchased 8 and 13/16 acres of that plantation from which he'd fled for $100!! I have the original deed we found when my grandmother passed away! Sadly, greed reared its ugly head and fights over the land have caused friction among the many heirs, some of them selling their parcels for peanuts. {SMDH}

It's taking a long time because there are so may layers of family, but I refuse to let the story go until it's finished, because I have sons and grandchildren who need to know exactly, as James Baldwin said, "...from whence they came."