WHERE THE RESILIENT GROW
A Trilogy by Rick H. Langley
A fictional story based on true family history.
You always find the strength to get back up. That is true resilience.
- MULTIGENERATIONAL HISTORICAL FICTION
- THREE VOLUMES
- 212 YEARS
Two things in this story refuse to die. One is an orange tree. The other is a boy.
In 1814 a wagon caravan leaves Savannah for the wilderness of La Florida. A preacher called Parson Brown and his wife, Meriabe. Seventeen freed slaves. A Romani family guided by visions, their lineage tied to the Salem witch trials. And a Chinese girl who has sailed halfway around the world carrying an orange seedling.
The seedling was her grandmother’s parting gift, taken from an enchanted garden high in the mountains that the women of her family had tended for thousands of years. Wherever it is planted, her grandmother told her, it will bring health, happiness and prosperity. The girl loses her parents at sea. She does not lose the seedling.
The Seminole attack the caravan on the trail and try to kill every soul in it. The seedling goes into the ground anyway. Two hundred years later the descendants of those same Seminole stand shoulder to shoulder with this family to protect what grew from it. Enemies became sacred friends. That is the shape of the whole story.
WHAT THEY LIVE THROUGH
The Indian wars. The Civil War. Prohibition. The Great Depression. Two world wars. One family holding one piece of Florida ground through every one of them — and out of that single seedling, a citrus company called SunBright that survives it all.
AND THEN THERE IS LUCAS
In the 1970s a nine-year-old boy named Lucas Langford, a senator’s son, starts taking his own beating. Isolation. Exposure. Exile. A fortune made and a life that still is not whole. Life knocks him down the way it knocked down every generation before him, and every time, he finds the strength to get back up.
That is not an accident of character. It is what he comes from. What the seedling was to that grove, Lucas is to this family: strong stock, planted in hard ground, still standing after everything that should have killed it. The reader follows him from a boy who understands none of it to a grown man who finally does.
HOW IT IS BUILT
Two timelines run side by side across all three volumes. One carries the caravan and the generations that come after it, from 1814 forward. The other carries Lucas, from the 1970s to the present day. They are the same story told twice, two hundred years apart, and they meet at the end.
BASED ON A TRUE FAMILY
Parson Brown is real. The story of the Parson Brown orange is real. The Langfords are real. Lucas is real. What happens to them in between is the novel.
PRINCIPAL CHARACTERS
PARSON BROWN
The preacher who leads the caravan into La Florida. Real: the author’s own fourth-great-grandfather, and the name still carried by one of the oranges that built the Florida citrus business.
MERIABE
Parson Brown’s wife. She survived a massacre that killed her entire family, and she walks into the wilderness beside him anyway.
DIA
The Chinese girl who sails from her homeland with the seedling and loses her parents at sea. What she plants in 1815 outlives everyone in this book.
WILLIAM
A slave whose strength and loyalty are vital to the caravan’s survival, and who becomes the son Parson Brown and Meriabe never had.
NAOMI
Descended from China and now of the Romani, she carries a gift, and she was sent to protect the seedling.
LUCAS LANGFORD
A senator’s son, nine years old when we meet him, carrying a legacy nobody has explained to him. The modern thread is his.