In the novel’s third section, the City family’s arrival at their 40 acres marks a shift from abstract hope to a tangible, almost unbelievable reality. After a journey fraught with Pascal’s anxiety about infertile land, the discovery of a beautiful meadow blanketed in grass and wildflowers feels like a divine reward to the characters. The overwhelming moment overwhelms Gideon with emotion: “It can’t be the truth. I will not hold this farm to my heart and lose my heart in pain” (69). His fear reveals the psychological weight of daring to hope after the trauma of enslavement. His inability to accept the farm as real until Pascal reads the title aloud emphasizes the power of legal documentation in validating a new identity as landowner and citizen. This scene is steeped in the cultural framework of the Exodus narrative, casting the family’s journey as a pilgrimage to a promised land and their arrival as a Jubilee moment. The immediate plans for burning the fields and building a house signify their active claiming of this new life, a process through which they begin to claim a sense of worth and agency that is an important component of Freedom as an Internal Reality.

As the family establishes their farm, their interactions with neighbors reveal that survival in the postwar South depends on collective action and mutual support. The initial encounters with other poor white and Black families all searching for land establish a shared landscape of struggle and dislocation. This dynamic is fully realized when Pascal discovers that the Bibb family has been devastated by typhoid fever. The City family’s response is immediate and comprehensive: Emmanuel cooks for the sick, the men help Mr. Bibb bury his dead sons, and their entire community later joins to prepare the Bibbs’ field for planting. This alliance, born of shared vulnerability and compassion, exemplifies Solidarity as the Path to Survival. Their cooperation recognizes the necessity of interdependence in a hostile environment where disease and deprivation don’t discriminate. This bond extends to the next generation, as the Bibb children join the City children on their daily walk to school, forming a small, integrated community focused on building a better future together.

The construction of the farmhouse illustrates the family’s aspirations and the constant peril they face. Mr. Freedman’s resourceful engineering of pieces of abandoned houses into a unique, eight-sided home transforms the refuse of the old order into a foundation for the new. The family’s immense pride in their farmhouse is palpable; they see it as a mark of respectability that causes even white people in carriages to stop and stare. However, this sign of progress is built alongside a stark emblem of fear, the hidden escape tunnel. Mr. Freedman’s insistence that he “ain’t building no house for colored people that don’t have as many ways to escape as there be people inside” is a chilling acknowledgment that their dream is fragile and constantly under threat of violence (73). This duality encapsulates the precariousness of Black life during Reconstruction, where the creation of a home must occur simultaneously with the preparation for its potential destruction. 

The symbol of the Ghost Tree develops alongside the family’s new life, representing the land’s deep history. Initially a landmark to guide them, the tree quickly becomes a central feature of their domestic world. Gideon is fascinated by it, and after he’s bitten by fleas in the den beneath its roots, Gladness proves her skill as a healer, reinforcing the land’s connection to both danger and sustenance. Later, Gideon and Gladness’s quiet evening conversations under its branches signify the growth of their relationship and the establishment of a peaceful routine. For Pascal, the tree contrasts sharply with the one on the plantation where he was whipped, transforming a site of past trauma into one of present wonder and future promise. In addition, Gideon’s discovery of a hacked-out space in one of the roots foreshadows the discovery of the gold coins, a key development in the next section. 

The hope embodied by the farm and the school is violently challenged at the Union League meeting, where political promises collide with brutal realities. Gideon’s outrage upon learning of the Black Codes, which he declares is “slavery all over again” (89), captures the core of The Betrayal of Reconstruction Promises. These laws represent a systemic effort to re-impose a system of forced labor on freed people through vagrancy statutes and coercive contracts. While Gideon’s Sherman Land title offers him a thin shield of protection, others are tricked and forced onto wagons, their freedom stripped away by legal chicanery. The attack on the integrated schoolhouse shatters any illusion of safety through political organization. Pascal’s recognition of the arsonist as a night rider he saw in South Carolina confirms that this is a coordinated campaign of terror. The section ends with the family fleeing, their hard-won dream now under direct assault from the resurgent forces of the old South.