Freedom Song

Gr 1—3—Brown is famous as a slave who had himself packed into a wooden box and shipped from Virginia to freedom in Pennsylvania. His story has been told by Virginia Hamilton in Many Thousand Gone (Knopf, 1993) and in Ellen Levine's Henry's Freedom Box (Scholastic, 2007). After discovering that Brown sang in his church choir, Walker took a different approach and built her story around the man's love of music. She imagines him as a child, surrounded by a loving family "even though they were slaves on Master's plantation," making up songs to help him through the toil of the day: a "workday song" in the fields, a "gather-up song" in the garden, then the "freedom song" he only can sing quietly at night. As an adult, Brown marries and is devastated when his wife's master sells her and their children. Inconsolable, he and a white man named Samuel Smith come up with the shipping plan. A letter from the man who receives the box describes how Brown came out of it and sang a hymn, a fitting finale to Walker's rhythmic text. Qualls's primitive-style collage illustrations strongly convey the depth of Brown's emotions.—Lucinda Snyder Whitehurst, St. Christopher's School, Richmond, VA