Most Loved in All the World by Tonya Hegamin

Author:Tonya Hegamin [Hegamin, Tonya Cherie]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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Author's Note to Parents and Educators

ALTHOUGH IT MIGHT BE HARD for some people to understand how a mother could send a child off into the unknown without her, it was a common fact of slavery. Even in our modern times, for so many reasons, women are forced to do the same—give up their children for adoption or put them into foster care—not because they do not love the child, but often because they simply do not live in conditions in which they can give the child the life he or she deserves. In a way, these mothers place their love and value for their children's future over their own feelings. When I wrote this story, I envisioned a woman, a spy and secret agent on the Underground Railroad, a woman who valued freedom so much that she would desire her child's more than her own. Because the lives of the enslaved were so uncertain, for this woman there could be no false hope of reuniting, although she would desperately want to. Her only concern is that her daughter grows up free and far from the bonds of slavery. Although the documented history about the Underground Railroad has been cloaked, I believe there might have been many "secret agents" like the mother in this book who sacrificed being with their children for the greater good. I think that the hope in this story is that the little girl gets a chance at freedom knowing that her mother loved her and was unselfish enough to give her that chance even if it meant that they'd never see each other again.

Africans were fleeing not simply hard physical labor but more the spiritual torture and emotional toil of enslavement. The childhood death rate for slaves was two to three times higher than that for whites. Enslaved children who survived disease and malnutrition were not often raised by their birth families because of forced separation by slave owners and traders. Most children were put to hard labor (like carrying hundred-pound sacks of cotton) by age eight. Although there are a few accounts of whole families escaping on the Underground Railroad together, often, because of circumstance, parents would have to send their children north without them, regardless of overwhelming feelings of loss and regret, and without even a shred of hope of seeing their loved ones again. Their only hope was freedom itself.

The Underground Railroad transported an estimated one hundred thousand freedom seekers from the relentless fields of rice and cotton from about 1830 until around 1861. There were so many people who took part in this secret and illegal practice of stealing freedom—not only public figures like Harriet Tubman and Frederick Douglass but those whose job it was to stay on the plantation to encourage and help others to escape.

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