Katy Simpson Smith’s Free Men is a skillfully written historical novel about three men who converge in the southern woods of what is now Alabama. The book takes place in our nation’s infancy,1788.
Bob, a garrulous black man, is fleeing slavery. He leaves a wife and two daughters, a family not of his choice but merely a union of convenience to his master. Istillicha, a Creek Indian, leaves his tribe after he’s been edged out of what he feels was his due. Cat, an emotionally scarred white man, flees from himself, from what he failed to do.
In a short period of time, the three men happen to join forces and later commit a shocking murder that sends Le Clerc, a French tracker, on their trail. Le Clerc studies men’s habits and as he tracks them he watches their behavior from a distance. He wonders how three such different men could have acted in unison.
I found Free Men a captivating study of how four men grappled with their merged, yet individual lives. Is it still a crime when the event is a sin against sinners? This story captures the beating heart of young America and its values at the time, values that are often so divergent from today’s sense of right and wrong.