by Kai Thomas
I was very excited to read this, and it did not disappoint. In The Upper Country offers readers a new perspective, one of many histories, of the Underground Railroad, and the people who traversed it, were borne out of it. This is a story about ancestry and descending, the diverse and convergent ways in which histories flow, often beyond our control and understanding.
Several stories, seemingly disparate, come together here to bring a fleshiness to a spectral kind of history.
The story is set in Dunmore, a town in Canada were black people who have escaped slavery can be free — and yet, of course, not, living as they are within a white world. An event shakes the town, the criminal refuses to be cowed and the result is a tense struggle between generations to grapple with North American chattel slavery and the concept of freedom. The result is a portrayal of the tragically disjointed and yet deeply connected lives of black slaves and free blacks. Lensinda was born free. But she must still live with the past. The past must learn how to reconcile itself.
This is the kind of story that must be read and re-read, the reader accepting that with each re-reading a different understanding of the characters and their ideas of freedom and bondage will become visible.
Dr JoAnn LoSavio 