Find Your Personal “Connections” to History at FREE Workshop & Book Signing

Join Author Minnette Coleman for how her latest book THE TREE: A Journey to Freedom helped her look for – and find – connections

“Connections” Workshop led by Coleman will help you explore your “connections” to historical figures, family heritage, places in US or globally, religious organizations, and more.

BOOK SIGNING at Sister’s Uptown Bookstore

BONUS: FREE article “Connections – on Sharing Black and Quaker History,” by Minnette Coleman with purchase of THE TREE: A Journey to Freedom

The Tree in author Minnette Coleman’s latest novel THE TREE: A Journey to Freedom is drawn from the real 300-year-old tulip poplar tree that continues to stand today in Greensboro, NC. It is called The Underground Railroad Tree, because of its connection to the freedom network for slaves with the aid of Quaker abolitionists and today is a National Park Service historic site. Although Coleman attended Guilford College, a Quaker school, until her research for her book she was unaware of her connection to The Tree. Through Coleman’s historical research, she discovered that this tree — in Greensboro-based Guilford College Woods — is on land that was never part of a plantation. She notes:

“Therefore, my story couldn’t be based or focused on the enslaved blacks imprisoned on a farm. Instead, the story is based on a hero – in this case, a female character named Epsie – who escapes that prison and on what Epsie must endure and then encounter to escape and to be free.”

Her novel THE TREE tells the story of how the belief that if only a slave could escape and make it to The Tree he or she would be free. That belief inspires her character Epsie as well as hundreds of other slaves that history documents to escape and to find the tree. They believed in the protective powers of that tree, namely that the branches of The Tree could not be used to hang or trap a slave, but instead, only to hide and welcome the runaway to freedom.