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A review of a novel based on a spiritual, about a black Civil War regiment, titled Where I'm Bound.

"With a gospel song in his heart, U Albany professor Allen Ballard uses a rousing adventure story to explore the Civil War from an African-American perspective....Published by Simon & Schuster, Ballard's Where I'm Bound is a swift-moving narrative about a black cavalry regiment during the Civil War. The story focuses mostly on the exploits of an escaped slave who joins the regiment, a daring man in battle who also attempts to find and reunite his scattered family during the last months of the war.... The black cavalry regiment at the heart of the novel isn't fictional: the 3rd United States Colored Cavalry really existed. In fact, the North had five black cavalry regiments; 10 percent of the Union troops were African-Americans, and by the end of the war, says Ballard, that figure had risen to 20 percent. Ballard is a professor at the University at Albany, where he teaches history and African-American studies. He's a Phi Beta Kappa graduate of Kenyon College, holder of a Ph.D. in government from Harvard University, and the author of two highly regarded nonfiction works on the African-American experience....

Above all, his book has songs. Songs are how the people in this novel express their deepest emotions; their songs bear the burden of their lives. "I've sometimes told kids in my classes if you want to hear African-American history, listen to the music," Ballard says. "If you want to hear what slavery was like, then you have to know the music." The author was born into a family filled with music, and one of his earliest memories is of song. "My grandmother used to iron clothes and she'd just be singing these songs, these beautiful songs, and I'm 3 years old, holding on to the legs of the ironing board, listening to my grandmother sing."

His parents were "achieving folk," he says, college-educated and cultured. "My father's family had great musicians, well trained not only classically but also trained in that beautiful rhythm, that beautiful, melodic, powerful rhythm of spirituals. And to hear my aunts play the piano was like hearing a full orchestra."