The fourth book in the popular Elm Creek Quilts
series explores a question that has long captured the
imagination of quilters and historians alike: Did
stationmasters of the Underground Railroad use quilts to
signal to fugitive slaves?
In her first
novel, The Quilter's Apprentice, Jennifer Chiaverini
wove quilting lore with tales from the World War II home
front. Now, following Round Robin and The
Cross-Country Quilters, Chiaverini revisits the legends
of Elm Creek Manor, as Sylvia Compson discovers evidence of
her ancestors' courageous involvement in the Underground
Railroad.
Alerted to the possibility that her family had
ties to the slaveholding South, Sylvia scours her attic and
finds three quilts and a memoir written by Gerda, the
spinster sister of clan patriarch Hans Bergstrom. The memoir
describes the founding of Elm Creek Manor and how, using
quilts as markers, Hans, his wife, Anneke, and Gerda came to
beckon fugitive slaves to safety within its walls. When a
runaway named Joanna arrives from a South Carolina
plantation pregnant with her master's child, the Bergstroms
shelter her through a long, dangerous winter -- imagining
neither the impact of her presence nor the betrayal that
awaits them.
The memoir raises new questions for every
one it answers, leading Sylvia ever deeper into the tangle
of the Bergstrom legacy. Aided by the Elm Creek Quilters, as
well as by descendants of others named in Gerda's tale,
Sylvia dares to face the demons of her family's past and at
the same time reaffirm her own moral center. A spellbinding
fugue on the mysteries of heritage, The Runaway Quilt
unfolds with all the drama and suspense of a classic in the
making.
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