The Unboxing Of Henry Brown

"THE UNBOXING OF HENRY BROWN documents the amazing life of Henry Box Brown, whose daring escape from slavery sealed in a box has become a celebrated saga of the Underground Railroad. Based on more than a decade of research in the United States and England, Jeffrey Ruggles tells the dramatic but true story of Brown, an industrial slave in Virginia, an abolitionist activist in New England, and a performer for a quarter-century on the English stage." -- page 4 of cover.

It is the most celebrated escape in the history of American slavery. Henry Brown had himself sealed in a three-foot-by-two-foot box and shipped from Richmond, Virginia, to Philadelphia, a twenty-seven-hour journey to freedom. In Narrative of the Life of Henry Box Brown, Written by Himself, Brown not only tells the story of his famed escape, but also recounts his later life as a black man making his way through white American and British culture. Most important, he paints a revealing portrait of the reality of slavery, of the wife and children sold away from him, the home to which he could not return, and his rejection of the slaveholders' religion--painful episodes that fueled his desire for freedom. This edition comprises the most complete and faithful representation of Brown's life, fully annotated for the first time. John Ernest also provides an insightful introduction that places Brown's life in its historical setting and illuminates the challenges Brown faced in an often threatening world, both before and after his legendary escape.

On March 23, 1849, Henry Brown climbed into a large wooden postal crate and was mailed from slavery in Richmond, Virginia, to freedom in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. “Box Brown,” as he came to be known after this astounding feat, went on to carve out a career as an abolitionist speaker, actor, magician, hypnotist, and even faith healer, traveling the United States, the United Kingdom, and Canada until his death in 1897. The Many Resurrections of Henry Box Brown is the first book to show how subversive performances were woven into Brown’s entire life, from his early days practicing magic in Virginia while enslaved, to his last shows in Canada and England in the 1890s. It recovers forgotten elements of Brown’s history to illustrate the ways he made himself a spectacle on abolitionist lecture circuits via outlandish performances, and then fell off these circuits and went on to reinvent himself again and again. Brown’s stunts included creating a moving panoramic picture show about his escape; parading through the streets dressed as a “Savage Indian” or “African Prince”; convincing hypnotized individuals that they were sheep who would gobble down raw cabbage; performing magic, dark séances, and ventriloquism; and even climbing back into his “original” box to jump out of it on stage. In this study, Martha J. Cutter analyzes contemporary resurrections of Brown’s persona by leading poets, writers, and visual artists. Both in Brown’s time and in ours, stories were created, invented, and embellished about Brown, continuing to recreate his intriguing, albeit fragmentary and elusive, story. The Many Resurrections of Henry Box Brown fosters a new understanding not only of Brown’s life but of modern Black performance art that provocatively dramatizes the unfinished work of African American freedom.

" ... Analyzes ... works in the archive of antislavery illustrated books published from 1800 to 1852 alongside other visual materials that depict enslavement"--

Performance and identity in nineteenth and early twentieth-century Arican-American creative work.

"Fugitive Science excavates this story, uncovering the dynamic scientific engagements and experiments of African American writers, performers, and other cultural producers who mobilized natural science and produced alternative knowledges in the quest for and name of freedom. Literary and cultural critics have a particularly important role to play in uncovering the history of fugitive science since these engagements and experiments often happened, not in the laboratory or the university, but in print, on stage, in the garden, church, parlor, and in other cultural spaces and productions. Routinely excluded from the official spaces of scientific learning and training, black cultural actors transformed the spaces of the everyday into laboratories of knowledge and experimentation"--Introduction.

Henry Box Brown is well known in America for escaping slavery by being packed in a box and mailed from Virginia to Philadelphia. The passing of the Fugitive Slave Act in 1850 made it unsafe for Brown to remain in America. He relocated to England where he had a very successful career, initially as a speaker on abolitionism before he began speaking on other subjects and then branched out into other forms of entertainment, including magic. He married Jane Floyd, who, with their children, appeared in his acts. This book concentrates on the relatively unknown period of his life in Britain, detailing both how he was received and how he developed as a performer. It is the biography of a brave, intelligent individualist who was always willing to learn and to take chances, becoming the first black man to achieve landmarks in British law and entertainment.

This incisive book investigates memorials to slavery throughout the African diaspora, with an emphasis on Europe. It analyzes not only the increasing number of physical monuments but also the practice of remembering—and forgetting—in museums and plantation houses as well as in contemporary cultural forms like the visual arts, literature, music, and film. A series of case studies ranging from the eighteenth to the twenty-first centuries, from Senegal and Montserrat to Manchester and Paris, explores issues such as the Lancashire cotton famine, black soldiers in World War II, and the 2007 commemoration of abolition in regional museums.