The Wished For Country

Book excerpt: The Wished For Country is set during the founding of the Maryland colony in the mid-seventeenth century. It traces the entwined lives of James Hallam, a carpenter and indentured servant; Ezekiel, an African slave brought to Maryland from Barbados; and Tawzin, a Piscataway Indian, kidnapped to England when a child, and now back in America. While Hallam goes on to become a soldier and a player in the politics of the Maryland colony, Ezekiel and Tawzin become the center of an outcast group of Blacks, poor whites, and Native Americans, who find themselves striving to reinvent themselves and their world. The stories of these three men, the women who love them, and the community they form, bring to vivid life the experiences of those who came to America pulled by a dream of what could be shaped from an emptiness that embodied promise, of those who were unwillingly brought to be the instruments of that dream, and of those who saw the shape of their world forever changed by the coming of the Europeans.