Runaway Haley

Michael Haley crossed from Ireland hoping to build a better future in America, but the years that followed brought grinding labor, scarcity, war, and disease. His children were drawn into those hardships alongside him, and later endured further mistreatment from others during Reconstruction.

In 1958, a letter from a distant uncle reached Ruby Haley. It recounted the lives of her father, Robert, and his sister, Fannie, and traced the long and unlikely path their family had traveled over the decades.

Drawing on the real lives of these ancestors, along with letters, official records, and old newspaper clippings, the author imagines how two generations of the Haley family may have lived in the Deep South in earlier centuries.