Birdsong's Law: A Novella of 1619 Virginia

Previously published as Birdsong by Thomas S. Inman A forged note. A poisoned cup. A legal system inventing race as guilt. Njila Mwana a Hosi has done something extraordinary in early Virginia. He has survived captivity, won his freedom, acquired land, and built a home with Beth, the English woman he loves. Then Beth is poisoned. A forged note points toward Njila. Rumor becomes evidence. Suspicion becomes law. >Set against the tobacco fields and towering pines of seventeenth-century Virginia, Birdsong's Law is a historical mystery about freedom, land, and love-and the moment prejudice begins shaping the meaning of each. Njila's story is fictional. The forces shaping him are not. Author's Note This novel grew out of years of land-patent reconstruction work in Virginia - the slow, exacting process of reading the colony's earliest documents line by line, ridge by ridge, and ford by ford. That work led me into the world of 1619 and its aftermath, where the boundaries of race, land, and law were still being invented. I consulted with scholars of early Virginia and with leaders of the Saponi and Nottoway communities whose ancestors lived the consequences of those inventions. I wrote Birdsong's Law to explore the human cost of that moment - the courage required to stay human when the law is learning how to erase you.