Steal away home : one woman's epic flight to freedom -- and her long road back to the south

Summary: "Born into bondage in Louisville, Cecelia was only fifteen years old in 1846 when she made her treacherous journey across the Niagara River. Reaching Toronto, she married Underground Railroad conductor Benjamin Hoolmes and began a new life. But she never forgot the beloved family members she had been forced to leave behind. Cecelia risked her own freedom when she wrote to her Kentucky owners asking the price of her mother's liberty. The letter rekindled her relationship with Fanny, both her former mistress and the closest companion of her childhood. Thus began a twenty-year correspondence entirely unique in the annals of the Underground Railroad. Cecelia's struggle to raise the needed funds carried her across the Atlantic and back, then from the Richester, New York, of the great Frederick Douglass to the battlefields of the Civil War, and finally to Louisville once more. With hooded Night Riders terrorizing newly freed Blacks, Cecelia turned to Fanny for support. In spite of their differences, the two women resumed the precious but very unequal friendship that would endure for the rest of their lives." -- rear cover.