Toley's Odyssey: Flight to Freedom

More about the book

TOLEY'S ODYSSEY is the story of a slave, from birth on a Louisiana plantation, through the death of his mother at the hands of their sadistic master, his growing up as a lonely slave on a leeched out cotton farm in Mississippi. When he is about thirty years old, the Master marries a rich widow [strictly for her money] who has a teenage daughter and a teenage slave girl who is both servant and companion to the white girl. Toley and the slave girl, Bertha, fall in love, but before they can 'jump the broom', the master tries to rape the young black girl only to have Toley catch him in the act. Toley pulls the master off Bertha and slams him across the room, breaking the master's neck. Toley must run, leaving his beloved Bertha behind. Toley makes good his escape and joins up with the Union army, becoming an orderly and the colonel's right hand man. When the war is over, the colonel takes Toley to Texas with him and Toley spends the next twenty years as the colonel's hired hand on a Texas cotton farm. In a surprise ending, Toley and Bertha are reunited and return to the Louisiana farm where Toley grew up.