It is the early 1850s when thirteen-year-old Ashani tribe member Berko Yaba is snatched from his home in Ghana, West Africa, and placed on a slave ship bound for Jamaica. A short time later, Berko takes a new name, Jed, and reluctantly begins a new, imprisoned life with his shrewd owner. Meanwhile, in Cupar, Scotland, Johnny McDonald is like most teenage boys in his farming community, focused on raising healthy crops and animals. But when Johnny marries Diana and begins farming his own land, things begin to go wrong.
Halfway across the world from each other, Jed and John endure very different challenges. As Jed battles the torture of slavery and falls in love with Mary, another slave, John fights the daily obstacles that accompany a life of farming. But when John encounters a disaster that ruins his crops and Jed discovers the Underground Railroad, fate eventually leads both men and their families to journey to a small community in southern Ontario, where common threads tie them together as they become owners of one of the largest potato farms in Canada.
In this historical tale, the years pass and the families grow to include multi-racial twins, as events eventually lead a new generation to Mississippi, where everyone must face the sorrows of prejudice.
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Miyamoto Musashi (1584–1645), famed swordsman, was born Shinmen Takezo in Harima Province and may have fought at Sekigahara under the Ukita as a common soldier. He claimed to have defeated his first opponent (a certain Arima Kihei) at the age of thirteen. He wrote that he engaged in sixty duels without suffering defeat once, and he was noted in this regard for his skill at handling two swords at once. Much of Musashi’s life between 1600 and 1640 is the stuff of legend, and some have postulated that he served at Osaka Castle on the defending side, taking quite a few heads in the process. In 1640 Musashi accepted service with the Hosokawa clan and three years later, in Higo Province, began work on his great book The Book of Five Rings. He finished this influential work on swordsmanship in May 1645—the same year he died.