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Summary
Summary
An important book of epic scope on America's first racially integrated, religiously-inspired political movement for change--The Underground Railroad, a movement peopled by daring heroes and heroines, and everyday folk
For most, the mention of the Underground Railroad evokes images of hidden tunnels, midnight rides, and hairsbreadth escapes. Yet the Underground Railroad's epic story is much more morally complex and politically divisive than even the myths suggest. Against a backdrop of the country's westward expansion,which brought together Easterners who had engaged in slavery primarily in the abstract alongside slaveholding Southerners and their slaves, arose a clash of values that evolved into a fierce fight for nothing less than the country's soul. Beginning six decades before the Civil War, freedom-seeking blacks and pious whites worked together to save tens of thousands of lives, often at the risk of great physical danger to themselves. Not since the American Revolution had the country engaged in an act of such vast and profound civil disobedience that not only subverted federal law but also went against prevailing mores.
Flawlessly researched and uncommonly engaging, Bound for Canaan, shows why it was the Underground Railroad and not the Civil Rights movement that gave birth to this country's first racially-integrated, religiously-inspired movement for social change.
Summary
Es sorprendente la escasez de datos de los que realmente disponemos sobre el Cosmos. Así, siempre nos ha intrigado la idea de los ?agujeros negros'. ¿En qué consisten? ¿Por qué se denominan ?negros? ¿Se podría quedar algún elemento atrapado y entrar en una situación de ?no retorno? La misma sensación la hemos experimentado cuando nos relacionamos con las personas a través del asesoramiento psicológico. Tras años de contacto directo con ?el alma que sufre?, no nos dejamos de sorprender con las miserias y grandezas de las personas y permanentemente se intuyen y vislumbran zonas o ?agujeros negros? a los que resulta difícil acceder. Igualmente, nos interpela la pobreza de conocimientos para explicar esos procesos cognitivos. No en vano, durante siglos todo lo relacionado con la salud mental ha estado rodeado de un halo enigmático. Incluso hoy en día es campo abonado para todo tipo de supuestos videntes o gurús que se presentan como solución para cualquier problema que tenga que ver con lo que popularmente se describe como ?estar mal de los nervios'. Ambas experiencias explican el porqué del título del libro. Frente a un contexto social que a veces presenta un horizonte que tiende a crear ?zonas de no retorno? similares a las de los ?agujeros negros?, la obra quiere animar a afrontar la vida con esperanza. De ahí que se planteen pistas e instrumentos -cuestionarios, escalas o ejercicios-, que posibiliten alternativas y ayuden a ?aclarar? e ?iluminar? las zonas oscuras. No hay tarea más ardua, pero más gratificante, que responsabilizarse de la existencia y convertirse en el protagonista principal de la propia vida.
