Freeman Walker Book

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. This begins an odyssey that will bring him back to the States as a young man, vaguely hoping to rescue his still enslaved mother, and leaves him wandering the country at the mercy of forces seemingly beyond his control, with only a naïve sense of discovery and a soon to be finely tuned acceptance of life's frightening ordeals to see him through.

Both blessed and cursed by his father's words-to-live-by and armed with his "free" papers and a copy of the Declaration of Independence, Jimmy grows into manhood on the battlefields of the Civil War and in the gold camps of the American West while he's repeatedly forced to reckon the joys, terrors and often ironic responsibilities of his freedom. He also discovers a chameleon-like ability to shift identities and re-invent himself along the way as the situation, and his conscience, demands.

Exploring themes of innocence, race, wilderness and civilization, David Allen Cates offers a timely examination of the American spirit, Manifest Destiny and the vast, mythic promise of a new world. Freeman Walker is an adventure story of one man's search for a defining inner truth that might allow him to survive a life of terrible misadventures — gritty, sublime and fantastical — and to finally understand the true meanings of moral freedom.