Title: Free Enterprise
First published: 1993
Description: In 1858, two black women meet at a restaurant and begin to plot a revolution. Mary Ellen Pleasant owns a string of hotels in San Francisco that secretly double as havens for runaway slaves. Her comrade, Annie, is a young Jamaican who has given up her life of privilege to fight for the abolitionist cause. Together they join John Brown’s doomed enterprise and barely escape with their lives.

With mesmerizing skill, Cliff weaves a multitude of voices into a gripping, poignant story of the struggle for liberation that began not long after the first slaves landed on America’s shores.
Subjects: Jamaican Americans, American authors, African American businesspeople, African American women abolitionists, African Americans, Earthquakes, Fiction, Fugitive slaves, History, Hotelkeepers, Hotels, Underground railroad, Women abolitionists, Women civil rights workers, Free enterprise, West virginia, fiction, African American businesswomen
Places: Harpers Ferry (W. Va.), San Francisco (Calif.), United States
People: Mary Ellen Pleasant
Time periods: 19th century, John Brown's Raid, 1859