By Ellen Levine
The true story of a man born into slavery who mailed himself north to freedom in a wooden crate.
Henry Brown is born into slavery in Virginia. He doesn't even have a birthday, because the people who enslaved him didn't let the children know theirs. He grows up, marries a woman he loves, and they have children together. Then one day, at the slave market, his wife and children are sold to another owner and marched away, and he never sees them again. Out of that grief he lands on something almost nobody would dare: he has himself nailed inside a wooden crate and shipped north like a package, hundreds of miles, and climbs out the other end a free man. This really happened, in 1849.
Slavery is an enormous thing to put in front of a seven-year-old, and this book manages it by hanging the whole subject on one person and one astonishing act. Your child doesn't have to take in all of history at once. They follow Henry. Nothing is softened — his family really is sold, and it isn't undone — but the story leans toward his courage rather than the cruelty, so a younger reader can carry it out the other side. And Kadir Nelson's paintings are extraordinary; the book won a Caldecott Honor and earns it.