Up From Freedom

October 1, 2018
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.

Starred review from August 1, 2018
All the complexity of race and relationships is laid out in Grady's novel, which is set in the days just before the Civil War. Virgil Moody, son of a plantation owner from Savannah, is strongly against slavery and moves with one of his father's slaves, Annie, to New Orleans and then on to Rio Brazos, Texas. Canadian writer Grady's evocative prose brings to life the parched cotton fields, and his characters are at once understated and powerful. Plot twists guide Moody to Freedom, Indiana, with Tamsey, a former slave, and to the realization that being well-intentioned is not enough when the lives of others are at stake. Grady's historical tale captures all the social turbulence and personal tragedies associated with being enslaved in the South and a freeman in the North. Race is never irrelevant, and liberty is never simple. The extent to which blacks and whites are intertwined is laid out in a brilliant trial scene involving Tamsey's son and his wife. This is a moving and eye-opening reminder of history's deep scars. In the best tradition of Toni Morrison and Colson Whitehead, Grady brings home the truth that there are no simplistic ways to combat and overcome deep-rooted hate and fear.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2018, American Library Association.)