Bathika, Engendro de La Fortuna - Enrique Colon-Santana

Bathika is a story based upon actual events. Real events that occurred at separate moments in time, apparently unrelated, although not at different periods in history. In any event, all have been forgotten. Some of those moments are contained in the text of Prigg vs. Commonwealth of Penna., 41 U.S. 539 (1842). A mother and her children are kidnapped in Pennsylvania where slavery is against the law. A bounty hunter returns the family to their owners in Maryland, where it is not. For this, the bounty hunter is convicted of kidnapping. He challenges the constitutionality of Pennsylvania statute used to convict him before the Supreme Court. He argues that the law denied him his constitutional right possess and recover his property. The case gathers an accumulation of opposing forces that face off in the legal debates that follow, and breathe life into the novel's characters. This was a society already well along the path towards that colossal conflagration and where redemption had already slipped beyond reach. The story, making use of a very visual and captivating narrative, describes the childhood and life of the slave, the anxiety that precedes her decision to run away, the intense journey that follows her escape, the refinement of her commitment to live life as a free woman, the contradictory facets that plagued the Abolitionists and the confrontation that was waged along the very borders of a legal system that favored the interests of Slaveholders. This novel correlates with brilliant certainty that no system of Slavery can possibly anticipate a happy ending for those that suffer it, for those that oppose it, for those that cause it, just as it cannot for those that profit from it as neutral and indifferent observers."