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Good books, old friends

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By Kara Kvasnicka

Tuesday, November 29, -0001

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If your children are also intrigued by the Underground Railroad as they study it and other events in black history during February, I recommend two recently written works of historical fiction: Cezanne Pinto: A Memoir by Mary Stolz, published by Alfred A. Knopf in 1994, a 279-page novel for third graders and older, and Aunt Harriet's Underground Railroad in the Sky by Faith Ringgold, published by Crown in 1992, a picture book for kindergartners and older.

Both contain strong black protagonists and breathtaking, suspenseful journeys on the metaphorical train to freedom from slavery we know as the Underground Railroad. Also, the authors of both weave historical fact into lively, entertaining narratives without sounding preachy or pedantic.

I realized I was not the only child who struggled to visually conceptualize the Underground Railroad as I read Cezanne Pinto.

In the character of Cezanne Pinto, Stolz has given young readers a pioneer in the African American struggle for freedom and equality their own age with whose alternate fear, confusion, and courage they can empathize.

The fictitious Pinto tells his story in flashback. A 90-year-old former school teacher who has lived "a life crammed with love, labor, exhilaration, rage, pain, pleasure," Pinto has decided to write a memoir of his historically significant childhood and youth, beginning in 1860 when he was about 10 and decided to run from the Virginia plantation on which he was a slave.

Pinto explains how he pictured the Underground Railroad before he became a fugitive dependent on it for his passage to safety: "All of us children, and plenty of grown-ups too uninformed to think otherwise, pictured the great snorting Freedom Train speeding through a tunnel deep in the ground, whistle screaming, smoke pouring from its stacks in glorious billowing clouds, till at length it roared up out the earth to spill us, like the children of Israel, into the sunlight of the Promised Land."

Only as Pinto makes his own arduous journey on foot through darkness and woods, with only the North Star to point the way, does he realize that the Underground Railroad is just a name for a system in which people called "conductors" led runaway slaves called "passengers" out of the South to safety.

He learns from his own conductor Tamar, a slave who had the rare good fortune to be educated by her former master's wife, he will only be completely safe in Canada because of the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, allowing slave masters to recover escaped slaves even in free states.

Pinto and Tamar's fictitious journey mirrors those of actual fugitives on the Underground Railroad, complete with a dangerous encounter with bounty hunters seeking to return them to their master for a large monetary reward and risky pauses along the way to rest with Quaker families, who acted on their belief that slavery was morally wrong by allowing fugitive slaves to use their houses as they would stations on an actual railroad.

When they finally reach Canada and "Freedom!" you will breathe a sigh of relief, feeling as though you had made the harrowing journey yourself.

Unfortunately, Pinto learns, "freedom" for African Americans then was a relative term. But the completion of his Underground Railroad journey is a rite of passage from which he gains the maturity and determination to embrace new challenges and experiences, gradually transforming himself from uneducated slave to educator in the Chicago Public Schools.

Readers will discover he has many more exciting adventures before settling on his teaching vocation and learn the intriguing origin of the name "Cezanne Pinto" he chose for himself since slaves were not allowed to have formal names.

Readers will definitely be endeared to Pinto's wit and wisdom, his perceptive insights into human nature, as he recalls the people and events which shaped his destiny. He will seem like an old friend.

In Aunt Harriet's Underground Railroad in the Sky, our protagonists are a young African American girl named Cassie and real life conductor on the Underground Railroad and antislavery heroine Harriet Tubman.

The book is set in 1949, the 100th anniversary of Tubman's first successful flight on the Underground Railroad. Cassie and her baby brother Be Be mark the occasion by taking an imaginary journey on the metaphorical railroad.

When Be Be boards a fantasy freedom train in the sky Cassie reluctantly follows to bring him safely home. Tubman serves as the conductor who leads Cassie to Be Be, but only after Cassie has had a complete tour and fully understands the significance of the Underground Railroad.

Ringgold's moving, straightforward prose and hypnotic illustrations of the fantasy freedom train in the sky contrasted with those of the actual road to freedom Cassie must take to rescue Be Be will help eliminate children's confusion about the Underground Railroad.

In 1949 Cassie and Be Be and other African Americans had only begun to struggle for their full civil rights and the book contains Ringgold's impassioned plea for African Americans to keep struggling. Harriet tells Cassie: "Every one hundred years that old train will follow the same route I traveled on the Underground Railroad so that we will never forget the cost of freedom."

She helps to answer some of the questions her story provokes by including a short biography of Tubman and a map of Underground Railroad routes.

Excellent factual accounts of the Underground Railroad and the antislavery movement includeMany Thousand Gone: African Americans from Slavery to Freedom by Virginia Hamilton, illustrated by Leo and Diane Dillon, published by Alfred A. Knopf in 1993, and The Underground Railroad by Raymond Bial, published by Houghton Mifflin in 1995.

If literary time travel is not enough, you can plan a vacation on which to visit actual landmarks on the Underground Railroad by consulting Charles Blockson's unique Hippocrene Guide to the Underground Railroad, published by Hippocrene in 1994. Addresses and visiting hours of houses, monuments, museums and parks along fugitive slaves' routes are listed, including some in Michigan.

A suggested tour of "Harriet Tubman's Trail to Freedom," maps of Underground Railroad routes and a list of Underground Railroad tour groups are included.

Ask for any of these or other titles on the Underground Railroad at your local public library.

Kvasnicka, a former East Village Magazine news editor, has been the magazine's research consultant since 1989. She has a master's degree in information and library studies from the University of Michigan and works for the Genesee District Library.

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