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Black people in my family and community were, of course, descendants of the enslaved.

I’m also obsessed with maroonage, a Black cultural tradition in which people who were enslaved would escape to the mountains and form independent communities.

Riding those subterranean rails is Cora, a headstrong enslaved woman determined to find her freedom in the North and learn the fate of her disappeared mother.

When one of her enslaved piglets colors a picture with crayons, she turns him into a pork chop.

The heroine — daughter of a plantation owner — gets caught in the chaos and stumbles upon a group of formerly enslaved people from her father’s cotton fields.