Eliza's Freedom Road

February 1, 2011

Gr 4-7-As she turns 12, Eliza is a Virginia house slave, increasingly responsible for the care of the ailing mistress who taught her to read and write. Since Sir sold her mother a year earlier, Eliza has only motherly cook Abbey, the discarded diary Abbey encourages her to write in, and a story quilt her mother made. When the mistress takes Eliza along to stay with family in Maryland, Eliza learns of the Underground Railroad from fellow slaves and a found stack of newspapers containing the serialized Uncle Tom's Cabin. With the help of a shadowy Harriet Tubman herself, Eliza escapes to freedom in Ontario, where by chance she reunites with her mother. Presented as the girl's diary published later by the adult Elizabeth, the narrative suffers from thin characterizations and awkward pacing resulting from sometimes forced pauses to record her mother's stories. While the writing is peppered with salient details of slave life and the times, Eliza experiences little of the brutality and, more important, the difficult choices, fleshed-out relationships, and internal struggles that humanize Patricia McKissack's Clotee in A Picture of Freedom (Scholastic, 1997), Jennifer Armstrong's Bethlehem in Steal Away (Orchard Books, 1992), or Elisa Carbone's real-life Ann Marie Weems in Stealing Freedom (Knopf, 1998). More didactic than authentic, Eliza's story serves as an effective vehicle to relate and contextualize 10 important folktales and Bible stories that were woven through the slave experience, though readers may wish for a more fully realized narrative holding those stories together.-Riva Pollard, Prospect Sierra Middle School, El Cerrito, CA

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