Beyond the Frontier: A Novel of Empire, Parks, and the Limits of Loyalty (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9798951570536)

Joseph Freeman is a Freeman by love, not by blood, the orphaned son of a man Isaiah brought out of bondage, raised half in the family kitchen, and counted kin because this family counts love thicker than paper. He carries the country's flag farther than any Freeman before him: up the heights of Cuba, into the jungles of the Philippines, where another empire is being built, and a Black soldier named David Fagen has crossed to the enemy and set a question burning in every colored regiment that no one dares speak aloud. He guards the great Western parks under the Army's first Black colonel. And he believes, the way the young believe, that if he only serves well enough, the country will at last be made to keep its word.

Then comes Brownsville. In 1906, the Army discharged one hundred and sixty-seven men of the Twenty-fifth Infantry without trial and without honor, the largest summary dismissal in its history, and Joseph stands among the condemned, branded guilty by a nation that never let him answer the charge. He comes home ruined. And the family that built its entire life on the saying of names does the one thing it has never done. It stops saying his.

Decades later, an old keeper lifts from the cedar chest a photograph with the face cut out, the record books Joseph kept, and the columns a young reporter named Cora Pruitt set in type while he was away at his wars. For most of a long life, the keeper did not know whose face had been cut from the picture, only that he was not to ask. He knows now.