Chains: An American Odyssey

I am the storyteller; within me dwells the spirits of the ancient storytellers. The dead are only dead if they are forgotten. The spirits of these dead storytellers have compelled me to tell you these stories, just as you have been compelled to listen, so sit quietly and listen lest the dead be forgotten. Ever since the beginning of time, when man first populated the earth, civilizations have risen from the dust and returned to the dust from which they came. They have come and gone without leaving any trace of their existence. Some have perished by natural disaster while others have died of famine, pestilence, or warfare. Yet far more have merged with other cultures, thus losing their own identities. There is however one common thread that was shared by all of these lost civilizations, their historians. Some of these lost historians have recorded their histories on the walls of caves, others have written them on their city walls, others from more advanced civilizations have used paper while others chose to rely on storytellers. The latter ran the risk of meeting the same fate as the civilizations that they recorded. The story you are about to hear is of one such lost civilization, a story that has been passed down from storyteller to storyteller. The story of a race of people who have survived the struggle against the harsh elements of nature and the inhumanities of mankind. The story of an ancient people who were kidnapped from an Old World and abandoned in a New World. The story of a slave girl and the man who enslaved her. A penetrating, passionate, epic tale of a woman chained by the shackles of love and freed by her tenacious will to adapt and survive. A woman who forged a new culture out of the ancient cultures of her Old World and merged them with the cultures that she found in the New World. This is the story of a woman named Carob who was to become the mother of the great war chief Osceola and the Seminole nation that evolved in the Florida Everglades. Three storytellers tell this epic tale of an American odyssey in three books from a perspective that only these storytellers could know because they were there and survived to tell. Follow the storytellers closely or chance being lost at sea, or maybe wander blindly through a sandstorm in one of the deserts somewhere in the Old World of which I speak. Or perhaps it would be your fate to sink into one of the deep abysses of the New World. A misty, dark, wet, foreboding world inhabited by deadly alligators, poisonous water snakes, and lethal infectious insects. A world the first European explorers thought to be hell and later proclaimed to be paradise.