When the wife of a plantation owner dies on a fateful night in 1887, John Billingsly makes the gut-wrenching decision to leave his mother and everything he knows to flee their slave cabin in Richmond, Virginia. Instructed by his mother to find a cousin in Mt. Hope, Alabama, John wends his way south in hope of a better life. With the plantation owner shadowing him every step of the way, his journey is perilous. One misstep could cost him his freedom-and his life. Inspired by a true story, is a mesmerizing historical family saga of loss and gain, survival and self-reinvention, and one family's fight for freedom in the midst of the post-Civil War American South.