Excerpts
Excerpts
Bound for Canaan The Epic Story of the Underground Railroad, America's First Civil Rights Movement Chapter One An Evil Without Remedy The Negro Business is a great object with us. It is to the Trade of the Country as the Soul to the Body. -- Joseph Clay, slave owner Josiah Henson's earliest memory was of the day that his father came home with his ear cut off. He, like his parents, had been born into slavery, and knew no other world beyond the small tract of tidewater Maryland where he was raised. He was five or six years old when the horrifying thing happened, probably sometime in 1795. "Father appeared one day covered in blood and in a state of great excitement," Henson would recall many years later. His head was bloody and his back lacerated, and "he was beside himself with mingled rage and suffering." Henson was born on June 15, 1789, on the eastern shore of Chesapeake Bay, on a farm belonging to Francis Newman, about a mile from Port Tobacco. His mother was the property of a neighbor, Dr. Josiah McPherson, an amiable alcoholic who treated the infant Henson as something of a pet, bestowing upon him his own Christian name. In accordance with common practice, McPherson had hired out Henson's mother to Newman, to whom Henson's father belonged. Newman's overseer, a "rough, coarse man," had brutally assaulted Henson's mother. Whether this was an actual or attempted rape, or the more mundane brutality of daily life, Henson does not make clear. Perhaps he didn't know. Whatever the cause, Henson's father, normally a good-humored man, attacked the overseer with ferocity and would have killed him, had not Henson's mother intervened. For a slave to lift his hand "against the sacred temple of a white man's body," even in self-defense, was an act of rebellion. Slaves were sometimes executed, and occasionally even castrated, for such an act. Knowing that retribution would be swift, Henson's father fled. Like most runaways, however, he didn't go far, but hid in the surrounding woods, venturing at night to beg food at nearby cabins. Eventually, hunger compelled him to surrender. Slaves from surrounding plantations were ordered to witness his punishment for their "moral improvement." One hundred lashes were laid on by a local blacksmith, fifty lashes at a time. Bleeding and faint, the victim was then held up against the whipping post and his right ear fastened to it with a "tack." The blacksmith then sliced the ear off with a knife, to the sound of cheers from the crowd. What the real sentiments of the slaves watching this punishment might have been no one can say. Perhaps they cheered in a desperate effort to reassure their masters that they, unlike Henson's father, were docile and trustworthy, and harbored no thoughts of rebellion. Or perhaps with relief, seeing a "troublemaker," whose deed had caused their masters to become more vigilant and harsh in an effort to forestall further rebellion, now getting his just deserts. Or perhaps, to people so brutalized by their own degradation, the cruelty may even have seemed a form of gruesome entertainment. Afterward, Henson's father became a different man, brooding and morose -- "intractable," as slave owners typically described human property that no longer responded compliantly to command. Nothing could be done with him. "So off he was sent to Alabama. What was his after fate neither my mother nor I ever learned." Following his father's disappearance, Henson and his mother returned to the McPherson estate. Even after years of freedom, Henson would remember the doctor as a "liberal, jovial" man of kind impulses, and he might well have lived out his life in passive oblivion as a slave had not it been for another stroke of fate that abruptly changed his life yet again. One morning, when Henson was still a small child, McPherson was found drowned in a stream, having apparently fallen from his horse the night before in a drunken stupor. McPherson's property was to be sold off, and the proceeds divided among his heirs. The slaves were frantic at the prospect of being sold away from Maryland to the Deep South, where it was well known that overwork, the grueling climate, and disease shortened lives. Even sparing that, an estate sale commonly meant that parents would be divided from children, and husbands from wives, lifelong friends separated from one another, a relatively benign master suddenly exchanged for a cruel one. For female slaves, the future might mean rape and permanent sexual exploitation. The only thing that those about to be sold did know was that the future was completely uncertain, and that they had not the slightest power to affect their fate. In due course, all the remaining Hensons -- Josiah's three sisters, two brothers, his mother, and himself -- were put up at auction. The memory of this event remained engraved in Josiah's memory until the end of his life: the huddled group of anxious slaves, the crowd of bidders, the clinical examining of muscles and teeth, his mother's raw fear. His brothers and sisters were bid off one by one, while his mother, holding his hand, looked on in "an agony of grief," whose meaning only slowly dawned on the little boy as the sale proceeded. When his mother's turn came, she was bought by a farmer named Isaac Riley, of Montgomery County, just outside the site of the new national capital at Washington. Then young Henson himself was finally offered up for sale. In the midst of the bidding, as Josiah remembered it, his mother pushed through the crowd, flung herself at Riley's feet, and begged him to buy the boy as well. Instead, he shoved her away in disgust ... Bound for Canaan The Epic Story of the Underground Railroad, America's First Civil Rights Movement . Copyright © by Fergus Bordewich. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers, Inc. All rights reserved. Available now wherever books are sold. Excerpted from Bound for Canaan: The Epic Story of the Underground Railroad, America's First Civil Rights Movement by Fergus M. Bordewich All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.
