Born on Emancipation Day, 1863, to a sharecropping family of African and Indian blood, Elijah Yancy never lived as a slave, but his self-image as a free person is at war with his surroundings: Spartanburg, South Carolina in the Reconstructed South. Exiled for his own survival, Elijah walks west to the Nebraska plains and, like many other rootless young black men of the era, joins the US cavalry to become a 'buffalo soldier'...