Almost Home

Cahaba Prison, Alabama, April 1865

Finally, you learn to wait.

You learn to wait while the rain falls for four days and nights; wait as the rivers rise over their banks, carrying with them the town shit and your own; wait as this new sewer-lake begins seeping into the cotton warehouse that is now a prison, your home. And then you learn to wait in your skin and bones: wait as the sewer-lake-pond-river consumes your toes, your feet, your ankles; wait as it crawls up your shins and over your knees; wait until your balls and prick are sodden; and then wait some more because when you are standing in a flood and not allowed to leave, there is nothing else to do....

Thus begins this compelling work of historical fiction that, while taking place mostly on land, begins and ends, as it must, in water: The river that overflowed a Confederate prison camp in Alabama and, at the other end, the mighty Mississippi, all that stood between broken men finally returning to homes and loved ones they had left behind years earlier.

At the heart of the novel are four invented prisoners from Indiana, the Muncie Men-George, Ephraim, Henry, and Jake-and a boy named Boy. This is their story, but it's also the story of the tens of thousands of real-life captives who survived, or didn't, often in unspeakable conditions in Civil War prison camps, both North and South, and of the greed and corruption that often thrives on the sidelines of great conflicts.

The Sultana had a listed capacity of 376 passengers when it set out from Vicksburg, Mississippi, on the night of April 24, 1865, with more than 2,000 on board, the vast majority of them Union Army POWs, homeward bound at last. A single surviving photograph captures the joy of that passage. Nothing other than fiction can capture its end. Writes author Howard Means: "I hope this novel at least offers solace because, most of all, this is a book about love."