Real Stories from My Time: Underground Railroad

Published: 2018. Author: Bonnie Bader (with excerpts from Connie Porter's Addy stories). Illustrator: Kelley McMorris

Summary

Addy's perspective is told through excerpts from Meet Addy, starting with her overhearing her parents plan how to escape to the North. They'll need to make it to a safe house owned by a Miss Caroline, a white woman who can get them to the next stop on the Underground Railroad. Her father and brother are sold before they can act on their plans, forcing Addy and her mother to leave her baby sister behind with older slaves. Under cover of darkness, they bravely make their way through a raging river, a group of Confederate soldiers, and other dangers before finally reaching Miss Caroline's. There's one last excerpt from Happy Birthday Addy! about the Civil War ending, and Addy's family (her father has joined them) determined to reunite fully.


Misc

Dedicated to "David, my history buff." The book also includes Connie Porter's dedication from her Addy books: "For Rachel Dunn, my mother's great-grandmother, born into slavery in 1807, and her daughter, Hannah, my mother's grandmother, my "Addy," born into slavery in 1850. She died free. Your strength inspires me today."

The book includes several anecdotes about real people who traveled and "worked" on the Underground Railroad, like Frederick Douglass, Sojourner Truth, and Harriet Tubman. It also goes in to the history of slavery in the US starting before it was even country, the Abolitionist Movement, the Fugitive Slave Act, the Emancipation Proclamation, and the end of the Civil War.

The excerpts are edited slightly to help them fit the flow of the historical narrative better.

It makes sense, but it didn't occur to me that some slaves in more southern locales escaped to Florida (then under Spanish rule) or Mexico. Those in Florida often lived with Seminole tribes.

The book includes a note about Addy's dialect, explaining that since it was illegal to teach slaves to read or write or give them any education, they often had poor grammar. Portraying Addy speaking "improperly" isn't meant to denigrate her intelligence but to be historically accurate.