Die Free - A Heroic Family Tale

A TV journalist finds the most powerful story in her own family heritage

When award-winning television anchor Cheryl Wills discovers that her great-great-great grandfather, Sandy Wills, was a runaway slave who joined the fight for freedom in the Civil War, she embarks on a search to find out more about the ancestor who demonstrated the same spirit and heart that she knew in her beloved father, a remarkable but flawed man, who died when Cheryl was thirteen, and who never knew his family legacy.

"My Great-great-great grandfather was not the only one to escape Edmund Wills’ suffocating plantation. So did five young men who were undoubtedly like brothers to him. This is Richard Wills’ enlistment form. He was the only one of the Wills Brothers to die before the war ended. Note that they put his occupation as ‘slave’. Read my book to see what I have to say about that!"

Die Free: A Heroic Family Historyis also a touching chronicle of the author’s yearning for her father both while he was alive and after his death. Wills asserts, “There’s a comma after that fateful night on the bridge, not a period. There was much more to his life than my dad’s transgressions, spectacular though they were, and his legacy proves that his errors in judgment are but a footnote in an otherwise breathtaking walk on the wild side for the thirty-eight years that Clarence Wills walked this earth.”

From Haywood County, Tennessee, in the 1860s, to New York City in the twentieth century, the unvarnished truth about the Wills’ family roots, ever entwined in passion, music, and faith, is a story full of rich detail and memorable characters. The author reaches back two centuries to provide history and context to a fascinating and vivid picture of an American family, descendents of enslaved Africans who, generation after generation, “reached for the gold.”

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