PROLOGUE

For hundreds of years desperate people turned to the swamps of Louisiana for escape.

Smugglers of all sorts and criminals hiding from the police. Bootleggers in the 1920s. All the way back to the Black Maroons, enslaved people who'd liberated themselves from bondage to seek refuge in one of the last wild places in America.

Long, long ago they had found freedom here, in communities they built themselves.

There was no arable land worth making into plantations and the swamps were rife with malaria and yellow fever, but that was a plus to the escaped slaves as the white men with their slave patrols rarely ventured far into the bayou. They were afraid of the fevers, the alligators and the hostile remnants of the native population. The slavers feared for themselves, but that was because they had something to lose. Desperation can make a person brave. Even without much hope of survival, many of them chose to die free in the swamp rather than under the lash of the overseer in the sugar plantations that lined the fertile river, the deadliest and most brutal for slaves in all the Southern United States.

Survival was never a guarantee in the swamps, but some stubborn escapees did manage to eke out a life for themselves, even in such an unhospitable place.

Being from tropical climes, they could weather malarial swamps better than the Europeans. The Seminoles, a mixed group of native tribes chased off nearby lands by armed white planters, had migrated to the swamps in the early 1800s, looking for places they could govern themselves and live in peace. If an escaped slave could find them, the Seminoles would protect him. Some joined the Seminole tribes and married with them. Others maintained their own separate villages.

The soil was poor in this free land and freedom itself was tenuous. Former slaves were often forced to flee the farms, boats and houses they'd built to avoid the patrols. Over successive generations they went deeper and deeper into the swamps where the land flooded in the rainy season and was vulnerable to hurricanes. Still, even there, the people survived, fishing and farming just enough in the poor soil to subsist on.

Eventually, all men were emancipated and some of the bayou was drained and cleared to enlarge the old town of Delacroix.

But the swamp wasn't banished completely. Even sandbags couldn't stop it from coming back every rainy season, to flood the first floors of the new houses, paint the barns in green moss and black mold, drown the crops and suck the children's shoes up in the sticky mud. And the attitudes that let slavery thrive in the land proved hard to change. Some former slaves turned into sharecroppers, still under the thumb of the old planation masters, now called landowners. They still owned nothing, not even the land that they'd worked on for generations and were now indebted to the landowners for equipment and seeds. The old slave patrols developed into the police force and the flag of the confederacy still graced clothes and cars and flew from boats with little thought as to how or why it got there.

But Samuel Wilson's family remembered. Few among them still spoke their old Creole language, a combination of West African, Indigenous, and European tongues, but their foodways thrived in the cosmopolitan kitchens of New Orleans and all along the Louisiana Delta.

Traditional outdoor grills and barbeques of catfish, shrimp, and oysters with red beans and "dirty rice" prepared in the old way were still served from food trucks and roadstops from Baton Rouge to New Orleans by members of the extended Wilson clan.

Sam was proud of his heritage, but at the same time it could be suffocating. There were expectations of what a Wilson should be and do that were so completely wrapped up in their small locality, that the future his parents imagined for him, felt more stifling to Sam than the choking grasp of humidity in the summer. He'd always been a fast runner and broad shouldered even at a young age. There was no money for college, but a football scholarship seemed a possibility for him. When that didn't materialize, he became depressed, feeling he'd doomed himself to a life where he'd never get to see a world beyond bayou, stuck on his parents' boat for the rest of his life. It wasn't that he hated the idea of working the fishing boat, per say, but just not yet, not while he was still young and longed to see more of the world. If he chose Delacoix, he wanted it to be a real choice, not because he had no other options.

He argued with his sister Sarah about it. How could she know for sure that Delacroix really was the place she was meant to be if she'd never been anywhere else in the world? And she'd answer that she didn't need to go anywhere else. Everyone she loved was right here. Why couldn't that be enough for him?

It made Sam feel selfish, because he knew it should have been enough. He loved his parents, his sister and the rest of his extended family, but somehow he couldn't shake the thought that he was meant for something greater than just running the family's fishing boat and selling their catch. He wanted to make a difference in the greater world outside their town, to correct some of the wrongs in his own small way that he saw made things so difficult for the people he cared about.

But there were other ways an enterprising young man might go to college. There was a recruiter for the military, running out of a storefront near the local fish market in Delacroix. Their band performed at Sam's high school and they handed out brochures. Sam wasn't particularly patriotic or interested in discipline or guns, but they offered free college tuition for everyone who served and with the football scholarship out of the picture, Sam knew it was the only way for him to break free of Delacroix, and still retain his family's approval. Once he had a college education, he could get a good job and help his family financially. Maybe then they'd understand. They could hire on more staff and his leaving them wouldn't seem like such a betrayal.

There was one other reason Sam Wilson was intent on leaving Delacroix and that he did not share with his sister, his parents or anyone else.

Despite being chosen as homecoming king for prom and dating the prettiest girl at his Catholic school, Sam had a secret.

He was gay.