The Price of a Child: A Novel - Softcover

Lorene Cary

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0679744673 ISBN 13: 9780679744672

Publisher: Vintage, 1996

Synopsis

An intimate, gripping novel of the antebellum Underground Railroad, based on the true story of a valiant Philadelphia freedwoman—a debut novel from the author of the “stunning memoir” Black Ice (New York Times).

"A stunning achievement ... a deeply engrossing story." —The Philadelphia Inquirer

With Price of a Child—the story of Ginnie Pryor (cook, mistress and servant to a Virginia planter) and her struggle with slavery in 1855—Lorene Cary continues has created a work that elevates the reputation she created with Black Ice, her memoir which won her comparisons to Maya Angelou and Richard Wright. In a novel that examines the price of freedom and the value of a child's life, Cary has created an authentic American heroine—a woman who finds voice for the appalling loss and bitterness of her past, and who creates within herself a new humanity.

About this title

About the Author

LORENE CARY's new novel Pride is told in the voices of four friends—“subtle, idiosyncratic characters...whose personalities seem utterly, and affectingly, distinctive,” according to The New York Times Book Review. It also praises the book’s ability to shift “between the staccato directness of black slang and the more formal cadences of standard English....”

The Price of A Child has been selected as the first city-wide One Book, One Philadelphia choice. The novel traces one woman’s escape from slavery and brings alive Philadelphia’s Underground Railroad history. A New York Times reviewer called the writer “a powerful storyteller, frankly sensual, mortally funny, gifted with an ear for the pounce [of] real speech,” and praised the novel as “a generous, sardonic, full-blooded work of fiction.” 

Cary’s first book, published by Knopf in 1991, was Black Ice, a memoir of her years first as a black female student, and then teacher, at St. Paul’s, an exclusive New England boarding school. Arnold Rampersad has dubbed it “...probably the most beautifully written and moving African-American autobiographical narrative since Maya Angelou’s celebrated I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings.” Black Ice was chosen as a Notable Book for 1992 by the American Library Association.

Lorene Cary was graduated from St. Paul’s School in 1974 and received B.A. and M.A. degrees from the University of Pennsylvania in 1978. She won a Thouron Fellowship for British-U.S. student exchange and studied at Sussex University. She has received Doctorates in Humane Letters from Colby College in Maine, Keene State College in New Hampshire, and Chestnut Hill College in Philadelphia.

In 1998 Lorene Cary founded Art Sanctuary, a non-profit lecture and performance series that brings black thinkers and artists to speak and perform at the Church of the Advocate, a National Historic Landmark Building in North Philadelphia.

Currently a lecturer in creative writing at the University of Pennsylvania, where she was a 1998 recipient of the Provost’s Award for Distinguished Teaching, Cary has lectured throughout the U.S. She began writing as an apprentice at Time in 1980, then worked as an Associate Editor at TV Guide, freelanced for such publications as Essence, American Visions, Mirabella, and The Philadelphia Inquirer Sunday Magazine, and served as Contributing Editor for Newsweek in 1993.

In 2002, Cary received the Women’s Way Agent of Change Award; in 2001 the Advocate Community Development Corporation’s Award for Urban Excellence; in 2000, a Philadelphia Historical Society Founder’s Medal for History in Culture; in 1999, the American Red Cross Spectrum Rising Star Award for community service; and in 1995, a Pew Fellowship in the Arts Fellowship. She serves on the usage Panel for The American Heritage Dictionary and the Union Benevolent Association board. Cary is a member of PEN and the Author’s Guild. She lives in Philadelphia with her husband, the Rev. Robert C. Smith, and daughters Laura and Zoë.

From the Back Cover

With her first book, the extraordinary Black Ice, Lorene Cary won comparisons with Maya Angelou and Richard Wright. Now she gives us a historical novel that belongs alongside the true slave narratives that are its inspiration - a gripping and minutely realized story of the antebellum Underground Railroad and of one courageous woman who rode it to freedom. In 1855 Ginnie Pryor, once cook, mistress, and slave to a Virginia planter, walks away from her furious master and into the embrace of a delegation of Philadelphia's Vigilance Committee. With freedom comes a new name (Mercer Gray), new pleasures (membership in a boisterous family of free-born blacks), and new responsibilities as Mercer becomes a speaker on the abolition circuit. But United States law still considers her a white man's property. And her baby Bennie remains a hostage in Virginia, subject to all the cruelties that Mercer has escaped. Suspenseful, raucously funny, and pulsing with the life of a vanished black America, The Price of a Child is an intimate epic of bondage and liberty by a writer with a true voice and heroic powers of imaginative reconstruction.

From the Inside Flap

With Price of a Child--the story of Ginnie Pryor (cook, mistress and servant to a Virginia planter) and her struggle with slavery in 1855--Cary continues has created a work that elevates the reputation she created with "Black Ice, her memoir which won her comparisons to Maya Angelou and Richard Wright. In a novel that examines the price of freedom and the value of a child's life, Price of a Child is "a stunning achievement...a deeply engrossing story.... Cary's impeccable research and seamless narrative carry us along" ("Philadelphia Inquirer).

Reviews

Set during the antebellum period, Carey's first novel tells of a woman who escapes from slavery only to be haunted by the memory of the baby she had to leave behind.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Edition details

• Publisher: Vintage
• Publication date: 1996
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0679744673
• ISBN 13: 9780679744672
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 336