In the Upper Country by Kai Thomas 2023

Book Discussion of In the Upper Country by Kai Thomas

Thirteen of us met on Saturday Oct. 5th to discuss Kai Thomas’s In the Upper Country, his debut novel. The story begins with an elderly woman who has escaped slavey from the US, and is now in Canada, shoots a slavecatcher who has tracked her there. A much younger woman, a journalist name Lensinda is assigned the task of interviewing the old woman, who is now in jail. When Lensinda asks the woman for her story, the woman responds by saying, “A tale for a tale.” Thus, Lensinda is required to tell a story to receive the old woman’s story. This starts a reciprocal arrangement of storytelling over the interviews.  

Kai Thomas, author 

Wendy started us out saying, “I have to say I loved listening to it, but I also think that if I had read it, I may have absorbed more. I thought the language was just exquisite. I also kept feeling that each story I would lose track of sometimes, but I stopped worrying about that and just listened to the stories and eventually there would be the connection between them and how it all related. It seemed like a film. I hope they make it into a film. And I learned such a lot about history that I had no idea about, especially concerning the overlap between the African American population and the Indigenous population. On the audiobook, there were three different readers.  

Shelara: Yes, there was one woman and two men. The woman did the voices of Lensinda and Cash. 

Marian offered, “I found it so strange for Lensinda to just take off, when her family’s land was attacked. She didn’t say a word to her family. She just left. Also, I still remain curious as to why Simeon disagreed with Lensinda when she suggested just burying the slavecatcher’s body in the swamp, instead of calling the constable. “ 

Meghan added, “I didn’t know much about the relationship between Canada and the US, and the war of 1812. I feel like all I had ever learned about the War of 1812 was that it was fought between the US and Great Britain, but I forgot that Canada was Great Britain, and the US is Canada’s closest neighbor, we share a lot of borders with them. I think I was really struck by the Canadian slavery stories that were just beyond borders.” 

Illustration from the text, credited to Jeffrey L. Ward

Barb followed up with, “The most striking thing to me was learning about the town of Dunmore. You always hear the stories about the formerly enslaved trying to get to Canada, to try to get to freedom, but not about what happens in freed slaves’ towns and the life there in its richness and in its complexity and the diverse reactions when the slavecatcher was killed: ‘we need to call the police’ vs. ‘we need to get rid of the body.’” 

Jeffrey L. Ward illustration from the text

Marian continued, “The other question that was never clearly answered had to do with what the old woman was saying to the Indigenous man named Dave, out back. We read about her gesturing and pointing at the ground. Simeon couldn’t hear what she was saying, he could only see her actions out of the window.” 

Shelara answered, “I thought she was telling him that she was part of his tribe. That’s why he knelt and gave her honor, and she in turn, offered him the necklace from around her neck.” 

Robin added, “She spoke to him in an Indigenous tongue.” 

Barb continued, “I found this book included many people’s back stories. There are all these interwoven stories which were hard to track. I thought I should have been drawing family trees and connections, but I was just reading.” 

Robin followed up with, “I liked the book very much, but I never feel like I got all the connections. One of the things that surprised me was that a person could go from slavery to freedom, then back to slavery, Lensinda expresses this on page 65: 

“Freedom is never absolute, it seems, and therefore escape, despite what they tell you, yields no final destination.  

Even here in the promised land, freedom was a frail thing – hollow at the core.” 

Wendy said she felt the same way about Girl Woman Other, (by Bernadine Evaristo,) “which I read a couple of years ago, in which I felt the same way and then I found online that someone had actually drawn a web of who was connected to who.”  

Shelara called our attention to the fact that the reason we do not hear about the war of 1812 is because we didn’t win. “Remember, in the Revolutionary War, a lot of enslaved people fought on the side of the British because they were promised freedom. So there’s a thread in all enslaved people’s history of fighting on the side of the British. I was interested in this book because it talks about things we had not heard a lot about. Canada ended slavery in 1934, the United States didn’t end slavery until 1865. Between those two dates there was the Fugitive Slave Act in 1850, which required that escaped slaves be returned to their owners, even if they were in a free state. So now formerly enslaved people had to go to Canada to find refuge. Anyplace you went in the United States, freedom was not guaranteed. Even if you were born free, you could be kidnapped and sold into slavery...They could have just hidden the slavecatcher’s body. I was with Lensinda, but they needed the old woman’s story out there. They were trying to make the abolitionist movement stronger.” 

Ann told us, “The thing that impacted me the most was the amount of trauma that was going on constantly, whether it was the loss of a significant other, or injury, or having to move right away. There were some discussions about how to approach things: whether to approach things with violence or non-violence. I had heard that after slavery was ended in the United States, a lot of people who had escaped to Canada came back because there was so much abuse going on in Canada.” 

Ann went on to tell us that some of the biggest slave owners were in Connecticut.  

Shelara added, “About Connecticut, was it William Lloyd Garrison who called Connecticut the Georgia of the North?” 

Nancy elaborated on this idea, telling us that “Diane Orson of Connecticut Public did a really good series called The Unforgotten which is exactly what you’re talking about. She interviewed a number of descendants of enslaved people in New England.” 

Robin, steering us back into the discussion of the book, said “I liked the magical piece that was in there. When Monk takes Chiron into the woods, and they go down into this other world.” 

Marian interjected, saying, “That was a maroon colony, right?” 

Robin continued, “There was like a magical quality, description of life in the cave. And then later in the book Chiron went back to that underground dwelling, the leader said he remembered Chiron’s real father: Apollo.”  

Shelara clarified that Apollo had run away and joined the Indigenous people.  

Marian wanted to talk about the little parables at the beginning of Lensinda and the old woman’s conversations. Lensinda started out talking about the enslaved woman who fell in love with someone, and the master decided to sell her off. The buyers put her on a boat, and she kept weeping and weeping until she made the water in the lake rise. The buyers pushed her overboard, thinking that they would save themselves but in the end the ship was broken up.” 

Shelara said that story was the Canada emancipation story. 

Robin wanted to know why Monk and Chiron didn’t just stay in the Underland with the Maroons.  

On p. 144, Monk explains to Chiron, “’At the Ruttle house...strange as it may be, (p.145) I have got some measure of security. Even now, we will be absent for as long as it suits us, and nothing will come of it. And that is a thing most could never dream of.’ I still recollect the glare that old man Ruttle gave us when he saw us in the field the next afternoon. But Monk was right; nothing ever came of it.”  

Shelara called our attention to how old man Ruttle thought he lost both is sons in a raid, but his youngest son had survived and had been raised by indigenous people. This son’s name was Alexander. He traded priceless furs with his father, gaining Chiron and his horse. He took Chiron back with him to the Detroit area and gave him a wife, named Anne. Anne and Chiron had two children. Alexander had arranged for Chiron’s freedom upon his death, but his sons wouldn’t honor that the way it was intended: they freed Chiron but not his wife and children. This is just one of the insidious byproducts of chattel slavery, your life and the lives of your family members hinge on the whims of someone else.  

Chiron’s story is just one of many in this book of interrelated narratives, which explore connections between Black former slaves and their relationships with the Indigenous people of the area as well as the fluidity between slavery and freedom itself.