On Free Ground - Hardcover

by Greg McDonald (Author)

North Carolina, 1839. When his mother dies, four-year-old Liam Gatlin, the plantation owner's son, is handed to Lily, the enslaved woman who runs the household, to raise beside her own son, Isaac. The two boys grow up sharing a cabin, a creek, and a schoolroomthough only one of them is allowed to learn there.

Isaac learns anyway, in a state where teaching him to read is a crime, and he keeps it hidden the way his mother taught him to hide everything. What neither boy can hide, as the years pass, is what grows between them: a love the plantation has no room for and the law has a name for.

When Liam goes north to study law in New Haven, Isaac goes with him-still, on paper, his property. In a free state that keeps its own cold distances, Isaac faces a question no enslaved man is allowed to answer: if he were free to leave, would he stay?

On Free Ground is a story of two young men learning that the law can make a man free, but only he can decide what to do with it.