Freedom Mail: Henry's Freedom Box by Ellen Levine and Kadir Nelson

Henry Brown wasn't sure how old he was.

Henry was a slave. And slaves weren't allowed to know their birthdays.

Henry's first master was kind, letting his family work in the big house with their mother while he grew up. But good masters are still masters, and when the master lay dying, he gave Henry to his son, who took the youngster away from his family to work in the son's tobacco business in Richmond.

Henry worked hard and became a skilled factory hand. Eventually he married a kitchen slave named Nancy and happily began to raise a new family of three children. But like his birthday, Henry had no rights to his family either. One morning, without warning, Henry learned that Nancy's master's finances had failed and that she and their children had been sold in the open slave market. Henry had to wait until his lunch hour to watch Nancy and the children taken away, never to be reunited. It seemed that Henry had nothing of his own but his grief.

Still, Henry had his quick wit and a friend in one Dr. Smith, a white abolitionist who agreed to help him with a daring plan. Unloading crates daily at work, Henry came up with a novel idea: perhaps he could mail himself to freedom.

Dr Smith carefully addressed the crate to a sympathetic friend in Philadelphia, and with Henry curled inside with only a little water and a few biscuits, saw the box off with orders to handle it with care. Traveling by railroad and by boat, Henry endured twenty-seven hours of painful travel, part of it upside down, before he was awakened to the sound of the box being pried open and a "Welcome to Philadelphia!"

Henry took that day, March 30, 1849, as his true birthdate, and an identity, Henry "Box" Brown, as his name.

Award-winning nonfiction author Ellen Levine tells this story simply and elegantly, and two-time Caldecott artist Kadir Nelson illustrates it beautifully in dark tones which brighten progressively as Henry moves toward the light at the end of his own bondage. Both drawing on historical sources, Levine from William Still's 1872 The Underground Railroad, and Nelson from period lithographs, Levine and Nelson create a perfect union of word and picture which tells well this true story of desperation and hope.

Henry's Freedom Box is a 2008 Caldecott Honor Book.