Love unlimited

Betty DeRamus's Forbidden Fruit: Love Stories From the Underground Railroad (Atria, $25) is a rich collection of true slave-era tales that are at times haunting, often riveting, but always triumphant in the end.

In this, her first book, DeRamus, a veteran journalist and a former columnist for the Detroit News, delivers a soulful, sassy love song to our people, instead of Black families torn apart, we see those who "had the courage to love in a time of hate," she says. There's Joseph Antoine, a free Cuban Black, who in 1792 signed away his freedom to be with his enslaved wife in Virginia. We follow Lear Green, who crammed her body into a wooden sailor's chest in 1857 and shipped herself from Baltimore to Philadelphia to meet her love, William Adams, who had sneaked out of Baltimore a week before. And we travel with the Crafts, who in 1848 daringly rode a train into freedom, with the light-skinned Ellen disguised as a White man, and her husband, William, as "his" slave.

What drove DeRamus on an exhaustive four-year journey, crisscrossing the country along the tracks of the Underground Railroad, searching through newspaper articles, unpublished memoirs, old marriage certificates and Census records to tell these stories?

It all started with her quest to "do something different" for a Black History Month column in 2000. She found one story, and others began to consume her.

"When I think about people walking across the country to find each other or spending years raising money for a loved one's freedom, I am awed and inspired," DeRamus says. "We need to know we were a people who would literally die for each other." Forbidden Fruit helps us not just understand, but stand proud. For more information on this book, visit bettyderamus.com.

COPYRIGHT 2005 Essence Communications, Inc.
COPYRIGHT 2005 Gale Group