Steal Away, Steal Away: Almost to Freedom by Vaunda Micheaux Nelson.

I started out no more than a bunch of rags on a Virginia plantation. Miz Rachel done a fine job puttin' me together, takin' extra time to sew my face on real careful, with thread, embroidery they call it.

When she's done, Miz Rachel give me to her little girl, Lindy. Lindy hugs me hard. "Your name be Sally." From that first day, when Lindy be somewheres, I be with her.

Lindy takes Sally to sit around the campfire after work, listening to the folks telling stories and sometimes talking softly about Freedom, saying you have to go somewhere called North to get it.

Sally goes everywhere with Lindy and her mother, tied with a string around her waist so Lindy can help her mother pick cotton in the field. She takes her to bed every night, and Sally doesn't mind if Lindy rolls on top of her.

But one morning, Lindy's daddy Henry is gone. Massa and some men go after him and bring him back, but Miz Rachel says he's been sold South, and after that Miz Rachel is sad and quiet. And when Lindy gets whipped all over her back for asking Massa's son how to spell her name, Miz Rachel is quiet and sad.

"Lord, don't let Massa be sellin' my baby away like he done her papa."

One night soon after, Miz Rachel wakes Lindy in the middle of the night and, with Sally tied around Lindy's waist, they steal away just like in the song and run toward the North. At the river they meet up with Lindy's father Henry and a man with a skiff who rows them across to the other side and takes them to a dark house. A kind man and a white-haired lady take them inside where the man pulls back a rug in the kitchen, removes some boards and opens a trap door with a ladder to the tiny room below.

"We almost to Freedom, Sally," Lindy whispers.

But after a few hours they are wakened abruptly. Slave catchers are coming, and they quickly leave the house to hide in the woods. But in the hurry up the ladder, Lindy drops Sally, who falls back down in the dark little room under the floor, where she lies for a long time, with no company but a mother mouse and her babies--until one night there's another family going North, and their little girl Willa finds the doll in the dark room.

Willa hugs me so hard. "Your name Belinda."

I like that. Sounds like Lindy.

Vaunda Micheaux Nelson's story of the Underground Railroad,Almost to Freedom (Coretta Scott King Illustrator Honor Book) (CarolRhoda Books) makes use of the narration of a beloved doll to tell the story of a families seeking freedom in that period of slavery before the Civil War through the eyes of the girls who loved her. Nelson artfully uses dialogue to reveal the emotions of a family trying to stay together as they escape to the North. With the help of the Coretta Scott King Award-winning artist Colin Boatman's vivid oil painting illustrations, author Nelson poignantly reveals the pain of slavery through the eyes of a child, softened by the comfort of a doll which two girls share.  Says School Library Journal, "... ultimately a story of hope and resilience, love and friendship." Pair this one with Ellen Levine's Henry's Freedom Box: A True Story from the Underground Railroad.

The Summons: The Bell Rang by James E. Ransome

Monday:The bell rings,
and no sun in the sky.
Daddy gathers wood.
Mama cooks.
We eat.

In the dawn a girl watches her family, Mama, Daddy, and brother Ben, go off to work with Master Tucker's other slaves, while she stays with the kids too young for field work with Miss Sarah Mae.

But on Wednesday morning something is different.

Ben surprises me
first with a kiss on the cheek,
then whispering
"Goodbye"
in my ear.

Ben has gone to the fields with his friends Joe and Little Sam. But at night they don't come home.

Master Tucker knows that they have "run," and the girl wakes on Thursday to the sound of the Overseer hitting Mama and Daddy. The girl hides.

Mama cries
all the way to the fields.

On Saturday they hear dogs barking and horses coming, and Joe and Little Sam, caught, are whipped, but there's no Ben.

Sunday We pray
Ben made it.
Free like Moses.
No more bells.

In stark but elegant free verse, James E. Ransome's The Bell Rang (Atheneum Books, 2019) tells the story, not of the runaway, but  from the witness of a little girl, a member of the slave family left behind, their sadness at the loss of a son, the fear for his safety, and the hope for his freedom. It's a powerful narrative, heightened by Ransome's stunning paintings which reveal much that cannot be said in mere words, however powerful. What is communicated are many truths about slavery's history and the wrenching human loss for families of those who dared to escape it, much as Ransome did in his 2017 award-winning story of young Harriet Tubman, Before She was Harriet (Coretta Scott King Illustrator Honor Books). and Words Set Me Free: The Story of Young Frederick Douglass (Paula Wiseman Books).