Up from Freedom

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. (Aug.)