Within this context, Davis not only probes her family's history, which features both those who fought for the Confederacy and slaves who arched their backs against its tyranny, but she also brings to life what she calls ''the first generation out of bondage."
''The first women and men to walk away from bondage reinvented the race, redefined the terms of American citizenship, and spread the blend of African and Euro-American culture created in bondage in the American South," Davis writes. ''Never has one group of people acted on such a large scale in so many regions of the country at once to push the society to honor its foundational principles." They are, she says, ''freedom's 'Greatest Generation.' "
Davis's genealogical journey began with her grandmother's unpublished writings and two photo albums belonging to her great-grandparents, Will and Chloe. This relationship alone would make for a compelling read but has as its dramatic backdrop the era of Reconstruction, as a wounded nation struggled to find itself after the bitter, bloody Civil War. And while slavery had been abolished more than a decade earlier, racism, legally sanctioned and mob-fueled, remained as virulent as ever.
With scholarly research and her skills as a writer, Davis imagines her great--grandparents' lives, especially Chloe's, which began in slavery in Alabama, and she manages this without contrivance or cliché. And, as a ''freedwoman," Davis writes, Chloe was still shackled by ''the harshest legalized oppression that could be devised without reinstituting de jure slavery." In the process, Davis recalls a nation at one of its most acrimonious crossroads, as well as the failings of Reconstruction, during which blacks were regularly terrorized, brutalized, and lynched with little legal recourse.
