THE BOOK OF DAVIS is a compelling narrative account of the black descendants of white slaveholder and cousin of Jefferson Davis, Ebenezer "Eben" Nelms Davis on his famed 4,000 acre Strawberry Plains Plantation. It brings to light yet another shameful chapter in the American history of five generations of the Davis/Washington family. Using records, original documents, books and personal narratives, including stories from his great-grandmother, author Erik Washington painfully pieces together a family’s desperate struggle to survive the inhumanity of enslavement and Southern aristocratic bigots—including a mulatto Davis family member who passes for white, and marries into the safety and protection of the Confederate Presidency of Jefferson Davis.

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A black family that valiantly fought and died for their freedom and America’s in not only the Civil War, but the brutal aftermath of the Emancipation Proclamation, both World Wars, the ‘Jim Crow’ Era and Mississippi burnings and lynchings.

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Starting from 1813 with “Bastard Thom”, the enslaved "founding father" of the Davis’ Strawberry Plains Plantation to Hollywood, where the author ironically starred in a film about Reconstruction with legend Muhammad Ali and Oscar-nominated actor-writer-singer, Kris Kristofferson, The Book of Davis is a moving and sobering account of a family’s unwavering love and fierce determination to survive—at any cost. Coming Fall 2022.