My grandfather was a big man.

Papa Joe stood more than six and a half feet tall, his shoulders so broad from fifty years of blacksmithing that any coat he wore seemed an uncomfortable fit. Even when he was in his seventies and beginning to complain of arthritis, his arms were hard and corded, his skillet-sized hands still remarkably strong. Beneath a sprinkling of white hair, his face was weathered and dark, with a wide nose and lips so full they looked as if they had been carved from volcanic rock. But it is his eyes I remember most. They were the deepest, wisest eyes I have ever seen, and they glittered like diamonds in the night sky. My grandfather was a dreamer, you see, a man who gazed into the future as easily as most men look back at the past. And he was in the perfect place to dream—America, where some dream of riches, others dream of freedom, and a select few dream of doing wondrous things.

            In another time and another skin, he might have been a teacher or a college professor. He read more books than anyone I have ever known. And he remembered what he read, quoting not just long passages of Scripture with the skill of a practiced preacher but also Shakespeare and Douglass, Dunbar and Dickens, Don Quixote, Williams’ History of the Negro Race in America, dime novels about the Wild West, Jules Verne, astronomy books, even pieces he had read twenty or thirty years past. He would have been wonderful in a classroom, a great bear of a man holding students enthralled with his deep voice and tireless stories. Instead, he was a blacksmith successful enough to own his own carriage, an ex-slave who somehow had acquired the documents of free birth—which I still keep in the family Bible. To the world that never saw him gazing at the stars or reading in his favorite chair or urging his son and grandsons to stand tall, my grandfather was a simple man. To my brother Will and me he was an inspiration. He made dreamers of us both.

            —From the unpublished manuscript Flight of the Blackbird by Augustus Lockhart

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“BLACKBIRD RISING is a daring and ingenious book, richly imagined and vividly told. Gary Earl Ross gets it all right: the tang and texture of Buffalo at the turn of the last century; the deep divisions and complex bonds of race and brotherhood; the danger and exhilaration felt by those who have the sky in their blood. This is a deeply moving and memorable story of our longing for freedom and for flight; it is a celebration of the capacity of the human spirit and imagination, even in unpromising and unlikely circumstances, to soar.”

--Mick Cochrane, author of SPORT and THE GIRL WHO THREW BUTTERFLIES

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"Against the backdrop of segregation, deadly competition, and an assassination attempt set in Buffalo, New York, BLACKBIRD RISING poises the reader for flight. The challenges of lifting an unlikely aircraft and pilot to unparalleled heights depend on the winds of hope." 

"BLACKBIRD RISING plunges you in the middle of 1901 Buffalo, a prosperous city roaring into the future, full of light, excitement, and possibility--the sky's the limit, and the airplane is being born. Blending history and fiction seamlessly, Ross tells a fine tale of creativity, suspense, greed, murder, fate, and hope thwarted and regained. BLACKBIRD RISING makes you feel as if you were there and, more than a century later, helps you remember the price of progress, mourn the casualties, and continue to hope."

--Gabrielle Burton, author of SEARCHING FOR  TAMSEN DONNER  and HEARTBREAK HOTEL

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“Brilliant and moving, Gary Earl Ross’s BLACKBIRD RISING  paints a panorama of a deeply divided society with stunning detail, wisdom, and a language so achingly beautiful you want to return to it again and again. This is a novel for everyone who has ever had a dream and tried to realize it against impossible odds. Ross is a master of suspense, his novel a tour de force!

 --Gunilla Theander Kester, author of WRITING THE SUBJECT  and  TIME OF SAND AND TEETH.