Freeman Walker
- 作者:Cates,David Allan
- 出版社:Baker & Taylor Books
- 出版日期:2008-10-01
- 語言:英文
- ISBN10:1932961550
- ISBN13:9781932961553
- 裝訂:精裝 / 15.9 x 23.5 x 3.2 cm / 普通級
At the age of seven a mulatto slave boy with an indomitable spirit, Jimmy Gates, is freed by his owner-father, separated from his mother and everything he holds dear, and sent to England for an education. Four years later when his father drowns at sea, leaving him bereft, Jimmy is apprenticed to a London workhouse where he spends six hard years making saddles, reading heroic novels to his companions, finding the comfort of prostitutes, and discovering the inspirational speeches of an Irish revolutionary name Cornelius O Keefe, or O Keefe of the Sword.
At eighteen, dreaming himself a warrior and a hero, he returns to the states intending to rescue his mother. Both blessed and cursed by his late father s words-to-live-by and armed with his free papers and a copy of the Declaration of Independence, Jimmy grows into manhood while he s on the battlefields of the Civil War and in the gold camps of the American West, repeatedly forced to reckon the joys, terrors, and ironies of his freedom. He also discovers chameleon-like ability to shift identities and re-invent himself along the way.
Freeman Walker is an adventure story filled with contradictory epiphanies, ironies, and paradoxes rolled into one man s quest to discover a defining inner truth that might allow him to survive a life of terrible misadventures-gritty, sublime, fantastical-and to finally understand the true meaning of moral freedom.