Virgil Moody decides that he never wants to own slaves like his father so while he is visiting his father's plantation he meets Annie, a defiant slave. He decides to take her away with him convinced he is rescuing her from a life of brutality. He finds out she is pregnant and decides to raise the child as his own son. What follows is an often painful and thoughtful journey through Virgil's trying to make up for the past.
I found the novel hard to read at times and very thought provoking but in the end I was glad I read it. The key issue throughout the novel is the question as to how do we make peace with the past and our own sins, and how can we be sure that we are doing the right thing?

Set in the antebellum period, Up from Freedom is a unique slave narrative in that it is written from the perspective of a white man, Virgil Moody. Born into a family of slave owners, Moody vows to never be like his father and to never own slaves. The novel takes place over two years, from May 1848 to November 1850, and readers watch as he experiences tragedy, questions his own assumptions, reconciles his past with his future, and, ultimately, learns what it means to be the man he always wanted to be. This book paints a stark picture of the traumas of slavery, the arbitrary and meaningless nature in which race was defined, and the consequences of these racial divisions.

This story is made even more special after reading the Author’s Note, in which the author reveals that although this is a work of fiction, it is based on his own family history. In using their names and telling their story, Grady has created a poignant novel which reflects upon history while also offering glimmering contemporary truths. It is not hard to apply the following quote to current attitudes in the United States surrounding immigration and refugees, nor is it hard to relate to the second quote (Disclaimer: quotes are from the final, published version of the novel).

“Change came slowly in small places, where townspeople were more inclined to see change as a threat. If slavery were to hold out anywhere, it would be in these small towns and rural areas of America, which was pretty much what the South consisted of.”

“The news exerted a morbid fascination of him. Whenever he thought things were as bad as they could get, the next day they got worse.”

All in all, I truly enjoyed this novel and look forward to picking up some of Grady’s other work in the future.

Drawing on research into his mixed-race family history, which he unexpectedly discovered as an adult, Grady evokes the complicated psychological terrain of antebellum America. He shows how simply living in this time and place forces everyone into a culture built around slavery’s existence, and how denying people agency causes harm regardless of intentions. Opening in 1848, the story follows farmer Virgil Moody as he tries to right a dreadful wrong and awakens to the mindset that prompted his original choice.

Born the son of a Georgia plantation owner, Moody had fled westward with a young enslaved woman, Annie, to save her from a cruel overseer. Along with the child Annie was carrying, they settled first in New Orleans and then along the Rio Brazos in Texas, where slavery had expanded following the recent war with Mexico. Moody abhors slavery, thinking of Annie and her son Lucas as his family, and is shocked to realize they feel differently. When Lucas falls in love with a young woman owned by a neighbor, devastating events occur, spurring Moody across the South and Midwest in search of Lucas.

Across these diverse landscapes and waterways, he encounters many well-realized characters, like a Quaker widow named Rachel and a sympathetic German-born storeowner, Solomon Kästchen, who works with the Underground Railroad. “Indiana is, generally speaking, antislavery, but it is also antislave,” Kästchen tells him, succinctly illustrating people’s complicity in a system they are supposedly against.

Along the way, Moody grows increasingly fond of Tamsey Lewis, a freedwoman he meets along with her family. Their story, both heartrending and inspirational, culminates in a riveting courtroom scene. This is a timely novel about the deep roots of America’s racial divide, strong in the eloquent truth expressed in individual sentences and in its overall storytelling power.

(from the Historical Novels Review, November 2018)

I didn’t know until I read the author’s note at the end how personal this story was to him and that made it all the more meaningful. At 47, Wayne Grady discovered that he was half African Canadian. As he traced his family back to 1835, he uncovers information of a trial involving his great-great-grandparents focusing on whether they were black or white. Later in the novel, this trial comes to life. The story, though begins with Virgil Moody, son of a Georgia plantation owner who thinks differently than his father. “As a younger man he’d vowed he would never own slaves, never be like his father....” He leaves Savannah, taking with him one of his father’s slaves, a young woman named Anne to free her and save her from further abuse. They make a life together raising Lucas, the son she was pregnant with before they left. Virgil goes off to the Mexican-American War and returns in 1848 with guilt and regret over things that happened. He returns to find Lucas, a man wanting to forge his own life with a slave woman from a nearby plantation.

