This "superbly researched and engaging" (The Wall Street Journal)
true story about five boys who were kidnapped in the North and smuggled
into slavery in the Deep South--and their daring attempt to escape and
bring their captors to justice belongs "alongside the work of Harriet
Beecher Stowe, Edward P. Jones, and Toni Morrison" (Jane Kamensky,
Professor of American History at Harvard University).
Philadelphia, 1825: five young, free black boys fall into the clutches
of the most fearsome gang of kidnappers and slavers in the United
States. Lured onto a small ship with the promise of food and pay, they
are instead met with blindfolds, ropes, and knives. Over four long
months, their kidnappers drive them overland into the Cotton Kingdom to
be sold as slaves. Determined to resist, the boys form a tight
brotherhood as they struggle to free themselves and find their way home.
Their ordeal--an odyssey that takes them from the Philadelphia
waterfront to the marshes of Mississippi and then onward still--shines a
glaring spotlight on the Reverse Underground Railroad, a black market
network of human traffickers and slave traders who stole away thousands
of legally free African Americans from their families in order to fuel
slavery's rapid expansion in the decades before the Civil War.
"Rigorously researched, heartfelt, and dramatically concise, Bell's
investigation illuminates the role slavery played in the systemic
inequalities that still confront Black Americans" (Booklist).
