Flight to Canada

Set during and after the American Civil War, the novel uses deliberate anachronisms, placing modern technology like jumbo jets, televisions, and helicopters into an antebellum landscape, to satirize historical narratives about slavery, freedom, and American identity. The story is framed by scenes of Raven Quickskill, a fugitive slave and poet, living in a Virginia Castle now owned by his former fellow slave, Uncle Robin. From this vantage point, Quickskill looks back on his escape and the events that shaped his fate.

The novel opens with Quickskill's poem "Flight to Canada," a mocking letter to his former master, Arthur Swille III. Quickskill taunts Swille about escaping on a jumbo jet, sneaking back to the plantation, stealing money from his safe, and leaving rat poison in his whiskey. The poem made Quickskill famous but also acted as a bloodhound, exposing the hiding places of himself and two other escaped slaves, 40s and Stray Leechfield. A meditation on storytelling follows, in which the narrator considers how Harriet Beecher Stowe appropriated Josiah Henson's autobiography to write Uncle Tom's Cabin, framing the theft of a person's story as a spiritual violation. Robin has entrusted Quickskill to write his life story, protecting it with literary "witchery" so it cannot be stolen as Henson's was.

The Swille dynasty is built on Arthurian legend, a mythology of knights and feudal hierarchy that serves as the ideological foundation for their slaveholding empire. The first Swille built a Castle modeled on Camelot; his grandson, Arthur Swille III, is an international rogue who once flogged Queen Victoria. Security on the estate is heavy because Swille's son Mitchell, an anthropologist, was killed in the Congo by a group called the Snake Society. In his study, Swille drinks his morning ration of slave mothers' milk and interrogates Robin about the escaped slaves. Robin, required to dress as a Moorish servant, performs the role of loyal, simple-minded house slave with expert precision. Swille frames the escapes using pseudoscientific language, citing a fictitious disease called "Drapetomania" that supposedly compels slaves to run away. Mammy Barracuda, the domineering head of the household slaves, enters to report that Ms. Swille has taken to her bed, refusing to eat in a suffragette boycott.

Abraham Lincoln arrives at the Castle seeking gold for the Union war effort. Swille mocks Lincoln's folksy manner, praises Confederate President Jefferson Davis as a cultured aristocrat, and tries to seduce Lincoln with visions of feudal paradise. Lincoln erupts in a populist speech defending the common people who built America's wealth. Impressed, Swille hands over bags of gold. In the carriage returning to his yacht, Lincoln drops the folksy act and reveals the encounter has given him a strategic idea: He will issue the Emancipation Proclamation to redefine the conflict so that supporting the South means supporting slavery. He orders the gold returned.

Cato the Graffado, Swille's mixed-race overseer who bears a striking resemblance to Swille, discovers through a literary magazine contact that Quickskill's poem is about to be published, its boasts pinpointing the fugitives' location near the Great Lakes. Swille mobilizes tracers and bloodhounds. After Cato leaves, he collides with Robin, who has been listening through the keyhole. Cato mocks Robin for receiving only a flat fee from Stowe for an interview she never used. Robin stares after him with a look that "could draw out the dust in a brick" (55). In their private quarters, Robin and his wife Judy reveal their true awareness, discussing Barracuda's tyranny over Ms. Swille and the household's use of biblical justifications for slavery. Judy recounts a disturbing story: A child found Swille lying atop the decomposed body of his dead sister Vivian in the family crypt, establishing his necrophilic obsession.

In Emancipation City, agents from Nebraska Tracers, Inc. inform Quickskill that his "lease on himself" has expired and Swille wants him repossessed. He escapes through a bathroom window and seeks allies among the other fugitives but finds them divided. Leechfield runs a pornographic photography business with his partner Mel Leer, a former indentured servant, and insists he has bought himself back by sending Swille a check. 40s, a militant who lives on a gun-filled houseboat, trusts only his rifle. Quickskill argues that words are as powerful as weapons, but 40s dismisses the idea.

Quickskill receives payment for his poem, enough for passage to Canada. At a farewell party hosted by Carpenter, a free Black craftsman also headed north, he reunites with Princess Quaw Quaw Tralaralara, a Native American frontier dancer and his former lover. Their affair began at the castle of her husband, Yankee Jack, a pirate who controls trade routes and shipping networks. Quickskill possesses a terrible secret about Jack that he has kept from Quaw Quaw. While the couple makes love at the party, the television broadcasts Lincoln's assassination at Ford's Theatre. They emerge to find partygoers weeping. At Jack's gate, Quaw Quaw begs Quickskill to take her to Canada, calling America a "half-savage country."

Back at Swille's plantation, Barracuda administers drugs that send Swille into Camelot fantasies, then launches a violent campaign to force Ms. Swille back into her role as Southern belle, kicking, scrubbing, and injecting her with sedatives. The ghost of Mitchell Swille, his body fused with a crocodile's, visits Ms. Swille and reveals his father's secret atrocities, including a film library screening footage of enslaved people being tortured. Ms. Swille declares she knows what to do.

At dinner, a Union general confirms to Swille that Lincoln's assassination was carried out as planned. Ms. Swille bursts in wielding a miniature cannon, confronting her husband about Mitchell's death. Swille talks her down, and she collapses into his arms, sobbing that she has been trying to become his dead sister Vivian. Vivian's ghost then appears, taunts Swille, and grabs him. He stumbles backward into the fireplace. The fire consumes him. Robin arrives with water too late.

Aboard a yacht arranged for passage to Canada, Quickskill and Quaw Quaw discover their benefactor is Yankee Jack. Quaw Quaw recognizes her father's skull used as an ashtray and confronts Jack, who reveals he raided her village for oil, killed her father, and raised her since she was 14. He adds that Quaw Quaw's own mother betrayed the chief's defenses for a share of the settlement. Overwhelmed, Quaw Quaw leaps into the Niagara rapids. Jack takes Quickskill across to Niagara Falls, Ontario, where Quickskill later spots Quaw Quaw crossing the Falls on a tightrope, backward, carrying a banner that reads: "Quickskill, I love you."

Their reunion is brief. Carpenter arrives at the hotel, bandaged after being beaten by anti-Black vigilantes who denied him a room. He describes a Canada dominated by American corporations and plagued by racial violence, shattering Quickskill's lifelong dream. He mentions casually that Swille is dead. Quickskill drops his head to the table. He and Quaw Quaw cross back into the United States, but their relationship fractures again over arguments about celebrity and artistic purity. She leaves in the middle of the night.

A judge reads Swille's will and reveals the final bequest: The entire Castle and estate go to Uncle Robin. Robin tearfully promises to run the estate as his master would have wanted, but at breakfast he confesses to Judy that he tampered with the will. He reasons that if the Dred Scott decision, in which the Supreme Court ruled that enslaved people had no rights white people were bound to respect, absolved slaveholders of moral obligation, then slaves need not respect their masters' property rights. He exploited Swille's dyslexia, becoming the man's reader and scribe, then used that power to leave the estate to himself. He also reveals the slave mothers' milk he served Swille each morning was actually Coffee Mate, a chemical-laden non-dairy creamer whose cumulative effects would eventually have killed Swille even without the fire.

Robin refuses a call from Stowe, who wants to write his story, and frees Leechfield when tracers deliver him in handcuffs. As evening falls, Robin reflects that "Canada, like freedom, is a state of mind." He compares himself to Nat Turner, the enslaved man who led a famous rebellion and was executed: Turner proclaimed a divine mission and died, while Robin, through patience and cunning, became master of a dead man's house. He wonders which approach was wiser. Pompey, the mysteriously swift house slave, announces that Raven Quickskill has returned.