David Goodrich: On Freedom Road
The Ivy and Bird in Hand are delighted to welcome back David Goodrich for a reading and conversation about his new book On Freedom Road: Bicycle Explorations and Reckonings on the Underground Railroad. This event will take place in-person, at our sibling shop, Bird in Hand Coffee & Books in Charles Village.
David Goodrich followed the most famous of conductors, Harriet Tubman, from where she was enslaved in Maryland, on the eastern shore, all the way to her family sanctuary at a tiny chapel in Ontario, Canada. Travelling South, he rode from New Orleans, where the enslaved were bought and sold, through Mississippi and the heart of the Delta Blues. As we pedal along with him, Goodrich brings us to the Borderland along the Ohio River, a kind of no-mans-land between North and South in the years before the Civil War. Here, slave hunters roamed both banks of the river, trying to catch people as they fled for freedom. We travel to Oberlin, Ohio, a town that staunchly defended freedom seekers, embodied in the life of Lewis Leary, who was lost in the fires of Harpers Ferry, but his spirit was reborn in the Harlem Renaissance.
