On Freedom Road
Bicycle Explorations and Reckonings on the Underground Railroad
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- £14.99
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- £14.99
Publisher Description
A thoughtful and illuminating bicycle journey along the Underground Railroad by a climate scientist seeking to engage with American history.
The traces of the Underground Railroad hide in plain sight: a great church in Philadelphia; a humble old house backing up to the New Jersey Turnpike; an industrial outbuilding in Ohio. Over the course of four years, David Goodrich rode his bicycle 3,000 miles east of the Mississippi to travel the routes of the Underground Railroad and delve into the history and stories in the places where they happened.
He followed the most famous of conductors, Harriet Tubman, from where she was enslaved in Maryland, on the eastern shore, all the way to her family sanctuary at a tiny chapel in Ontario, Canada. Travelling South, he rode from New Orleans, where the enslaved were bought and sold, through Mississippi and the heart of the Delta Blues. As we pedal along with him, Goodrich brings us to the Borderland along the Ohio River, a kind of no-mans-land between North and South in the years before the Civil War. Here, slave hunters roamed both banks of the river, trying to catch people as they fled for freedom. We travel to Oberlin, Ohio, a town that staunchly defended freedom seekers, embodied in the life of Lewis Leary, who was lost in the fires of Harpers Ferry, but his spirit was reborn in the Harlem Renaissance.
On Freedom Road enables us to see familiar places—New York and Philadelphia, New Orleans and Buffalo—in a very different light: from the vantage point of desperate people seeking to outrun the reach of slavery. Join in this journey to find the heroes and stories, both known and hidden, of the Underground Railroad.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Climate scientist Goodrich (A Voyage Across an Ancient Ocean) documents his bike rides along "routes of the Underground Railroad" in this illuminating blend of history and travelogue. Aiming to "get closer to the people who walked these paths, and to their descendants," Goodrich begins by following Harriet Tubman's route from Maryland's Eastern Shore to Ontario, Canada. Along the way, Goodrich unearths moments of historical significance in places as unlikely as an eyebrow threading salon in lower Manhattan; formerly the offices the American Anti-Slavery Society, it was where Tubman once sought funds to help bring her parents north. Bicycling north along the Mississippi River from New Orleans, Goodrich documents the horrors of the "Second Middle Passage" that rerouted enslaved people from declining tobacco plantations in Maryland and Virginia to cotton plantations in the Deep South. Elsewhere, he relates the stories of Josiah Henson, whose published account of his life in slavery and 1830 escape from a Kentucky plantation inspired Uncle Tom's Cabin, and abolitionist Lewis Leary, who was mortally wounded during John Brown's raid on Harpers Ferry. Throughout, Goodrich reveals how slavery is remembered and misremembered in America, and makes a convincing case that "national trauma, like a wound, tends to heal when it's exposed to air." It's a harrowing yet inspirational ride. Photos.
