Love Stories from the Underground Railroad

Bety DeRamus     2005     288p     5.5 x 8.5

Forbidden Fruit is a collection of largely untold tales of ordinary people who faced mobs, bloodhounds, bounty hunters, and bullets to be together–and defy a system that categorized blacks not only as servants, but as property, and interracial love as abominable.

Here you’ll meet, among other extraordinary characters, a fugitive slave from Virginia who spends seventeen years searching for his partner. A Georgia slave couple that sails for England with federal troops trailing behind. A white woman who falls in love with her deceased husband’s slave. A young slave girl who is delivered to her fiancé inside a wooden chest.

Betty DeRamus gleaned these anecdotes from descendants of runaway slave couples, unpublished memoirs, Civil War records, census data, magazines, and dozens of previously untapped sources.Though not all of the stories in Forbidden Fruit end in triumph, they all celebrate hope, courage, and passion.

$4-10