FREEDMAN TOWN

Ben H. Winter, Underground Airlines: A Novel (New York: Mulholland Books/Little, Brown, 2016) ("Now I see things differently. It took me some time, but I know the secret now. Freedman Town serves a good purpose--not for the people who live there, Lord knows; people stuck there by poverty, by prejudice, by laws that keep them from moving or working. Freedman Town's purpose is for the rest of the world. The world that sits, like Martha, with dark glasses on, staring from a distance, scared but safe. Create a pen like that, give people no choice but to live like animals, and then people get to point at them and say Will you look at those animals? That's what kind of people those people are. And that idea drifts up and out of Freedman Town like chimney smoke, blacks get to mean poor and poor to mean dangerous and all the worlds get murked together and becomes one dark idea, a cloud of smoke, the smokestack fumes drifting like filthy air across the rest of the nation." Id. at 140. What if the American Civil War never happened? How would America look?).