When Suncara Jackson travels from Tallahassee back to the place she will always call home – the historically Black community of Royal in Central Florida – she sometimes shuts her eyes against the glare of the sun and tries to imagine what it was like.

What was it like for her great-great-grandfather Jim Patterson to make his way in the years after the Civil War from the plantation he was born on in Waycross, Georgia, to Royal, where he would become one of the few newly freed Black Americans granted land by the U.S. government under the Homestead Act of 1862?