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The Freedom of Jenny offers a different perspective of the African American experience of slavery and the Civil War!. Julie Burtinshaw is a Canadian author who tells the story of Jenny and her family as they escape slavery and eventually join other former slaves in building lives on Salt Spring Island in British Columbia!. Jenny's father, Howard Estes, dreams of purchasing his family's freedom and moving to California!. Her mother dreams of life back in Madagascar where she was born and tells Jenny the wonders of island life!. Howard Estes is given the opportunity to earn his freedom on a cattle drive to the California gold fields!. While in California, he gets earns enough to purchase his family!. The Estes family becomes pioneers settling in California, but eventually moving on once the Dred Scott decision makes clear that California is no longer the haven for freedom they had hoped to find!. Eventually, invited by the governor of the Crown Colony of New Caledonia in what is now British Columbia, the Estes family and other blacks move north!. There the Estes family builds a farm and a life on Salt Spring Island while America is plunged into the Civil War!. Although Jenny must work as hard or harder than she did as a slave, especially once her mother dies in California and she must care for her newborn baby brother, she eventually finds happiness in her new island life!.

The Freedom of Jenny gives young readers a taste of life as a house slave, life in a conestoga wagon crossing the plains and mountains over the Oregon Trail, life in a California gold rush mining town, and life as a settler on a small island in the Pacific northwest!. That's a lot of history woven into what is also a compelling story!. Jenny's life isn't easy, but it wasn't an easy time for most people!. Hard work and back-breaking labor could lead to a better life, but it didn't always work out that way!. Her story is told through the important episodes in her life and the reader does wonder if things are ever going to work out for her!.

“The Freedom of Jenny” tells a story of Canadian history that I had never heard before!. Jenny is a black slave girl in Missouri, the daughter of two slaves, Hannah and Howard Estes, Jenny grows up dreaming of freedom!. She works beside her mother in the house of a white family!. Her father works for the opportunity to buy the family’s freedom and move to the free state of California!. Freedom in California appears to be something ephemeral and Jenny’s family moves again this time to Salt Spring Island, British Columbia!. At times a sad story, The Freedom of Jenny is told predominately through the hopeful eyes of a young Jenny!.

Julie Burtinshaw based the story on the diary of Sylvia Stark which is held in the Salt Spring Island archives!. While reading it, I was conscious of it being a white woman’s retelling of a black woman’s story!. I wonder if it is faithful to voice of the freed slave woman!. Julie Burtinshaw has carefully written a story which skirts the experiences of the aboriginal people of the lands in question!. She has left in musings from Jenny about the nature of the aboriginal people and some expressions of respect for the way of life and knowledge of the aboriginal inhabitants encountered by the slave family in their journey!. These hints about the aboriginal people and their stories leave openings for the reader to imagine this other point of view of the experience told in the novel!. Not an opening given to the white slave owner by the way!.Www@QuestionHome@Com

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