His Promised Land (1886)

John P. Parker's slave narrative was never actually published until 1996, but editor and historian Stuart Seely Sprague makes a thorough and painstaking job of it. Parker was a freed slave as of 1845, at the age of 18, who worked out of Ripley, Ohio, "running off" Kentucky slaves by way of the Underground Railroad. Twenty years after the Civil War the reporter Frank M. Gregg tracked him down and interviewed him. Gregg's interest was primarily in verifying the factual basis for the Eliza scene in Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin, which involves a young woman escaping with her baby across the melting ice of the late-winter Ohio River. Slaveholders and other Southerners took an interest in debunking it as implausible, but Gregg wanted to prove it. Parker died in 1900. His narrative had to go unpublished in his lifetime because of the danger the story represented to himself and family, both legally and personally. It's harder to say why it went unpublished for nearly a century after his death, but the reasons are not hard to guess: lack of interest as African-American liberation was replaced by Jim Crow laws and Confederacy memorials. Still, Parker may be the single most heroic figure in all these slave narratives, smart, brave, and committed to freedom. "Freedom" has become a dangerously inapproximate word these days, but in Parker's case it's pretty clear: "freedom" means freedom from enslavement. As always, the details of the context—notably the high value of slaves—contributes to understanding the difficulty of ending it once it had become an institution. As always, there is the mystery of seeing Americans accept it so readily, often aiding the slaveholders rather than the slaves. Parker's story is fragmented because of the way it made it into print. Some sections are simply missing. But it also contains some of the most exciting scenes in slave literature, with anecdotes of amazing adventures. They are too short and there are not enough of them, but they will do. Parker earns his bona fides and then some here as a genuine American hero. He did not have to stay in Ripley and help runaway slaves. As a shrewd and successful businessman, with several patents to his name for metalworking inventions, he could have stayed in Ripley and let the runaways see to themselves. But he did not. Partly out of hatred for slavery and slaveholders, partly for the thrill of what it involved, he spent his nights for years on exceedingly dangerous work. We still need more like him.

In case it's not at the library.