Song yet Sung

Maryland’s Eastern Shore, 1850. Liz Spocott, an enslaved young woman wounded during an attempted escape, is imprisoned in the attic of the slave trader Patty Cannon. After learning fragments of a secret communication system known as the Code, Liz escapes again and enters the swamps, farms and waterways where enslaved people, free Black residents, watermen and slave catchers are connected by fear, obligation and concealed knowledge.

Liz’s visions of the future give the pursuit a prophetic dimension while the people around her must decide whether freedom is worth the danger of helping her. McBride draws on the history of Patty Cannon and the region associated with Harriet Tubman to create a suspenseful account of slavery as a network of law, commerce and violence—and of the parallel networks through which Black communities resisted it.