The Held Land

About the Novel

Ezekiel Washington walks off his land in July 1872 with nothing but his discharge papers and the clothes on his back. A fraudulent contest, perjured testimony, and a hearing conducted by men who had already decided the outcome have taken everything he built. He disappears from the historical record, one of thousands of Black landowners dispossessed through mechanisms designed to strip them of the wealth they had earned.

Eighteen years later, a Bohemian immigrant family named Shimerda purchases that same land at auction. They find a soddie already standing, a well already dug, a windbreak already planted. They never learn who built what they inherit. The daughter, Anna, finds a scrap of oilcloth in the soddie wall and keeps it for nearly fifty years without knowing its significance.

In 1993, Marcus Cole arrives at Shimerda Ground Correctional Facility, built on the same quarter-section. Over fifteen years of incarceration, he discovers the story of the man who first claimed the land through the prison chaplain's research. On his last day, he places an index card bearing Ezekiel's name in the soddie wall, returning to the ground what the ground had lost.

The novel culminates in 2026, at a dedication ceremony for a historical marker that finally acknowledges what happened on this land. Three families across 159 years, connected by soil that holds everything: the labor, the loss, the inheritance, and the recognition that comes too late for repair but not too late for witness.

About Fractional Fiction

Fractional Fiction is a literary series that combines classical narrative structures with contemporary scientific research. Each novel uses a public domain literary source as its structural framework while integrating findings from current scholarly domains. The result is fiction that holds contradictions without resolving them, that transforms through knowledge without necessarily healing, and that honors the human need for narrative even when resolution remains impossible.

The Held Land is the fourth novel in the series, following The Dying Grove (mycorrhizal networks and forest consciousness), The Inheritance (transgenerational epigenetics and family secrets), and The Kinship of Strangers (population genetics and identity).

Source Material: My Ántonia by Willa Cather

The novel draws its structure and several characters from Willa Cather's My Ántonia (1918), one of the great American novels of immigrant life on the Nebraska prairie. Cather's Shimerda family becomes the vehicle for exploring what her novel could not see: the Black homesteaders who preceded the European immigrants, who built the soddies and broke the sod and were dispossessed before the Bohemians arrived. The Fractional Fiction methodology asks: Whose labor made the prairie habitable? Whose names were erased so that other names could be written?

Research Domain: Black Land Loss in America

The novel integrates findings from historical and economic research on Black land dispossession. Between 1910 and 1997, Black Americans lost approximately twelve million acres of farmland through fraud, intimidation, discriminatory lending, partition sales, and legal mechanisms designed to strip Black families of generational wealth. The Freedmen's Bureau records, General Land Office files, and county deed records document this systematic theft. Ezekiel Washington is fictional, but the pattern of his dispossession is documented, quantified, and ongoing.

Structural Framework: Three Timelines, One Place

The novel braids three narrative threads across 159 years, all rooted in a single quarter-section of Nebraska prairie. The land itself becomes the protagonist, holding the labor of everyone who worked it, the bones of everyone who died on it, and the memory of everyone who was erased from its official record. The structure asks what it means to own land that was taken, to inherit wealth that was stolen, to build a life on ground that remembers what we have chosen to forget.

Excerpt

The land holds everything.

It holds the bones of the Pawnee who hunted here before the survey lines were drawn. It holds the labor of the man who broke the first sod, who dug the well, who planted the windbreak that still stands. It holds the body of Václav Shimerda, buried at the crossroads because the church would not have him. It holds the footsteps of Anna, who walked this ground for sixty years and never knew whose hands had shaped it before hers.

It holds the years Marcus Cole spent inside the walls that were built on this same quarter-section, the prayers he said in the chapel that stood where the barn once stood, the morning he walked out the gate and did not look back.

The land holds everything. Including what we choose to put back.

About the Author

David Boles is a multidisciplinary creative professional based in New York City with over four decades of experience as an author, dramatist, editor, publisher, and teacher. He holds an MFA from Columbia University, where he trained at the Oscar Hammerstein II Center for Graduate Theatre Studies. He founded David Boles Books Writing and Publishing in 1975.

His work explores the intersection of history, memory, and the stories we tell to make sense of what we inherit. He maintains an extensive web presence including Boles.com, BolesBooks.com, PrairieVoice.com, and HumanMeme.com.

David is a member of the Dramatists Guild, Authors Guild, and PEN America.