To Free a Family: The Journey of Mary Walker

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Description

What used to be it like for a mother to flee slavery, leaving her children in the back of? To Free a Family tells the remarkable story of Mary Walker, who in August 1848 fled her owner for refuge in the North and spent the next seventeen years seeking to recuperate her circle of relatives. Her freedom, like that of thousands who escaped from bondage, came at a super price-remorse at parting with no word, fear for her circle of relatives’s fate.

This story is anchored in two abnormal collections of letters and diaries, that of her former North Carolina slaveholders and that of the northern circle of relatives-Susan and Peter Lesley-who safe and employed her. Sydney Nathans’ sensitive and penetrating narrative reveals Mary Walker’s remarkable persistence in addition to the sustained collaboration of black and white abolitionists who assisted her. Mary Walker and the Lesleys ventured half a dozen attempts at liberation, from ransom to ruse to rescue, until the end of the Civil War reunited Mary Walker with her son and daughter.

Unlike her more famous counterparts-Harriet Tubman, Harriet Jacobs, and Sojourner Truth-who wrote their own narratives and whose public defiance made them heroines, Mary Walker’s efforts were protracted, wrenching, and private. Her odyssey used to be more representative of women refugees from bondage who labored secretly and in the back of the scenes to reclaim their families from the South. In recreating Mary Walker’s journey, To Free a Family gives voice to their hidden epic of emancipation and to an untold story of the Civil War era.

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