You know the people behind a newly disclosed TV project.
One is an elegant, gifted Detroit writer and the other is an elegant, gifted Detroit-born singer.
Betty DeRamus researches and tells stories of "hope, passion, courage and triumph of the human spirit."
Betty DeRamus and Stevie Wonder unite in a NBC venture based on her widely praised nonfiction book, "Forbidden Fruit: Love Stories From the Underground Railroad," Esther Zuckerman of Entertainment Weekly reports Friday afternoon.
NBC announced that it is producing an eight-hour miniseries about love stories on the Underground Railroad, with Stevie Wonder serving as executive producer.
The miniseries, titled "Freedom Run," is an adaptation of Betty DeRamus’s 2005 book. . . . It will focus on three “specific epic journeys and love stories, each based on actual people,” according to NBC.
But wait, there's more: The three screenwriters also are adapting the book for a stage musical, which would have songs composed by Wonder, the network says.
"Am I excited? You don't know the half of it," DeRamus says on Facebook, where her post has more than 320 likes and 180 comments.
DeRamus, a former Detroit News and Free Press columnist, isn't working directly on the TV series. There's no clue yet about what year we can watch it.
The publisher, Simon & Schuster, describes her first book -- which spent nine months on Essence magazine's best-seller list -- as stories of "hope, passion, courage and triumph of the human spirit."
Here you'll meet, among other extraordinary characters, a fugitive slave from Virginia who spends 17 years searching for his wife. A Georgia slave couple that sails for England with federal troops trailing behind. A white woman who falls in love with her deceased husband's slave. A young slave girl who is delivered to her fiancé inside a wooden chest.
Acclaimed journalist Betty DeRamus gleaned these anecdotes from descendants of runaway slave couples, unpublished memoirs, Civil War records, Census data, magazines and dozens of previously untapped sources. This is a book about people pursuing love and achievement in a time of hate and severely limited opportunities.
DeRamus' combines groundbreaking research with lush, lyrical storytelling, as this passage shows:
Molly Welsh knew the penalty for breaking Maryland's laws against marrying across the color line, but how many women could resist a tall, dark and handsome prince who carried his dignity with him like a cape. Certainly not Molly Welsh. She had been in trouble before and knew its texture and smell.
The 288-page paperback germinated from research for a four-part Detroit News series on untold underground railroad stories, which won a Michigan Press Association top prize.
The Detroiter followed up with a 2009 book titled "Freedom By Any Means: True Stories of Cunning and Courage on the Underground Railroad." Both collections are "oral history buttressed by hard facts. Isn't that what journalists do?" DeRamus tells Sandra Svoboda in a 2009 Metro Times interview.
While at The News, DeRamus was a 1993 Pulitzer Prize finalist in the commentary category "for her columns about the problems and promise of urban America." During her journalism career, she toured Central African refugee camps under the auspices of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees and was outside the South African prison when Nelson Mandela was freed in 1990.
She has written about African-American history for Essence, Time-Life and Black World.
The video below is from a 2008 appearance at the Kerrytown BookFest in Ann Arbor.
