In this debut historical novel, Calloway fictionalizes the story of his enslaved Black great-grandfather.

George Calloway was born into slavery in 1829 in Cleveland, Tennessee. From the age of 12, he was expected to work as hard as a grown man, and he did. Indeed, he worked so hard that when the White overseer died, George was made the manager of the farm at the age of 18: “He was proud of the fact that the farm produced more per acre with him as boss than under old Bryant. He was proud of the straight rows, taut fences….George could run a farm as well as any man.” Now, on the eve of the Civil War, George is married with a child, and they live in a small cabin on the land that his enslaver owns. Marsa Thom, as George calls him, is the biological father of George and his siblings, although this relationship isn’t acknowledged openly. Still, the horrors of slavery affect George’s family deeply: His freedman father-in-law, after a run-in with a White man, is whipped within an inch of his life, and his enslaved younger brother Henry is sent off to work at a plantation in New Orleans in exchange for cash. George and his family do what they can to support people who decide to run for freedom, including his younger brother Louis, a frequent (and frequently recaptured) escapee. Change may be coming soon, however, with the election of Abraham Lincoln to the presidency and a rumored potential invasion of the South by abolitionists. George isn’t sure what war might bring—an end to slavery is almost too outlandish for him to imagine—but one thing’s for sure: Tennessee is about to get a lot more violent.

Calloway’s elegant prose effectively captures the tension and textures of the period, as when George comes upon some neighbors celebrating the surrender of Fort Sumter: “George walked out into the front office and stopped short when he saw the jug of moonshine spilling on the out-of-town newspapers that had just come in that morning. Acock was so drunk that his hand listed badly to one side spilling the clear liquid, smearing the message of Confederate Sovereignty printed on the front pages.” Although the author presents the novel as something of a family history project, he shows himself to be such a talented writer of historical fiction that the biographical element of the work barely registers. George and his family are complexly rendered characters, and it’s only the occasional photographs and footnotes that remind the reader of the underlying reality of the story. This relationship to true history complicates some of the less-realistic aspects of the plot, such as the oddly honorable depiction of enslaver Marsa Thom, whose sympathetic rendering will likely be off-putting to some readers. It’s a lengthy novel at more than 400 pages, but Calloway largely earns the length with his nuanced depictions of life in Bradley County.

A sprawling, often engaging story of a family in bondage set against the backdrop of the Civil War.