In the Upper Country

"Young Lensinda Martin is a protegee of a crusading Black journalist and activist in mid-18th century southwestern Ontario, finding a home in a community founded by veterans of the War of 1812 and refugees from the slave-owning states of the American south--whose agents do not always stay on their side of the border. One night, a neighbouring farmer summons Lensinda after a slave hunter is shot dead on his land by an old woman recently arrived via the Underground Railroad. When the old woman, whose name is Cash, refuses to flee before the authorities arrive, the farmer urges Lensinda to gather testimony from her before Cash is condemned. But Cash doesn't want to confess--instead she proposes a barter: A story for a story. And so begins an extraordinary exchange of life stories that reveal the interwoven history of Canada and the United States; of Indigenous peoples from a wide swath of what is called North America and the Black men and women brought here into slavery and their free descendents on both sides of the border. As Cash's time runs out, Lensinda realizes she knows far less than she believed, not only about the complicated tapestry of her people's ancestry, but also of her own family history. And it seems that Cash may carry a secret that could shape Lensinda's destiny. Moving from Virginia to Kentucky, from Montreal to Indigenous communities on the shores of the Great Lakes and Black communties in southern Ontario and a fictionalized version of Owen Sound, these two women's life stories weave together love, tragedy, and survival, to map their own unexpected interconnections onto the history of North America in an entirely new and resonant way."--