Bound Out

The war is ending. The taking is not.

Freedom came to Maryland at one minute past midnight on the first of November, 1864. Within four weeks, the Orphans' Courts of the Eastern Shore had bound some two thousand freed children back to the men who had owned them, on a printed form, with a judge's signature at the bottom. Nobody broke the law. The law was the weapon.

In Chambersburg, Ruth Odell keeps a book of names: mothers searching for children, children sold away, families the war scattered across a continent. When a woman walks a hundred and ten miles with her shoes in her hands to ask whether her daughters are in that book, Ruth carries the fight into the Maryland courthouses, one indenture at a time.

Six hundred miles south, Jonah Harlan arrives in occupied Savannah as a quartermaster's clerk and finds the old order rebuilding itself out of paper. Labor contracts. Store ledgers. Settlement books that turn free men into debtors before the cotton is picked. Following the forms from the Savannah printers to the plantations of Wilkinson County, he learns how slavery survives its own abolition.

But Ruth's book holds one entry Jonah wrote himself: the killing he has carried since he was nineteen. And when the dead finally have names, Jonah must decide whether a man who demands an accounting from the South can refuse to give one of his own.

Spanning eight years, from the last winter of the Civil War to the fragile promise of Reconstruction, Bound Out is Book Five of the Jonah Harlan novels.