Book overview
The history books told him what happened. The watch showed him the truth.
Bentley Rogers McGee has grown up in a house where history is dinner-table conversation. His father is an HBCU history professor. His mother teaches AP U.S. History. Bentley can tell you exactly why the Emancipation Proclamation didn't actually free anyone the day it was signed, and he can do it before breakfast.
But on the morning of his thirteenth birthday, his grandmother Loretta places an old brass pocket watch in his hands - and everything Bentley thought he knew becomes something he can feel.
Now Bentley can travel back to the moments that shaped a nation. He lands in Galveston, Texas on June 19, 1865 - Juneteenth - and stands beside a man named Samuel as freedom is announced, late, hard-won, and more complicated than any textbook dared explain. He witnesses the joy. He witnesses the fear underneath the joy. He witnesses the enormous, terrifying question that comes after the word free: now what?
Bentley is a Witness. He cannot change what happened. But he can carry it forward.
Back in the present, his friend Zora writes everything down in a notebook she calls Things Bentley Saw That History Forgot, while his friend Marcus asks the question that changes everything: Carry it forward where? The answer leads them from their neighborhood to a Houston church to a sixty-year-old box in a Galveston archive - and to a document that has been waiting for them since 1865.
The Last Lash and the First Freedom is the first book in The Amazing Adventures of Bentley Rogers McGee - a five-book series that takes one boy across the moments that made America, and asks what it means to truly witness history rather than simply remember it.
