After the surrender at Appomattox, the nation was reborn, but not without scars. Slavery — the institution that had defined the South — was outlawed, and four million men, women, and children were freed from a lifetime of bondage. Yet freedom was often freedom to the wind, to the wolves, and to the wilderness. Into this fractured world wanders Dick Charlie, a carefree, naïve carpetbagger from the North, convinced he can strike it rich by snapping up sharecropping farms and investing in the booming textile mills of the Carolinas. He believes he has solved the “race question” in his head — that money can smooth over anything — until he collides with the brutal truth: in the South, race trumps profit every time.