Raven Quickskill

Raven Quickskill is the protagonist of the novel, although he is not present in many of the novel’s scenes. He is an escaped slave who used to be under the dominion of a very wealthy man named Arthur Swille. Before the events of the novel, Quickskill ran away from Swille’s Virginia estate with two other escaped slaves, called Stray Leechfield and 40s. Raven arrives in a town called Emancipation City near the northern border of the United States. He writes a poem, “Flight to Canada,” and the poem becomes a success. It earns Quickskill enough money to travel to Canada to start a new life.

Quickskill is portrayed as a spirited and idealistic man with a penchant for artistic expression and an understandable fixation on the role of race in society. His idealism becomes somewhat deflated when he arrives in Canada and finds that racism...