The novel is a journey, both literally and emotionally for Virgil as he feels responsible for Lucas running and for Anne’s fate in the face of what may happen to Lucas. Virgil takes us to many places across the country from Savannah to New Orleans to Galveston to Indiana and Chattanooga, Louisville and other cities as he sets out to find Lucas and seek redemption for his deeds and his father’s. Along the way he meets and connects with Rachel, a Quaker woman who saves his life. Helping runaways along the way with Rachel and the twins Tim’n’Tom and then on his own bringing fugitives to Solomon Kastchens and others who put themselves in danger moving runaway slaves to freedom. He meets and helps a black family, helping them through a trial - should a black person be able to marry a person assumed to be white. Horrible and racist arguments, chilling in fact. These people are the author’s family. While I found this slow at times, the novel provides a picture of the country in these years, in these various places that Virgil travels to and in the opposing sentiments and beliefs about slavery. A powerful story and so much more poignant that this is based on the author’s family. There is much to reflect on here - the journey of a man seeking redemption and the journey of these slaves to freedom.

I received an advanced copy of this book from Penguin Random House Canada through NetGalley.

***Available in stores today!!***
3.5 stars

Typically historical fiction novels set during antebellum times are told from the perspective of the slave escaping to freedom. In <b>Up From Freedom</b>, our protagonist is the reluctant slaveholder Virgil Moody. While visiting his father's plantation, he meets the defiant young Annie. Assured that he is saving her from a brutal life he steals her away to New Orleans. When he discovers her pregnancy he decides to raise the child as his own. In his mind he and Annie are like husband and wife and Lucas their son. As the novel progresses he is forced to examine the ways in which he is complicit with the institution of slavery. Was Annie with him all these years of her own accord or did she feel as if she had no other choice? Is he Lucas' father or his master? This internal struggle remains with Moody as he journeys north and works alongside Quakers and abolitionists.

<b>Up From Freedom</b> examines the concepts of freedom from both that of the oppressed and the oppressor and looks at how racist ideologies have historically been implemented in the court room. Is it enough to be released from the shackles of slavery? What happens after the slave reaches freedom? Perhaps the most captivating part of the book was the trial against Leason and Sarah Lewis for the crime of fornication. Based on the real life trial of the author's great-great-grandparents it begs the question - <i>what is the biological basis for race?</i>

Wayne Grady is a Canadian author of both fiction and non-fiction. His first novel, <b>Emancipation Day</b> is also in part autobiographical. Nominated for the Scotiabank Giller Prize in 2013, this book centers around a young man who passes for white and the impact this denial has on those closest to him.

<i>Thanks to NetGalley, Doubleday Canada and Wayne Grady for an ARC in exchange for an honest review.</i>

Virgil Moody “vowed he would never own slaves, never be like his father” but when he left home “he’d taken Annie [a house slave] from his father’s plantation.” Moody discovered that Annie was pregnant but he comes to think of her and her son Lucas as his family. This family is broken apart when Lucas falls in love with a slave belonging to their neighbour and flees with her. Virgil sets out to find him, enroute encountering people with differing attitudes to slavery. Eventually, he finds himself in Freedom, Indiana, where he meets Tamsey and her family who are trying to escape the reach of the Fugitive Slave Act.

