Heirs to Freedom

Inspired by Russian historical novels, especially Tolstoy and Pasternak, Heirs to Freedom is the story of a colonial Charleston, South Carolina family, who lived in the four decades before the American Revolution. The book was precipitated by a true event: in this period, the son of a planter and a former slave woman was tried in a colonial court. To rule in his favor the judge had to declare him white. To account for this startling finding, the story imagines what he and his family might have been like. In the process, it deals with all the issues that swirl around a remarkable family in America’s turbulent formative decades: slavery, race relations, generational strife, sexuality, gender, marriage and religion, all in the context of the developing Independence movement and the emergence of American national identity. Inevitably the political analogues of the private life are explored: equality, merit, individualism, justice, prosperity, liberty and freedom.