David Bradley · 1981 · exile

Winner of the PEN/Faulkner, and built on something Bradley's mother actually found: thirteen unmarked graves on a Bedford County farm, confirming a local story that a party of runaway slaves who reached free soil in Pennsylvania asked to be killed rather than taken back. A historian goes home to work out why.

1. 1
   Philadelphia

   John Washington is a historian at a major university, in a life he has built at some distance from where he came from - and a telephone call tells him that Old Jack Crawley is dying and he has to go back.

2. 2
   Bedford

   The county town just north of the Mason-Dixon line, and the Hill - the old black neighbourhood he grew up in, which he can navigate in the dark and does not want to be in at all.

3. 3
   Old Jack's cabin

   Up in the hills where the man who really raised him is dying by degrees - and where John finds that his father Moses, supposedly illiterate, left extensive notes on a piece of local history nobody would explain to him.

4. 4
   Virginia

   The other half of the book: thirteen escaped slaves coming north on the Underground Railroad, out of a South that is legally entitled to send men after them and does.

5. 5
   The Mason-Dixon line

   The surveyed line that Mason and Dixon cut in the 1760s and that by 1850 meant the difference between a person and a piece of property - crossed by thirteen people who believe they have got clear.

6. 6
   Chaneysville

   They reach free soil and die there anyway, and someone takes trouble to bury them properly - thirteen unmarked graves that Bradley's mother really found on a Bedford County farm in 1969, which is where the novel comes from.