Compelling and important in so many ways. I was especially impressed with Turnage’s vivid description of his many escape attempts, including the final escape just after being whipped for attempting to escape. There are fools who imagine that slaves were content with their lot or that slaves had decent lives. They ought to be required to read this book and any other first person slave narratives available until they can recognize the complete inhumanity of the slave system.

The narratives themselves are stunning. It’s hard to imagine what it was like to transition from the hell of slavery to the unknown future of “freedom,” and these men lived to tell their tales.

I heard an interview of David Blight on Fresh Air and knew right away that I had to read this book. These two narratives are amazing. Each man was a slave who escaped to freedom during the civil war and then later wrote the story of his escape. And each story was protected, but hidden, for almost a hundred years so that they are now available to us completely unaltered from their original writing (which wouldn't be the case if they'd been published at the time of their writing).

It goes without saying that slavery was and is a horrible, evil institution with lasting ramifications that is (and should be) a permanent stain on our country. But I imagine that most people who aren't Black probably haven't really thought about what slavery was.

Reading this book, which begins with Blight's excellent description of the overall times and history and which weaves in parts of Wallace Turnage's and John Washington's narratives and ends with the narratives themselves, really made me stop and think about slavery. Just one example: I think all of us know that slave owners raped their slaves and that children resulted from these rapes. And these children were themselves slaves. But how many of us have stopped to really think about what this means?

Fathers enslaved their own children. Their own children! Sold them, separated them from their mothers, beat them, killed them. Their own children.

I don't know if slavery made slave owners inhuman or if the inhuman chose to own slaves. Whichever, one remarkable thing is proven true by these two narratives: not even slavery could rob these men of their incredible dignity, their strength, or their determination to be free, no matter what it took. And what is true of these two men is undoubtedly true for the many millions of slaves who were prevented from writing their stories for us.

My only complaint was that the author tells you the story of the two men before getting to the actual first hand accounts. On the audiobook you don’t actually get to them until you’re over 60% of the way through.