The novel is set during Reconstruction (1865-1877), a turbulent period of political and social upheaval following the Civil War. For newly freed African Americans, this era offered a brief but deep hope of economic independence. In March 1865, Congress established the US Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned Lands. Also known as the Freedmen’s Bureau, this organization was responsible for ensuring that the nation’s over 3.5 million formerly enslaved people received what they “needed to live as free citizens, including land, family, education, safety and justice” (“The Freedmen’s Bureau: New Beginnings for Recently Freed African Americans.” National Museum of African American History & Culture). In addition to establishing schools, hospitals, and orphanages for impoverished Black and white citizens, the Freedmen’s Bureau also issued the titular promise of granting families in need “forty acres and a mule” (56).

The idea originated from General William T. Sherman’s Special Field Order No. 15 in January 1865, which set aside 400,000 acres of coastal land in South Carolina, Georgia, and Florida for settlement by Black families. The policy was bolstered in July by the Freedmen’s Bureau’s Circular 13. However, this promise was quickly broken. After Abraham Lincoln’s assassination, Andrew Johnson became president, issued widespread pardons to former Confederate landowners, and ordered the land returned. The Freedmen’s Bureau then issued Circular 15 in September 1865, formalizing this reversal and forcing tens of thousands of freed people off the land they had begun to farm. As a result, “all but 1,565” of the 40,000 African Americans who received property under Circular 13 lost their land (129). This historical betrayal is the central conflict driving the plot, as Pascal and Gideon’s dream of owning Green Gloryland is ultimately destroyed by this policy change. At the same time, Southern states enacted restrictive “Black Codes” in 1865 and 1866. These laws aimed to control the labor of freed people through measures like vagrancy statutes, which made it a crime to be unemployed. Those arrested could be forced into unpaid labor, often for their former enslavers, a system known as convict leasing. The Reconstruction era officially ended in 1877 when President Rutherford B. Hayes withdrew Northern intervention, which led to escalated civil-rights abuses against African Americans. This context explains the constant danger that the characters face and the coercive power of the work contracts that they’re forced to sign.