Underground Railroad Free Press
News & Views on the Underground Railroad • Vol. XVII, no. 96, July 2022
Published bimonthly since 2006, we bring together organizations and people interested in the historical and the contemporary Underground Railroad. Free Press is the home of Lynx, the central registry of contemporary Underground Railroad organizations; Datebook, the community's event calendar; and the Free Press Prizes awarded annually for leadership, preservation and advancement of knowledge, the community's highest honors. Underground Railroad Free Press is distributed digitally free of charge on the 15th of odd-numbered months. Please visit urrfreepress.com for more.
In This Issue
Announcements
YouTube Underground Railroad Keynote Address
Free Press Prize Nominations Open
Articles
Book Review: Underground Railroad novel Elizabeth’s Field
ASALH and Network to Freedom Team Up
View Talk on Today’s International Underground Railroad
On June 27, Underground Railroad Free Press publisher Peter Michael delivered the keynote address at the opening of the Traditions Week of McDaniel College’s annual three-week Common Ground summer program. For nearly 30 years, Common Ground has promoted racial understanding through traditional music and arts. Mr. Michael presented an illustrated presentation on "The Underground Railroad: The War for the Soul of America" which included a series of slides on today’s international Underground Railroad. Visit https://youtu.be/MFTQtMifECM?t=68 to view the address and slide show.
Free Press Prizes to Be Announced in September Issue
The three Free Press Prizes awarded annually for leadership, preservation and advancement of knowledge, regarded as the international Underground Railroad community's highest honors, will be announced in our September 15 issue. Nominations are still open. Please visit urrfreepress.com for more on the prizes and for nomination forms.
Superb Novel Takes Its Place on the Underground Railroad Book Shelf
Review of Elizabeth’s Field: Of Freedom and Bondage on Harriet Tubman's Eastern Shore
By Barbara Lockhart
If it hasn’t happened yet, it’s just around the corner: with self-published books now rapidly displacing traditionally produced ones, many of the best-written books in any given year are increasingly being published by independent—”indie”—publishers or directly by authors themselves. While the mostly New York-based, big-name publishing houses are struggling to grow at all, the self-publishing market is expanding at 17 percent annually as authors fed up with closed doors are these days only a few clicks away from seeing their works for sale to the world online.
The trade-off is that old-line publishing houses will market the few books that they take in but pay only 8 to 12 percent in royalties to their authors. Self-published authors do their own marketing so sales are usually lower, but royalties can go as high as 70 percent.
While the publishing industry has axed 70,000 jobs since 2014, the number of self-published books has more than tripled. Enter Amazon and its publishing subsidiary, Kindle Direct Publishing (formerly CreateSpace), which has become the new behemoth of publishing. Here, no literary agent is necessary to pry open doors for an author.
In 2012, writer Barbara Lockhart encountered the usual brick walls of disinterest from agents and major publishing houses when she sought to have her recently completed novel, Elizabeth’s Field: Of Freedom and Bondage on Harriet Tubman's Eastern Shore, published. So, Lockhart self-published her book, had it listed on Amazon, and began letting people know about it. The book has drawn raves and was recently republished in a second edition.
When Lockhart purchased her farm in 1970, her writer’s inquisitiveness led her to delve into county land records to learn the history of what she had bought. There she uncovered the rare situation for the time that the farm had been owned from 1852 to 1857 by a mixed free Black and Native American woman—Elizabeth Burton, the Elizabeth of the book title—and that then the title passed suddenly to a White family that owned the farm for three generations before selling it to the author.
But how did Elizabeth and her family lose their land wondered Lockhart? As the author told us in a recent interview, she “had to find out why.” Nine years of research later, with Elizabeth’s Field Lockhart turned out a page-turner based on the free Black woman who owned Lockhart's farm in Harriet Tubman country of Maryland’s Eastern Shore of the 1850s, then had it essentially schemed from her by a White neighbor.
Elizabeth’s Field is related through the character Mattie, based on the author's 84-year-old African American neighbor who told Lockhart the intact oral tradition of the property. Lockhart deftly weaves past and present into the revealing lesson of how wrongs can echo down through generations. Technically fiction, Elizabeth's Field precisely recounts the racist aggravations that the actual people who lived on Lockhart's farm and nearby endured 165 years ago. Harriet Tubman, who was from the same county, makes multiple appearances in the book.
This gem of a story, which any major publisher should have been glad to back, received its due when Elizabeth’s Field won a national book prize for fiction with an Independent Book Publishers award, an IPPY as this honor is called.
Barbara Lockhart is a retired educator who holds a Master of Fine Arts degree in creative writing and is the recipient of multiple Maryland Arts Council awards for her works. In our opinion she is as good an example as any of the self-published author who deserves a much wider audience. For more, visit the book’s web page at https://tinyurl.com/ElizabethsField.
ASALH Co-sponsors Grant Program
Sylvia Cyrus, Executive Director of the Association for the Study of African American Life and History (ASALH), asks that we inform Free Press readers of her organization’s grant program conducted in conjunction with the National Park Service’s Underground Railroad Network to Freedom program. We are glad to do this.
Two categories of grants are available. One is for existing Network to Freedom sites, programs, or facilities for preservation, research, or interpretation. These grants are from $1,000 to $10,000 with preference given to applicants not previously awarded a Network to Freedom grant and to applicants with matching funds.
The second category offers grants up to $5,000 for writing applications for new sites, programs, or facilities to become listed in the Network to Freedom. These grants are available to the public and do not have to be associated with an existing Network to Freedom site or program. An application for listing in the Network to Freedom is the required outcome of one of these grants and must be submitted within six months of the date of the grant award.
Grant applications and awards run on an annual cycle beginning July 1. The program website explains that projects that highlight less-known aspects of the Underground Railroad such as movement south to Spanish Florida, Mexico, or the Caribbean, maroon communities, or the involvement of indigenous nations will be awarded bonus points in their evaluation.
For more information and for links to grant application forms, visit the ASALH web page at https://asalh.org/network_to_freedom_grants/.