A thirteen-year-old newly-freed slave faces the challenges of freedom and horse racing as he pursues his dream of becoming a famous jockey in Civil War Kentucky and New York.

Even though it is now 1901, the people of Buxton, Canada (originally a settlement of runaway slaves) and Chatham, Canada are still haunted by two events of half a century before--the American Civil War, and the Irish potato famine, and the lasting damagethose events caused to the survivors.

Thirteen-year-old Gabriel, a former slave, leaves behind his life as a professional jockey and joins his father in the Fifth U.S. Colored Cavalry at Camp Nelson, Kentucky.

In 1848 Willow, a fifteen-year-old educated slave girl, faces an inconceivable choice -- between bondage and freedom, family and love -- as free born, seventeen-year-old Cato, a black man, takes it upon himself to sneak as many fugitive slaves to freedom as he can on the Mason-Dixon Line.

Freed from slavery, Mariah and her young brother Zeke join Sherman's march through Georgia, where Mariah meets a free black named Caleb and dares to imagine the possibility of true love, but hope can come at a cost.

In 1860 Michigan, as twelve-year-old Zach and his father become involved in a new, unnamed church and befriend neighbors who are freed slaves, they have conflicts with townspeople and with Zach's mother, a Baptist from Georgia.

Nine-year-old Betita and her parents fled Mexico after her uncle was killed by the cartels, and settled in Los Angeles seeking political asylum and safety in what her father calls Aztlan, the land of the cranes; but now they have been swept up by the government's Immigration Customs Enforcement, her father deported back to Mexico, and Betita and her mother confined in a family detention camp--Betita finds heart in her imagination and the picture poems...