What The Ground Remembers

**Title: ** *What the Ground Remembers* **Genre: ** Historical Fiction / Civil War / Linked Novellas / Southern Literary Fiction On the same July 4, 1863 - the day Vicksburg fell - two Confederate soldiers from two entirely unconnected Southern families met two very different fates hundreds of miles apart. *What the Ground Remembers* tells both stories in full: Benjamin Wellington Odom's wounded, doomed walk home from Vicksburg, and Ellsberry Layne's two-year survival through Federal prison after the disaster at Helena. Neither man would live to know that his bloodline was destined to meet the other's until, a generation later, Ellsberry's daughter married Benjamin's son, and their child became the grandfather the author never met, but has spent years researching, tracing, and finally, in this book, bringing home. Built from real family documents, Confederate service records, and the author's own visits to the battlefields and cemeteries where this family's history is lost to time.