1 Books Published by Bascom Hill Publishing Group on AALBC — Book Cover Collage
Die Free - A Heroic Family Tale
by Cheryl WillsBascom Hill Publishing Group (Jan 03, 2011)
Read Detailed Book Description
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.”