"The land . . . America, is but a great body. The head and heart are the northern part, and the bowels and unruly loins are the south. Soon the body will make war against itself, and the pestilence that is slavery and the evil done against all people will be paid for in rivers of blood and tears. It can only be as such, and the land will not heal for many generations to come. Timothy will see the setting of the sun upon the old ways and the rising of it on a new day. He will be among the first by way of his own example to lead the people—all people—back into harmony with the land and each other. I have been shown Timothy shall wield a mighty sword in the trouble to come upon the land he is being taken to. He is to be the father of a mixed and diverse family—your people--his father's--and my own also."
Born aboard a slave ship the son of a captive African woman and her English husband during the Atlantic middle passage then sold with his mother to an Alabama cotton planter, this is the story of a white slave boy named Timothy and his multicultural family in the years leading up to and after the American Civil War, and his struggle amid the conflict to obtain his own family's freedom, happiness, and prosperity during the most turbulent era in the history the United States.