Though Virgil is searching for Lucas, his journey is very much a journey of self-discovery. At the beginning he fails to understand that his actions make him complicit in slavery. He claims to abhor slavery, but he fights on the side of Texas in the Mexican-American War knowing that “Texans were fighting for slavery.” He convinces himself that he saved Annie from his father’s cruelty but he never asked her if she wanted to come with him. He claims that he knows Annie stayed with him because she wanted to “’because she didn’t leave’.” Virgil thinks “of Annie as his wife and Lucas as their son” but “Annie hadn’t been as comfortable with that as he was [because] the consequences for her were far greater than they were for him.” Virgil tells Lucas, “’I always raised you like a son’” but Lucas points out, “’Did you? Wouldn’t you have sent your son to school?’” At one point, Annie asks Virgil to talk to Lucas but Virgil replies, “’He’s your son’” and she responds with “’But he your slave!’” And Virgil never actually frees them!

Gradually, Virgil comes to realize that he could have done more. When Annie and Lucas have to stay in steerage, “suffocated below on straw mats and were fed gruel,” aboard a steamer while he “slept comfortably in his cabin, on clean sheets and in fresh air,” he counts himself “virtuous for having noticed [Annie’s] anger, thinking she would appreciate the difference between his concern and the other passengers’ lack of it. Annie and Lucas were more to him than slaves: wasn’t he a fine chap? . . . But what could he have done? More.” Virgil comes to see his selfishness, to see that he had blindly assumed “that doing what was good for him was good for everyone else concerned.” He admits “He was only generous when it suited him. He transported fugitives only because he thought they might help him find Lucas. And he didn’t even want to find Lucas for Lucas’s sake, but for his own. For forgiveness.”

It is Tamsey who forces Virgil “to admit to himself what he was. A white man in a world that was increasingly determined by the consequences of slavery. It was time for him to stop acting surprised and indignant whenever anyone suggested to him that the reason he hadn’t freed Annie or Lucas was that he had liked it that their relationship was based on ownership, that that was the way he’d been raised, and, hate it though he professed he did, it was the relationship he understood and felt most comfortable with.” Then, when given an opportunity, he sets out to redeem himself.

The concept of freedom is examined in the novel. Virgil tells Lucas, “’You [and your mother] always been free here” but obviously Anne and Lucas don’t feel that way. A man Virgil encounters tells him “’our Northern states are proud of the fact that their constitutions do not allow slavery. No, the workers on these industrious projects are free blacks – a designation that usually signifies a man is free from slavery, but that here has come to mean also a man who works for free. Or for wages so low that he can’t afford to do anything about his situation.” Even freed slaves with “free papers” fear fugitive catchers, especially with the passing of the Fugitive Slave Act: “’I show our papers to catchers, you think they leave us alone?’” And Virgil can never be truly free of his past.
Set between May 1848 and November 1850, the novel examines racial turmoil in the United States at that time, a turmoil that erupted in the American Civil War a decade later. But the novel is relevant to today. Virgil’s father taught him that “’Nothing is forgiven . . . Some things are forgotten, but damn few. And nothing is every forgiven’” and Virgil realizes that “his father had been right, that forgiveness meant wiping the record clean and that could never happen.” Slavery cannot be wiped clean and so not truly forgiven but perhaps, as one character says, “’It not too late to seek a better world’”?

There is a trial towards the end of the novel that has a twist I never expected but is apparently based on an actual case involving the author’s great-great-grandparents. It emphasizes that the terms “black” and “white” are in many ways meaningless and only labels which can be used/misused to serve one’s purposes. Can any of us really call ourselves one or the other?

This is an excellent novel which I highly recommend. It has a compelling plot and a complex character who learns much about the world and himself. The book will leave readers asking questions about their own behaviour.

Note: I received a digital galley of this book from the publisher via NetGalley.

I received this from netgalley.com in exchange for a review.

Virgil Moody vowed he would never be like his father, he would never own slaves. A well told Epic story of a man's struggle to do what's right in a society that says you are wrong.

Good story!

4☆

Up From Freedom, is the second book I recently read that feels epic surrounding the original sin of slavery. This one tells the tale of Virgil Moody and his reluctance to be a master of any human. “As a younger man he’d vowed he would never own slaves, never be like his father, but when he moved from Savannah to New Orleans, he’d taken Annie from his father’s plantation.”

