Up From Freedom
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- 10,99 €
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- 10,99 €
Publisher Description
For readers of Colson Whitehead, James McBride, Yaa Gyasi and Lawrence Hill, Up From Freedom is a powerful and emotional novel about the dangers that arise when we stay silent in the face of prejudice or are complicit in its development.
As a young man, Virgil Moody vowed he would never be like his father, he would never own slaves. When he moves from his father's plantation in Savannah to New Orleans, he takes with him Annie, a tiny woman with sharp eyes and a sharper tongue, who he is sure would not survive life on the plantation. She'll be much safer with him, away from his father's cruelty. And when he discovers Annie's pregnancy, already a few months along, he is all the more certain that he made the right decision.
As the years pass, the divide between Moody's assumptions and Annie's reality widens ever further. Moody even comes to think of Annie as his wife and Lucas as their son. Of course, they are not. As Annie reminds him, in moments of anger, she and Moody will never be equal. She and her son are enslaved. When their "family" breaks apart in the most brutal and tragic way, and Lucas flees the only life he's ever known, Moody must ask himself whether he has become the man he never wanted to be--but is he willing to hear the answer?
Stretching from the war-torn banks of the Rio Brazos in Texas to the muddy waters of Freedom, Indiana, Moody travels through a country on the brink of civil war, relentlessly searching for Lucas and slowly reconciling his past sins with his hopes for the future. When he meets Tamsey, a former slave, and her family trying to escape the reach of the Fugitive Slave Act, Moody sees an opportunity for redemption. But the world is on the cusp of momentous change, and though some things may be forgotten, nothing is ever really forgiven.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Grady (Emancipation Day) poses provocative questions about the legacy of slavery in this uneven novel. Virgil Moody doesn't want anything to do with his father, a brutish slaveholder lording over his plantation in Savannah, Ga. When Virgil leaves for New Orleans in the 1840s, he takes Annie, an enslaved woman he is convinced would otherwise face a gruesome fate at his father's hands. A few months after they start their new life, Annie's pregnancy begins to show, but she is hesitant to reveal who fathered her child. Virgil treats her son, Lucas, as his own, and the years pass. As a young man, Lucas falls in love with an enslaved woman and runs away with her, and Annie kills herself. Virgil embarks on a journey across a country to find Lucas, during which he meets Sarah and Leason, a couple facing legal action for an interracial relationship, and a former slave named Tamsey who, with her family, is trying to outrun the Fugitive Slave Act. They offer him a chance to reexamine his own complicity and an opportunity to fight against the system that raised him. The book is sometimes choppy and would have benefited from more fully-developed secondary characters, especially given their roles in launching Virgil's emotional, spiritual, and physical journey. Though thoughtful, the novel lacks the poignancy needed to help Virgil's redemption fully land with the reader.