Forbidden Fruit

Love Stories from the Underground Railroad

Betty DeRamus

• Publisher: Atria Books
• Year: 2005
• ISBN:
  9781416513377
• Topic: Historia
• Subtopic: Historia afroamericana

Forbidden Fruit is a collection of fascinating, largely untold tales of ordinary men and women 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. In the true love stories of Forbidden Fruit, you will meet sixteen couples who fought for love—love between slaves, between slaves and masters, and between slaves and free black folks. There is the fugitive slave from Virginia who spends seventeen years searching for his wife. 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a wooden chest.Acclaimed journalist Betty DeRamus gleaned these anecdotes from descendants of runaway slave couples, unpublished memoirs, Civil War records, census data, magazines, and dozens of previously untapped sources. This is a book about people pursuing love and achievement in a time of hate and severely limited opportunities. Though not all of the stories in Forbidden Fruit end in triumph, they all celebrate hope, passion, courage, and triumph of the human spirit.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Acknowledgments
• Permissions
• Introduction
• Contents
• Book I The Rebels
• 1 Love in a Time of Hate
• 2 A Love Worth Waiting For
• 3 The Special Delivery Package
• 4 The Man Who Couldn’t Grow a Beard
• 5 Even a Blind Horse Knows the Way
• 6 The Slave Who Knew His Name
• 7 Footprints in the Snow
• 8 Chased by Wolves
• 9 The Woman on John Little’s Back
• 10 Angeline’s Blues
• Book II Crossing the Color Line
• 11 Suspicious Lynchings, Passing for White, Passing for Black and Mixed Marriages in Deadly Times: A Chronology
• 12 Hound Dogs Hate Red Pepper
• 13 The Schoolteacher Had to Duck Dead Cats
• Book III Free at Last
• 14Guns And Pickles
• Bibliography
• Index