The Price of a Child

With her first book, the extraordinary Black Ice, Lorene Cary won comparisons with Maya Angelou and Richard Wright. Now she gives us a historical novel that belongs alongside the true slave narratives that are its inspiration - a gripping and minutely realized story of the antebellum Underground Railroad and of one courageous woman who rode it to freedom. In 1855 Ginnie Pryor, once cook, mistress, and slave to a Virginia planter, walks away from her furious master and into the embrace of a delegation of Philadelphia's Vigilance Committee. With freedom comes a new name (Mercer Gray), new pleasures (membership in a boisterous family of free-born blacks), and new responsibilities as Mercer becomes a speaker on the abolition circuit. But United States law still considers her a white man's property. And her baby Bennie remains a hostage in Virginia, subject to all the cruelties that Mercer has escaped. Suspenseful, raucously funny, and pulsing with the life of a vanished black America, The Price of a Child is an intimate epic of bondage and liberty by a writer with a true voice and heroic powers of imaginative reconstruction.