Set along the Outer Banks of North Carolina in the 1800's and the 1970s, the novel follows Theodosia Burr, daughter of Aaron Burr, who by many accounts was captured by pirates and lived out the rest of her life on a remote island, and the island's descendants hundreds of years later.

"On the gleaming banks of the Nile, the brilliant Taita -- a freed slave and advisor to the Pharaoh -- devises a plan to destroy Egypt's most feared enemy, the might Hyksos...With the future of the kingdom itself on his shoulders, Taita plunges into a world where the line between loyalty and betrayal shifts like the desert sands, evil waits in the shadows, and death lingers on the edges of darkness." --p. [4] of cover.

When Sethe, an escaped slave living in post-Civil War Ohio, takes in a strange girl named Beloved, she finds that she must face her unthinkable past in order to own her present and future.

"In the waning days of the Civil War, brothers Prentiss and Landry, freed by the Emancipation Proclamation, seek refuge on the homestead of George Walker and his wife, Isabelle. The Walkers, wracked by the loss of their only son to the war, hire the brothers to work their farm, hoping through an unexpected friendship to stanch their grief. Prentiss and Landry, meanwhile, plan to save money for the journey north and a chance to reunite with their mother,...

A Mind to Stay is a unique and extraordinary historical narrative of generations of a Black family with roots in slavery and in the South. This family won their freedom with emancipation but, instead of fleeing the poverty and oppression of the White plantation, decided to stay on the homeland of their White masters and then to purchase it for themselves within a decade. In a true counterpoint to the predominant tale of the Black exodus north in the...

"In Sweet Taste of Liberty, W. Caleb McDaniel focuses on the experience of a freed slave who was sold back into slavery, eventually freed again, and who then sued the man who had sold her back into bondage. Henrietta Wood was born into slavery, but in 1848, she was taken to Cincinnati and legally freed. In 1855, however, a wealthy Kentucky businessman named Zebulon Ward, who colluded with Wood's employer, abducted Wood and sold her back into bondage....

"As her beloved city of Richmond is transformed into a deadly Civil War battlefield, spirited Carrie Cromwell puts her medical skills to work in a Confederate hospital. While she fights to save unknown soldiers, the one she cares about the most is lost to her. Meanwhile in the North, Carrie's dear friends, former slaves Rose and Moses, have found freedom at last -- only to be separated by war. Can Moses, now a Union spy, elude those who are searching...

Illustrations and text introduce the reader to Biddy Mason.