This âsuperbly researched and engagingâ (The Wall Street Journal) true story about five boys who were kidnapped in the North and smuggled into slavery in the Deep Southâand their daring attempt to escape and bring their captors to justice belongs âalongside the work of Harriet Beecher Stowe, Edward P. Jones, and Toni Morrisonâ (Jane Kamensky, Professor of American History at Harvard University).
Philadelphia, 1825: five young, free black boys fall into the clutches of the most fearsome gang of kidnappers and slavers in the United States. Lured onto a small ship with the promise of food and pay, they are instead met with blindfolds, ropes, and knives. Over four long months, their kidnappers drive them overland into the Cotton Kingdom to be sold as slaves. Determined to resist, the boys form a tight brotherhood as they struggle to free themselves and find their way home.
Their ordealâan odyssey that takes them from the Philadelphia waterfront to the marshes of Mississippi and then onward stillâshines a glaring spotlight on the Reverse Underground Railroad, a black market network of human traffickers and slave traders who stole away thousands of legally free African Americans from their families in order to fuel slaveryâs rapid expansion in the decades before the Civil War.
âRigorously researched, heartfelt, and dramatically concise, Bellâs investigation illuminates the role slavery played in the systemic inequalities that still confront Black Americansâ (Booklist).