Counting on Freedom is a three-part work of historical fiction set during the U.S. Civil War.
Part I (Old Dogwood) introduces Sarah, Hani and Joseph, three slaves from Old Dogwood, a cotton and rice plantation on the Charleston road. Hungering for freedom and a better life, Sarah’s talents for counting, her love for Hani, the Bible lessons she’s learned from Joseph, and the looming approach of Sherman’s army make Sarah the catalyst for a daring plan to escape Old Dogwood by sea to the Union-occupied South Carolina Sea Islands, where Hani was born. Hani's plan involves making a small sailboat from the parts of the large supply wagon that Hani has made to bring Old Dogwood’s harvest of cotton and rice to the Charleston Harvest Market. Launching this sailboat into the Cooper River at Charleston Harbor, they float unnoticed past Confederate forts and a Union fleet into the vastness of the Atlantic Ocean.
Part II (Hani's Ocean) finds this small sailboat too far offshore to see land. Hani teaches Joseph and Sarah how to sail and survive at sea. Just as Hani catches a big fish and is trying to bring the fish onboard by hand, they are caught by a terrible, fast moving winter storm, filled with blowing snow, rising seas, contrary winds, and freezing cold. They have no choice but to run out to sea with the storm, sailing day and night deeper into the Atlantic Ocean, until the storm finally abates and Hani can use the night stars to steer a course back to land.
When they finally make landfall at Saint Helena Island in sheltered waters that Hani has known since his youth, they make their way on foot to find Hani’s Uncle Balan, seeking to avoid the Union forces that have occupied the South Carolina Sea Islands since the early part of the Civil War.
In Part III (The Sea Islands), Sarah, Hani and Joseph discover a land of Milk and Honey on Saint Helena Island and a clear feeling of effective freedom in the South Carolina Sea Islands. It is a Union stronghold in the heart of the Confederacy where ten thousand plantation slaves had their first taste of freedom more than a year before Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation. And yet, freedom does not come easily, even in a Promised Land. For this is the true story of the Port Royal Experiment where hundreds of northern civilians and benevolent associations, “the Gideons”, travelled south to the South Carolina Sea Islands with the U.S. Army and Navy to help uplift the lives and education of these former slaves, to help the Union win the war and finance its cost by growing and selling southern cotton, and to make their fortunes.
Among the first “Gideons” that Sarah, Hani, and Joseph meet on Saint Helena Island are three members of a troubled family of Jewish merchants from Philadelphia, Rebecca, Aaron and David Van Ryn. As Hani joins the Union Army’s troop of black soldiers, and Joseph works the island’s cotton fields, Sarah begins working in the Van Ryn family’s general store, which supplies the needs of the military and the planters. Sarah and Rebecca are the same age and grow very close, very quickly, depending on each other, since they can’t depend on Rebecca’s bereaved father or her strange but talented uncle. She observes the Van Ryns and their friends conducting a Passover Sedar that celebrates the same Exodus story of Moses and the Jewish people that inspired her escape with Hani and Joseph from slavery.
As the Civil War continues to rage towards its inevitable conclusion on the mainland, Sarah’s remarkable talent for counting uncovers a terrible secret of grievance, revenge, blackmail, and treason that will threaten the Van Ryns’ lives. The only hope for their salvation is to outwit a formidable adversary from Sarah’s past through a brilliant “con game” that is creatively devised from the same unforgettable Bible stories that Sarah first learned as a young slave from Hani and Joseph.
