Henry's Freedom Box

Multicultural Picture Book
Title: Henry's Freedom Box
Author: Kadir Nelson
Age Level: 4+
Rating: 5 out of 5

Summary
This book tells the story of Henry Brown, a slave in the South.  Henry gets separated from his family and put to work in a warehouse dealing with tobacco leaves.  Henry meets a woman, Nancy, and marries her and has children but he is devastated again when his wife and kids are sold at the slave markey because their master has lost a great deal of money.  He realizes what he needs to do is mail himself to the North to his friends in Philadelphia, where he can finally have a birthday and be free.

Opinion
I found this book to be very powerful and something that many children can learn from.  This book was definitly a window book for me and I thought it was a very uplifting story about how important freedom really is and how devasted people were when they didn't have it as slaves.  This book dealt with a behavioral level of culture because it was about slavery in the South and the treatment that African Americans were given just because they were a different skin color.  This is something that I think is very important for children to learn about because it was something that was very common in the past and shaped how lots of people believed they should act, and in some cases, how they still think they should act today.  The illustrations in the book were beautifully done and the expressions on the characters faces were very descriptive and made you feel the emotions that the character was feeling.  I think that this book was done from a socially conscious perspective because the story portrayed the social problems that African Americans faced in the past by not having any freedom and their yearn for justice.

This would be a book that I would keep in my classroom library and use when units about this topic came up.  I think this book will pose lots of questions for students and form the starting point for a rich discussion on this issue that was dealt with.

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