Excerpt from Black Cloud Rising by David Wright Falade, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

"I don't mean Kill Devil Hills and Nags Head and out there, but Roanoke Island. Home!"

Home—not just the place, but also those left behind. My ma'am, my girl Fanny.

"Them memories are what we're out here fighting to forget." He sighed, long, looking off into the trees. "Why not instead fill the hole with new, free-born thoughts?"

"Naw," said I. "I'm fighting for my right to prerogate claims to home."

"Prerogate?" Fields laughed in his easy, mouth-broad-open way.

"That ain't even a word."

"Why ain't it?"

"Always boasting your book learning," said he, elbowing at me for effect. "Hincty!"

A few of our troopers wandered up from below deck and I righted myself, adopting the bearing prescribed by my rank.

"Sergeant, Corporal," Simon Gaylord greeted us.

"Men," said I. I kept my gaze out to shore.

Besides Gaylord, there were Miles Hews and Josh Land. They chatted idle with Fields, who, as a corporal, was meant to hold a closer place to them than I was.

Our commander, Colonel Alonzo Draper, appeared on the forecastle and made his way out toward the general. The colonel sported a gesture of dark beard, the aim seeming to be to trick the eye from lingering on his youthful countenance, not quite succeeding. He was the African Brigade's second-in-command, below Wild, and he and the general exchanged what seemed a solemn correspondence—at least, to read Draper's stern demeanor, it did. General Wild wore his habitual smirk.

"Hear tell we're out after one rank Secessionist today," said Josh Land to Fields. But it sounded more a question and he said it deliberate loud, loud enough for me to hear.

"Otherwise, why else would they have us out hereabouts on our own," Simon Gaylord added, "with guns and hardly a week's training in the use of them?"

Gaylord, who hailed Little Washington, North Carolina, as home, was broad in the beam but shy-eyed, the sort to always ask permission. How he had found his way into our lines was a mystery, and not only on account of his fearful disposition. For Gaylord had been a free man where most of us others in the Brigade had been slaves. He often crowed about his foregoing self-rule, much as he did about his erstwhile trade as a roving merchandiser; he thought this stamped him as special. Colonel Draper seemed to see it likewise, lauding the man's enterprising spirit, but I knew cannon fodder to be more to the mark. We sergeants took it upon ourselves to posit a peck of buck into the ones like Gaylord. He come in a puppy, but mister, he would leave a dog.

Fields told Gaylord, "We done paraded and hup-twoed and about-faced, and now the general has procured our company Springfields enough to take the field. We will put them rifles to use."

They were Harper's Ferry muskets, actually, not Springfields, manufactured at the arsenal where old John Brown had made his raid. I'd overheard the general telling Draper this. Though he'd been able to procure only enough rifles for one company, he'd made a point that it be this particular model, liking the intimation of it.

"It ain't that, Corporal—" Gaylord was saying, looking at his feet, when Hews jumped in.

"That ain't what we come up about. It's just all the hushedness behind this business."

I was a young-looking twenty-one, or so I was told, but Miles Hews made me seem a right grandpappy. He was seventeen, maybe, and everything about him was long, so much so that his pant cuffs only reached his ankles and the knobs of his wrists showed below the ends of his sleeves. He'd directed his words at me, their sergeant, rather than at Fields, my adjutant, and I could see that he was antsy like Gaylord. This was not Hews's natural bearing.

I dead-on faced him a pause before cutting into the three of them. "We will do what we're told and do it well, by God! The general elected Company F for this sortie because we've got bottom and we've got grit."

Excerpted from Black Cloud Rising copyright © 2022 David Wright Faladé. Used by permission of Atlantic Monthly Press, an imprint of Grove Atlantic, Inc. All rights reserved.