Amplifying a little-known slice of Southern history, journalist Alan Huffman has reconstructed the riveting true story of freed slaves who fled Mississippi to establish a new home in Africa in the 1840s. Mississippi in Africa: The Saga of the Slaves of Prospect Hill Plantation and Their Legacy in Liberia Today tells this stranger-than-fiction story in compelling style, capturing the hope, conflict and tragedy of the endeavor.

Isaac Ross was a Revolutionary War veteran who had established a sprawling, 5,000-acre cotton plantation in Jefferson County, Mississippi. When he died in 1836, Ross’ will stipulated that all the slaves of the Prospect Hill plantation be freed upon his daughter’s death. The plantation would be sold to finance a journey for any freed slaves who wanted to emigrate to Liberia, a province in Africa where a colony of freed slaves had already been established.

Legal battles by some of Ross’ heirs delayed execution of the will for more than a decade, but by 1849 about 200 of the Prospect Hill slaves had been freed and had settled in Liberia. (Slaves who chose to stay behind were sold at auction, but the will specified that family units could not be separated.) Some who moved to Liberia emulated what they had seen back in Mississippi, building Greek Revival-style mansions in their new African homeland.

As it turned out, the freed slaves were not welcomed with open arms by the residents of the colony and a violent, bloody and bitter battle ensued between the tribes and the colonists. As part of his research, Huffman went to Liberia in search of the group’s descendants. There he discovered that conflicts between natives and freed slaves have echoed throughout the country’s history, even up to today’s civil war.

Events move swiftly in this complex and turbulent tale, but with the skill of a Southern storyteller, Ross weaves the threads together in a clear and readable narrative. Piecing together a story he first heard about during his own Mississippi childhood, he has produced a well researched account that illuminates a distant event and its lasting legacy.

Duck, a cattle herder in a poor, isolated region of Chilean Patagonia, is in the midst of one his frequent drunken episodes. And he has a knife to the throat of his American friend, author Nick Reding."Why you here?" Duck asks."The road," answers Reding, who has been chronicling the life of Duck and his family for his book The Last Cowboys at the End of the World: The Story of the Gauchos of Patagonia. The incident lies at the heart of this beautifully novelized nonfiction work about the culture of Chilean cowboys, or gauchos, and their kin – a cattle – herding, hard – living bunch that includes the alcoholic Duck and his angry wife Edith, who believes her violent husband is possessed by the devil. The road to which Reding refers is the Careterra Austral, or the Southern Highway, a leg of the Pan American Highway, which runs through the United States, Central America and South America. The road for the first time forces interaction between the gauchos, whose lives have changed little since the 18th century, and the modern world that begins with the city of Coyaique, where the 21st century has definitely arrived.Serving as reporter, novelist and anthropologist, Reding presents the gauchos through keen observation and linguistic investigation. We learn, for example, the origins of the word "gaucho," most likely derived from huacho or guache, which means "orphan" in several Indian languages.The reader accompanies Duck and Reding on cattle drives and visits to distant neighbors. Meanwhile, the author weaves into his narrative the figurative language of fiction, relaying several of the gauchos’ mysterious, magical myths – stories that somehow arise from the austere reality of their daily lives.During the year he spends with Duck, Reding learns of the cowboy’s hopes for a better life in Coyaique – a desire that leads the family to the slums of that city, where the book comes to its sad conclusion.Reding renders the Patagonian landscape in wonderful detail. The end of the world may seem like a long way to go for a story, but the trip was more than worth Reding’s – and the reader’s – while.

Dave Bryan is a writer in Montgomery, Alabama.