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.
