Rice and a Bowl of Boat

This audiobook is narrated by an AI Voice. Tennessee, 1866. The Thirteenth Amendment has been ratified. The papers say Cleet is a free man. Freedom, he is learning, is not a thing you are handed — it is a thing you have to build, board by board, on ground that does not want you standing on it.

He cannot read. He owns nothing but the clothes he walked out in. What he has is a gift for whiskey, a way of listening to trees, and Hattie Marie — a woman who speaks seven languages and writes down the story he cannot write himself.

Together they make their way from a Mississippi plantation toward a life of their own: a distillery on a river, a business license with a real last name on it, a bank account, a wedding. And along the way they keep finding people the world has thrown away. An orphaned boy hiding in a rice field. A father who crossed an ocean searching for a stolen son. Four children with no one left. A sister long presumed dead, hidden in the hold of a steamboat.

The family Cleet builds is not the one he was born to. It is the one he assembles out of everyone slavery scattered.

But a curfew is still a curfew. A plantation does not stop being a plantation because a law says so. And when the road takes them down the Mississippi to New Orleans — the boot of America — Cleet discovers how much of his freedom is still something other men can take back.

Told almost entirely in the voices of the people who lived it, Rice and a Bowl of Boat is a Reconstruction-era story about the distance between being freed and being free — and about the stubborn, ordinary work of making a family out of strangers.