“Lorene Cary’s first young adult book, FREE!, is a collection of non-fiction stories of America’s Underground Railroad as compelling as the history they chronicle. Cary, author of the memoir Black Ice and the novels, Pride and The Price of A Child, breathes life into accounts of slave escapes documented by William Still, co-chair of the Vigilance Committee of the Pennsylvania Committee for the Abolition of Slavery. Still himself was the son of an escaped slave, and the heartbreaking story of his mother’s daring escape is among the stories included.”
FREE! Great Escapes on the Underground Railroad
FREE! Offers 21st century readers a chance to run with breathless courage, through darkness, freezing cold, desperate hunger and bone-weary fatigue, toward the ever-beckoning call of freedom. As these 12 true stories show us a side of slave life rarely seen, we meet real people who once risked all for the chance to be their own masters. One husband and wife planned an elaborate costumed ruse, one woman mailed herself in a box, while others made it to safety by remarkable feats of human endurance fueled by sheer will.
FREE! is an amazing book for all ages that reminds us of a past we dare not forget. The book will be reissued in September 2011. In the meantime, books can be ordered directly from New City Community Press
Educators can also download the curriculum for FREE! here.
“’The Price of A Child’ is a book seared by a sense of mission. It is part of the novel’s strength that Ms. Cary presents the Underground Railroad as a patriotic drama of born-and-bred Americans fighting for the right to live free. But there is nothing preachy about her narrative style. She is a powerful storyteller, frankly sensual, mortally funny, gifted with an ear for the pounce and ragged inconsequentiality of real speech and an eye for the shifts and subterfuges by which ordinary people get by.” – The New York Times Book Review
Price of a Child
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 hostage in Virginia, subject to all the cruelties that Mercer 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.
“If at times the novel seems almost too diffuse, and the narrative self-conscious, one has to admire Cary’s insistence that all of her characters be as smart and imperfect as we are in life. At its best, Cary’s style allows her to depict contemporary life with wit and passion.” – Pennsylvania Gazette
Pride
With Pride, Cary introduce us to four accomplished, passionate, and thoroughly down-to-earth African American women whose lifelong friendship is about to take some unexpected turns. There’s Roz,the sharp-tongued politician’s wife, who’s trying to keep her family together as she recovers from breast cancer and her husband runs for the biggest election of his career. But she’s hardly prepared for the bombshell that explodes when she discovers one of her three best friends has been sleeping with him. There’s the fiery and fiercely independent Tam, avoiding commitment both in her career and in her sexually combustive affairs with men. She’s ready to make some radical changes, though, including allowing herself to feel vulnerable with a sexy hunk who may have more than just looks. That’s Arneatha, an Episcopal priest, to whom the friends look for moral guidance, but who has felt hollow since the early death of her husband. When fate throws her a couple of curves, in the forms of an abandoned child and an intriguing stranger, her life is completely overturned-and she needs all her faith, and all her friends, to get through. And there’s Audrey, talented, caring, but nearly ruined by drinking, who has to be the bravest of them all to battle back from the clutches of addiction. Her struggle almost costs her life, but brings renewal to the friends’ devotion to each other. Lorene Cary takes us into the lives of these remarkable women with verve and humor, capturing their outspoken voices, their most heartfelt emotions, and their unfailing humanity. Funny, juicy, pulsing with life and love. Pride is an unforgettable novel.
“’Black Ice’ is an extraordinarily honest, lively and appealing book. The author expresses her desire to enter “that unruly conversation” of black narratives that inspired her, and this she certainly has accomplished, weighing in with a wry, reflective, unpreachy voice all her own. Her memoir also links up with such fine recent books as Eva Hoffman’s “Lost in Translation” and Richard Rodriguez’s “Hunger of Memory” in describing the ache of the minority or immigrant scholarship student, who keeps trying to straddle two worlds and lose neither.” – The New York Times Book Review
Black Ice
In 1972 Lorene Cary, a bright, ambitious black teenager from Philadelphia, was transplanted into the formerly all-white, all-male environs of the elite Saint Paul’s School in New Hampshire, where she became a scholarship student in a “boot camp” for future American leaders. Like any good student, she was determined to succeed. But Cary was also determined to succeed without selling out. This wonderfully frank and perspective memoir describes the perils and ambiguities of that doubt role, in which failing calculus and winning a student election could both be interpreted as betrayals of one’s skin. Black Ice is also a universally recognizable document of a woman’s adolescence; it is, as Houston Baker says, “a journey into selfhood that resonates with sober reflection, intelligent passion, and joyous love.”
