The Chaneysville Incident

The Chaneysville Incident

David Bradley

#268 of 8,085 books · #138 in Fiction

Won the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction (1982). Also shortlisted or longlisted for 1 other award.

The Chaneysville Incident won the PEN/Faulkner Award and was a finalist for the National Book Award. Brilliant but troubled historian John Washington has left Philadelphia, where he is employed by a major university, to return to his hometown just north of the Mason–Dixon Line. He is there to care for Old Jack, one of the men who helped raise him when he was growing up on the Hill, an old black neighborhood in the little Pennsylvania town—but he also wants to learn more about the death of his father. What John discovers is that his father, Moses Washington, left behind extensive notes on a mystery he was researching: why thirteen escaped slaves reached freedom in Chaneysville only to die there, for reasons forgotten or never known at all. Based on meticulous historical research, The Chaneysville Incident explores the power of our pasts, and paints a vivid portrait of realities such as the Underground Railroad's activity in Bedford County, Pennsylvania, and the phenomenon of enslaved people committing suicide to escape their fate.