Rice and a Bowl of Boat III

This audiobook is narrated by an AI Voice. Memphis, 1876. Reconstruction is collapsing, and Cleet Oakley — born the property of another man — now owns a whiskey distillery, a riverboat, and a lumber yard. He has money, papers, and a name on a deed. What he does not have is an hour of the mayor's time without asking twice for it.

When crosses burn on Oakley land, Cleet and his wife Hattie Marie take the matter to the men who keep the seals and the ledgers, and learn exactly how far the law will bend for a man who can read a contract. What follows is a season of treaties struck with the tribes upriver, hog hunts and a daughter turning eight, a woman found half-dead in the woods with no name to give, and a sheriff who has decided which side of the ledger he wants to be on.

It ends where the family's history began: a deed signed for sixty-nine thousand dollars, handing the Oakley Plantation over acre by acre to the people it once held.

Told almost entirely in the voices of the people who lived it, the third book of the Rice and a Bowl of Boat saga is a story about what a man builds once he is finally allowed to keep it — and about how much of freedom is bought, negotiated, and signed for, one page at a time.