The Freedom Maze

The Freedom Maze (2011) by Delia Sherman won the Andre Norton Award, the Prometheus Award and the Mythopoeic Award for Children's/Young Adult Literature. It was also nominated for a Tiptree Award. The setting of the book is a Louisiana sugar plantation in the 1960s and the 1860s. In the 1960s, most of the land has been sold and the proud remnants of the family, Grandmama and Aunt Enid Fairchild, live in the only remaining house, Oak Cottage. Sophie, the thirteen-year-old protagonist, is suffering through a divorce. She has an absent father and a self-centered mother, who takes Sophie to live with her Fairchild relatives for the summer because Sophie's mother needs to "prepare" for her new life. As Sophie explores the surrounding property and the bayou, she encounters a magical trickster figure that she calls the Creature. He tells her: "I mighty powerful juju. I sits at the doorway betwixt might be and is, betwixt was and will be, betwixt here and there. I breaks chains and bends laws" (38).

Feeling alone and unloved, Sophie escapes through books. After one especially bad argument with her mother, the Creature appears in Sophie's room and she wishes to have an adventure, like the characters in The Time Garden. The creature promptly sends her back to 1860, where Fairchild plantation life is at its height, with beaux and balls in the honor of the belle, Miss Elizabeth Fairchild. The best way I can describe the book is Kindred for young adults. However, other classic young adult books also influenced Sherman's writing. Besides Edward Eager's The Time Garden, this book owes much to E. Nesbit's Five Children Series, especially Five Children and It and The Story of the Amulet. Sophie even reads the latter book during the novel. Nesbit and Eager's books both contain magical trickster figures, Psammead in the former and Nannerjack in the latter, that suggest Sophie's Creature.

When Sophie arrives in the past, she is believed to be a mulatto slave because of her appearance. She is dirty, bare-foot and very tan. She also has unruly, curly dark hair, which she inherited from her father's side of the family. Yet, her resemblance to her mother's family ("the Fairchild nose") makes the plantation owners think she is the offspring of Robert, the black sheep who lives a degenerate life in New Orleans. This resemblance insures her an inside job and she begins training to become the body servant of her five-times great-grandmother.

After living on the plantation for several weeks, the Creature appears and informs her that he cannot return her to her time until the story is over, "the story of how you done what it is you supposed to do, of course—the thing I brung you here to do" (109). Of course, he will not tell her what her role in this story is. Therefore, Sophie settles into her life as a mulatto slave, resented by the blacks and suspected by the whites.

This book gives Sophie the adventure that she wishes for and follows many of the normal beats of a young adult novel, without being clichéd or entirely predictable. It explores slave life and demonstrates many of the forms of "betwixt and between" that slaves had to endure. One of the most interesting explorations of this hybrid life occurs in Sherman's look at the slaves' religious live. First, they endure the preacher the master provides for them on Sunday morning and then travel into the bayou to hear their own preacher and have their own service. However, they also participate in voodoo. Sherman's book demonstrates the mixture of African and Caribbean cultures that informed Louisiana voodoo and folkways. The readers encounter the Haitian Papa Legba, the gate-keeper between human and spirit worlds; Yoruba deities called Orishas, including Yemaya, a mother goddess; and Jamaican spirit beings called duppies. The readers learn about magical charms, such as veve and gris gris, as well.

Folklore is not the only thoroughly-researched area in the book. The acknowledgements section is very interesting to read as it outlines Sherman's path as she planned, researched, and wrote the book.

This is a fantastic book, and while I never forgot I was reading a YA novel, it is one that would interest adults as well.