Rarely does a historical study pack the suspense and emotional intensity of Sydney Nathans’s To Free A Family: The Journey of Mary Walker. To Free A Family reads more like a novel, offering an intimate, multidimensional portrait of the life of its central protagonist, the fugitive slave Mary Walker, with “cameo appearances” by a celebrity cast of characters including Ralph Waldo Emerson, Lydia Maria Child, and Frederick Douglass (p. 5). Chronicling Walker's exodus from slavery in North Carolina in 1848 to her life as a Northern free woman of color until her death in 1872, Nathans examines how Walker’s individual attainment of freedom was incomplete in the context of her family’s enslavement: Walker dedicated her life to campaigning for her family’s freedom. Bringing to light the story of this previously unknown enslaved woman helps rectify the dearth of fugitive slave women’s life stories from the antebellum era and offers a companion to the often-cited narratives of Sojourner Truth and Harriet Jacobs. Nathans inserts a fruitful biography into the historical record, centralizing the experience of women of color, both free and enslaved, within a comprehensive understanding of the politics of abolitionism and emancipation.
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