Ta-Nehisi Coates

Inevitably readers will compare Ta-Nehisi Coates's fiction piece - it clearly seems to be a first chapter in a forthcoming novel, not a short story - in the New Yorker fiction issue, Conduction, with other recent works on a similar theme notably Colson Whitehead's underground-railroad novel and maybe less recent works Ike the great film 12 years a slave or eve Beloved, but the key is there are many possible approaches to and imaginations about that too little chronicled moment in American history in which activists from north and south, both black and white risked their lives in search of freedom and in helping others in that search. So Coates's is a work of historical fiction set sometime before the civil war and narrated by a man who attained freedom through forged papers and w the aid of a group of activists who help guide black men and women to the North and then provided social services to the freedmen and women. The chapter in the NYer gives the needed background - sometimes w a clumsy narration in which characters tell their life story in a few paragraphs (too much tell not show), but in other ways it's a hugely promising opening, describing a social network among the recently freed that has been seldom chronicled at least to my knowledge - and the tension the builds across the narrative is that the narrator- Hiram (?) - will return to the south to help others, particularly those whose race to freedom separated them from the spouses and children.

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