By Deborah Hopkinson
Enslaved and clever with a needle, Clara turns the rivers and roads she overhears into a quilt that's really a map to freedom.
Clara is taken from her mother as a young child and put to work in the fields, then moved into the Big House because she's good with a needle. While she sews, she listens — to the drivers, to visitors, to anyone who's traveled far — and she works out that she could stitch every river, road, and landmark she hears about into one quilt. It would be a map north, and nobody would guess it was anything but bedding. So she builds it, patch by patch. When it's finished she uses it to escape, and she leaves it behind for the next person who needs to find the way.
It makes the Underground Railroad something a child can actually picture: a real river to cross, a real direction to walk, not just a phrase from a history lesson. And it does that by following a girl who's thinking her way toward freedom, so the story is about her cleverness and her patience, not only about what was done to her. James Ransome's paintings are warm and full of light, which keeps the people in it close and human. It sits well beside Henry's Freedom Box if you want two escape stories from the same era, one sudden and one built out of years of quiet work.