Mark Leslie will speak about True North: Tice’s Story at the Friday Local Author Series

Friday, March 13th at noon in Meeting Room #5

Portland, Maine - The heroes of Portland’s Freedom Trail and Maine’s Underground Railroad north through Augusta, China, Bangor and Brewer are vital characters in a new novel — True North: Tice’s Story — by Maine author Mark Alan Leslie.  Set in 1860, Leslie’s historical thriller follows the 19-year-old, God-fearing Tice as he runs from his master’s plantation in Maysville, Ky., and swims the Ohio River to Ripley, Ohio, where he is connected to a network of people who rush him northeastward, ever northeastward toward New Brunswick, Canada. The ruthless and relentless Morgan, his master’s foreman, is constantly on his trail.  Along the way, Tice is aided by real historical people who were key “conductors” on the Underground Railroad, including the memorable Henry David Thoreau, who joins Tice from Newton to Andover, Mass.

When Tice crosses over into Maine, he is nearly caught by Morgan and when he reaches Portland,
Morgan is already there, searching for him at Mariner’s Church and along the harborside which was known for scurrying slaves onboard ships to escape.  Besides the pastor at Mariner’s Church, Portland’s Reuben Ruby and the Samuel Fessenden family team up to rush Tice out of the city.  Readers familiar with the Freedom Trail will be drawn into a telling of the Portland Rum Riot of 1855 and a chilling scene at the Fessenden home.

On his way to Canada, Tice is helped by Frank and Mildred Nason in Augusta and by Abel and Elizabeth Chadwick of Vassalboro whose son Caleb takes them to Bangor and Brewer.  The famous Holyoke House in Brewer, which served as a way-station for a number of runaways, sending them down an underground tunnel to the Penobscot River and waiting boats, is the penultimate safe house for Tice and another slave who joins him in Portland. The river is the site for the final, deadly confrontation with Morgan.

True North: Tice’s Story is a refreshing telling of the great escape of the African slaves out of bondage in the South in the 1850s and 1860s. And it serves as a prequel to Leslie’s coming The Last Aliyah in which descendants of Tice and the Chadwicks are involved in a modern-day underground railroad helping Jews escape America, which has joined a worldwide ban on Jewish immigration to Israel.

This is the second historical novel by Leslie, a former editor of the Portland newspapers who was raised in Scarborough and Brewer and lives in Monmouth with his wife, Loy. A longtime journalist who has won five national magazine writing awards, Leslie authored the nationally acclaimed Midnight Rider for the Morning Star, which was based on the life and times of America’s first circuit-riding preacher, Francis Asbury.

A golf writer for two decades, he also wrote to the golf e-books Putting a Little Spin on It: The Design’s the Thing! and Putting a Little Spin on It: The Grooming’s the Thing!