And that’s taken, like not buying or even asking for permission, taken as in ‘freeing. You see Moody is the son of a slaver, and despite his best intentions, he couldn’t completely avoid the sordid business of enslaving human beings. This novel is skilled at asking the tough questions and presenting the uneasy choices, forcing the reader to engage beyond the level of entertainment. Moody is a man of convictions and contradictions, I suppose no different than most human beings. Despite his abhorrence for slavery he fought on the side of Texas, when it was still a part of Mexico, knowing full well, Texas would become a slave state and it did.

He has always been ambivalent about his father’s plantation and was sullied about the association with slavery. He is drawn as an empathetic character but one who often fails to see how his own actions makes him complicit in the slavery operation. When he is afforded an opportunity to leave the Plantegenet plantation, he does and takes Annie with him along with her two-year-old son, Lucas. Moody treats Annie more as wife and Lucas as son, then bondsmen. This isn’t problematic in New Orleans, but when he moves to Texas, things change.

“In New Orleans, he and Annie had lived together openly in the Quarter, let anyone think what they would. They’d had to be more careful in Texas, where every white farmer was a slaveholder and no one felt compelled by Mexican law to give up their slaves. Polk’s war might have been about territory, but Texans were fighting for slavery. Slavery was their religion; the Mexican War had been a religious war. But within their own house, Moody had gone on thinking of Annie as his wife and Lucas as their son.”

He never knew how to exactly frame their arrangement, and Annie never pushed for any clarity on the issue. This left Moody perturbed, because he certainly didn’t want Annie to see him as “Massa” although essentially that is what he was to both Annie and Lucas. When Lucas wants to take up with Benah, a slave girl from a nearby plantation, Moody attempts to buy Benah in order to free her, but the mean Mr. Millican is dead set against that and counters with an offer to buy Lucas. Of course Moody quickly squashes that idea and tells Lucas there is nothing that can be done. Upon hearing this, Lucas storms out and Moody neglects to go after him, setting up his regret and search for Moody throughout the balance of the novel.

Moody’s disappearance is devastating for his mother Annie, and Moody broods over his mistake. His search for Lucas takes him to many places and puts him in strange situations. He spends some time with a Quaker woman in Tennessee, and hears some things that help challenge his mind on the way he handled Annie and Lucas; further on, he meets a former enslaved family that are free, but not paper free, And the precariousness of being Black during slave times is keenly felt by Grady’s writing. Because rather slave or free, you could be kidnapped and sold into slavery by the whim of any white man depending on their mood of any day.

“If slavery was to be defeated, religion would have to be defeated first. And that would have to be done by men and women of conscience.”

Moody, once again finds himself in a relationship with a free-not-free woman, Tamsey Lewis and this leads to some problems and challenges including a court case involving her son and his wife that would be funny if it wasn’t so sad. Mr. Grady keeps us guessing never letting the story become bland and predictable. Elements of this story are based in some of the author’s actual family history. Overall, a well done effort. It’s not easy to keep readers enthralled over territory that has been vastly explored in fiction but Wayne Grady does with minimal hiccups. He includes some challenging questions at the end of the book, which help you to reflect on what you’ve just read in a thoughtful manner. Thanks to Doubleday Canada and Netgalley for an advanced DRC. Book will drop on Aug.14, 2018.

Virgil Moody, the son of a Savannah slaveholder, doesn't believe in slavery and yet he somehow becomes the owner of two slaves: Annie, the woman he loves, and Lucas, the boy he consider a son. When Lucas disappears, Virgil follows him north, desperate to right the great wrong he has committed. The novel follows Virgil on his journey as he becomes involved with the underground railroad and meets a family of former slaves who might present an opportunity for him to achieve redemption. "Up From Freedom" is a fascinating story based on the author's own family history.