Which Way Freedom? and Out from This Place by Joyce Hansen

First published:Which Way Freedom?, 1986; Out from This Place, 1988

Type of work: Historical fiction

Themes: Race and ethnicity, and social issues

Time of work: 1861-1866

Recommended Ages: 13-15

Locale: South Carolina and Tennessee

Principal Characters:

• Obadiah (Obi) Booker, a slave on the Jennings’ plantation in South Carolina who runs away from slavery to join the Union army
• Easter, a young teenage black girl, companion to Obi and functional mother of Jason, who also runs away
• Jason, a child and the third of the slaves to escape
• Buka, an elderly slave on the Jennings’ plantation who helps the three escape
• Rose, a woman slave on the Phillips’ plantation who becomes Easter’s friend and confidante after the escape
• Miss Grantley, a Northern, white missionary teacher who encourages Easter to go to the North to school so that she can return to teach the freed slaves
• John Jennings, owner of the plantation and master to the three runaways
• Martha Jennings, John’s wife, a good woman who believes that someday whites will pay God for the sin of slavery
• Wilson Jennings, John’s cruel elder brother
• Rayford, a proud and arrogant slave on the adjacent plantation who escapes with Buka and others
• Thomas, a Northern black who serves in the same regiment as Obi and who becomes a close friend to him

The Story

These two companion novels are excellent works of historical fiction. Set during and shortly after the American Civil War and peopled mainly with characters who are slaves, Which Way Freedom? and Out from This Place serve mainly as novels of intrigue written to reveal the problems, evils, and intricacies of the institution of slavery; to emphasize the role that blacks played in fighting in that war; and to dramatize the difficulties facing the newly freed people after the fighting stopped and slavery was abolished. Joyce Hansen is able to re-create these turmoils and social upheavals realistically and make them readable for young audiences without resorting to sanitizing the violence of this human conflict.

The primary action of Which Way Freedom? is composed of two unfolding events: the determination of the slaves to escape and Obi’s experiences in the Union army. At the beginning of the novel, the slaves are rightfully desirous of their freedom. Even so, they act out of some sense of loyalty to their master, John Jennings, and do not actively seek their freedom by means of escape. Yet when an official from the Confederate army comes to the plantation to determine that Obi will be conscripted into the Southern military since Jennings himself is too old to fight, Obi believes that he has no choice and must run. At the same time, when Jennings decides to sell Easter and Jason, they feel forced to run away with Obi.

Joyce Hansen uses these events to reveal the evils of slavery as an American institution. The brief glimpses of life on the plantation show that black slaves had no family or experience with family structure—even mother and child are separated in this greatest violation of human compassion and decency. Hansen reveals the evils of the auction block as the slaves are sold and traded like cattle. She writes of their endless hard labors, poor living conditions, and lack of food and medical attention. Similarly, the degradation suffered from the illegality of slaves’ becoming literate is portrayed.

Having decided to escape, the first real problem is to decide where to go. The obvious choice is to the Union forces or, at least, to Union-controlled land. This alternative is nearly ruled out when they learn that Union forces are, more or less, returning runaway slaves to their masters by refusing to take them in and become responsible for them—thus the title Which Way Freedom? The slaves have no freedom in the South or in the North. Under the leadership of the elderly slave Buka (now freed because of his old age and uselessness for plantation work), they decide to escape to the Sea Islands, where they will be under Union control and yet will be in charge of their own lives.

The three do, in fact, make it to the islands, where they live in a colony with other escaped slaves. Soon afterward, Obi, not permitted to join a white Yankee regiment, enlists in a newly formed black one and goes to fight in the Fort Pillow Massacre at Fort Pillow, Tennessee, where hundreds of blacks were killed. At the end of the novel, he is left still searching for his mother, from whom he has been separated since early childhood. Now, however, he is also lost from the only two persons in the world about whom he truly cares: Easter and Jason.

Out from This Place picks up the narrative at this point, but the point of view generally shifts from that of Obi to that of Easter. Accordingly, she, rather than Obi, is the main character in the second novel. She struggles not to become a field hand in the cotton crops by working out a plan under which she will take care of the children of those women who do work there. She struggles with Jason, who has become spoiled, unloving, and removed from reality while living with the slave owners during a period of separation from Easter. She must decide whether to marry another freed slave, as Rose did, or to await the return of Obi from the war. Her biggest and hardest decision, however, is whether to give in to Miss Grantley, her Northern white teacher, who pressures her to go North to school so that she herself can return to teach other newly freed slaves to read and write.

None of these problems is actually resolved until the end. Easter does decide to go to school to become a teacher; Jason’s behavior slowly returns to normal as he becomes loving, hardworking, and realistic; and, finally, the reader learns at the end of the novel that Obi is returning to the Sea Islands to find Easter, presumably to marry her. Thus the ending is vaguely duplicitous, since Hansen does not make it clear that Obi will find Easter, now studying in the North; nor does she indicate that the two will remain permanently and hopelessly separated.

Context

Both novels are overwhelmed by two contexts. First of these is the historical backdrop provided by slavery, the Civil War and the role of blacks in it, and the era of Reconstruction. Characterization, structuring, and plotting are all subservient to the author’s purpose of describing what it meant to be alive and to be black at this time. Hansen writes a fictional story set in history in such a way as to make it unfold in a believable manner, without tampering with the facts of two actual events: the escape of plantation blacks to the Sea Islands and the Fort Pillow Massacre in Tennessee.

The other context is social and racial. The author embeds her characters in realities of the day, compassionately speculating about their feelings, fears, and motivations. There is a certain air of struggle, suffering, and endurance in her depiction of occurrences in the daily lives of these people, which assures accuracy in understanding their turmoils and triumphs. There is little contemporaneous coloration of the characters and the events, which would serve only to make the novels social commentary rather than works of literature.

The greatest attraction to these stories is their accomplishment in accuracy—not in terms of historical correctness but in their fidelity to expressing the oppression of the people. The novels, because of their subject matter, are of interest to young black readers; however, their success is not limited merely to this audience. Persons of any race, and particularly anyone concerned about the Civil War, will want to read these award-winning works. Hansen has captivated the excitement of the era in this fictional re-creation of history.