Forbidden
Fruit
Love Stories from the
Underground Railroad
By
Betty DeRamus
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Betty DeRamus
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Forbidden
Fruit is the story of true love—between slaves,
between masters and slaves and between slaves and
free blacks. It’s the story of couples who fight mobs,
wolves, bloodhounds, bounty hunters and bullets to
preserve their love, defying the system that allowed
slave masters to breed and sell people like cattle.
Some break the taboo against interracial marriage,
putting their lives in the most severe peril. Love
is the forbidden fruit, and all of these couples pluck
a ripe handful and pile it onto their plates.
(For a book review by Robin Van Auken, click here)
In
one remarkable story, a Georgia
couple who fled slavery wearing multiple disguises
sails for England with bounty
hunters and federal troops on their trail. A fugitive
slave from Virginia spends seventeen
arduous years searching
for his wife. A Missouri
slave falls in love with his white Mormon neighbor
and escapes to Canada to be with
her, putting pepper in his shoes to throw dogs off
the scent at night and hiding in trees by day.
Betty
DeRamus gleaned these astonishing stories from descendants
of runaway slave couples, unpublished memoirs, Civil
War records, books, magazines and dozens of previously
untapped sources. Forbidden Fruit is a
beautifully written and profoundly important book
that reveals this shameful era to be about triumph
as well as torture, achievement as well as degradation
and indomitable love as well as hate.
Atria Books, a division of Simon & Schuster,
has published Forbidden Fruit.
A
veteran and award-winning journalist, Betty DeRamus
was a finalist for a Pulitzer Prize in commentary
for columns about the Los
Angeles riots and was among
the handful of print journalists who watched Nelson
Mandela walk out of prison in 1990. A short story
writer, world-traveler and pianist, she lives in Detroit, her hometown. For more information
e-mail bderamus@detnews.com
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