The Far Shore

Emancipation told them they were free. The ledger said otherwise.

Georgia, 1865. Moe Strider was fourteen when he learned to read: first words, then ledgers, and finally the fine print that freedom was written in. What the proclamation left his family was a contract built to keep them owing, and a harvest they worked but somehow could not own.

So the Striders turn west, chasing the land America promised families like theirs. The road carries them through night riders, river crossings, a pueblo that shelters them at a price, desert hunger, and the hard arithmetic of survival. Moe reads it all the way down: the contracts, the tally books, the promises with a column hidden inside them. But every promised land has its own ledger, and California is no exception.

What waits at the end of the road forces the question no one wants to ask: what if the design can't be escaped from inside the frame?

Told by Moe's sister Miri, keeper of the family's record, The Far Shore is a literary odyssey about belonging, memory, and the distance between being freed and being free. It arrives on Juneteenth: the day that distance got its name.