Henry's Freedom Box (review)

Among the stories of runaway slaves, the tale of Henry "Box" Brown's successful 1849 flight from Richmond, Virginia, to Philadelphia via packing crate is one of the more famous. Although it can be related in the quasi-folkloric tone of a trickster tale, Levine focuses on the poignant details of his earlier life—his forced separation from his mother and later from his wife and children—that make his ultimate escape a bittersweet triumph. Levine and Nelson's collaboration is well suited to primary-grade listeners, from the plainspoken text ("'Your wife and children were just sold at the slave market.' 'No!,' cried Henry. Henry couldn't move. Henry couldn't think. Henry couldn't work") to the dramatic images (a larger than life double-page bleed of Brown's mounting anxieties; cross-sections of his contortion in the wooden crate). Nelson's mixed-media illustrations, with their cross-hatched pencil lines inspired by a nineteenth-century lithograph, often seem to more closely emulate crackled glazing; and although some male figures in their lengthy topcoats appear oddly truncated, the sober, fixed gaze of Brown as a boy and the steely dignity of Brown as a man are riveting indeed. No citations are offered for quotations, which are loosely paraphrased from Brown's own account, but reference to the Brown narrative and that of equally famous escapee William Still are included following a brief author's note.