New Historical Fiction: The Short Happy Life of Wyatt Outlaw

Wyatt Outlaw was a Black American hero that history has tried to forget. I’m trying to get my new novel, The Short Happy Life of Wyatt Outlaw, listed on AALBC but so far haven’t figured out how. It’s available on am*zon, B&N, Ingrams, and other sources.

Little is known about Wyatt Outlaw’s life, but his tragic death is well documented. My novel imagines Wyatt Outlaw as a son, husband, and father.

The novel is framed with the murderous events that occur in Graham, North Carolina, on February 26, 1870. The atmosphere is thick with political tension and impending violence. Wyatt Outlaw, a Black town commissioner, master carpenter, and Union veteran, is marked for death by the White Brotherhood and KKK.

Born the unacknowledged son of a white planter and an enslaved mother, Wyatt is sold to protect his father's fragile public image. After years of working as a slave on a tobacco farm and then being brutally beaten by a patroller or “pattyroller,” Wyatt's world improves when he meets Rachel. Because marriage is forbidden for slaves, their romance culminates in a secret jumping-the-broom ceremony. They begin a family, but when a violent clash with a pattyroller—to defend Rachel—forces Wyatt to make an impossible choice to flee North, he joins the United States Colored Cavalry to fight against the system that enslaved him.

Following the Civil War, Wyatt returns to Graham a free man and a proud combat veteran. With the help of his strong mother, who takes care of his three sons, Wyatt attempts to create harmony out of the ashes of the Civil War. He builds a successful woodworking business. He is appointed town commissioner and becomes a leader in the Union League, working to forge a political alliance between newly enfranchised Black voters and poor white farmers.

But this coalition is a threat to the old Southern aristocracy, and the planter class unleashes the White Brotherhood and KKK to crush Wyatt’s organizing efforts through terror, triggering a ticking-clock countdown leading to the Kirk-Holden War.

The narrative is followed by a Book Club Discussion Guide that offers readers and book club groups a profound look at what it costs to build a family and community when the world wants to forget you.