runagate

Bettina Scott, who lives with her odd, controlling mother, is at the center of a number of family mysteries in her village of Runagate, a place where you’ll find “roses planted in wire-fenced gardens on the buried corpses of roadside kangaroos.”

His great-great-great-grandfather Scipio, a runaway slave, intended to escape from Kentucky alone but wound up trying to help another runagate, a pregnant woman named Abby, cross the Ohio River.

The last work on the program was also the most impressive: “Runagate, Runagate,” by Wendell Logan, sets Robert Hayden’s flamboyant poem about a runaway slave to music of wild ferocity, sobriety, eeriness and mordant wit.

"Well, I must say Marmaduke might have remembered that he had other relatives besides that runagate son," grumbled the squire.

The room, stiflingly close, lay in semi-darkness; on the bed sprawled the young runagate, dead asleep, his arms tossed wide.