Free Enterprise: A Novel of Mary Ellen Pleasant (Signed!) [B0415]

1993 HCDJ Signed 1st edition. In 1858, two black women meet at a restaurant and begin to plot a revolution. Mary Ellen Pleasant owns a string of hotels in San Francisco that secretly double as havens for runaway slaves. Her comrade, Annie, is a young Jamaican who has given up her life of privilege to fight for the abolitionist cause. Together they join John Brown's doomed enterprise and barely escape with their lives. With mesmerizing skill, Cliff weaves a multitude of voices into a gripping, poignant story of the struggle for liberation that began not long after the first slaves landed on America's shores. "Written with lyrical power, Free Enterprise is a novel whose beauty opens out from every level of its existence. Confident and visionary, its urgent social agenda-as relevant today as in the time of the setting-speaks with courage to the human struggle for justice and freedom. Bravo! For Michelle Cliff."-Clarence Major, author of Such Was the Season. "Free Enterprise is an angry, gaudy, multicultural storm of a historical novel . . . At the heart of this story are two African-American women, comrades of abolitionist John Brown . . . Michelle Cliff brings together a fabulous cast of outsiders...to retell New World history from the women warriors' point of view."-Elle.

From recent Amazon/GoodReads reviews: "Michelle Cliff has an uncanny ability to make the reader feel the characters' emotions. This book is definitely not for the passive reader, but for those who want to walk away enlightened and changed, which is what good historical fiction is meant to do. This novel doesn't shy away from depicting the brutality and horror of slavery and oppression, and Cliff creates two strong female leaders who defy the restrictions placed on them and rise above their circumstances."