There is no doubt why this book is entitled Forty Acres and Maybe a Mule. The phrase, first mentioned on page four, is the refrain to the ex-slaves' song of freedom. It appears in practically every chapter as the goal Gideon hopes to achieve, as the dream they attain in Georgia, and as the vision they lose when their farm is confiscated.

Robinet expands facts text books would cover in three or four paragraphs. The entire Forty Acres and Maybe a Mule personifies one family's application of General Sherman's Field Order No. 13. Pascal and Nellie bring the reader along with them into the town where freed slaves are enveloped in the Black Codes and required to sign work contracts.

Robinet chooses three trees to symbolize the effects of the Civil War and Reconstruction on Pascal and his expanded family.

The whipping tree on the plantation, the...