Bound To Stay Bound

Booklist - 02/01/2012 Expanding a chapter from Dennis Fradin’s Bound for the North Star: True Stories of Fugitive Slaves (2000), the Fradins relate the harrowing experiences of a freeborn New York resident who was kidnapped, drugged, and sold into slavery in 1841. Repeatedly sold and renamed, Northup spent 12 years in captivity on several Louisiana plantations before he was able to contact his family—and, more importantly, considering contemporary laws and attitudes, a white lawyer who knew him—to secure his release. Based on Northup’s published account, supported by other sources, and enhanced by both relevant period illustrations and generous quantities of print and web leads to further information, this simply, cogently written story illuminates one of the less well known episodes in slavery’s history. - Copyright 2012 Booklist.

Bulletin for the Center... - 04/01/2012 cell, unable to prove that he was a freeman. His abductors sold him into slavery, and after managing to get a message off to his wife explaining what had happened, he was sold in New Orleans to owners who changed his name and controlled his fate for the next twelve years. While Solomon, now known as Platt, labored as a field hand, carpenter, and even occasional fiddler, his wife attempted to recover him under an 1840 New York law that mandated state assistance in gaining the release of kidnapped freemen. His changed name and the remoteness of the Louisiana plantation made tracing him nearly impossible, so Solomon waited over a decade for a chance to find an ally, a white itinerant carpenter named Samuel Bass, who would make contact with persons in New York who could attest to his free status and arrange his release. While children’s literature is rife with tales of the Underground Railroad and daring, even creative, strategies of escape, the horrifying reality of abducted freemen who simply disappeared and were lost to family and history has received less attention. Northup’s experience is thrillingly told, and although it culminated in a happy family reunion, the Fradins make it clear that justice did not follow jubilation-under mid-nineteenth-century law it was virtually impossible for a black man to successfully prosecute a white offender, since his testimony was not allowed in court. The Fradins supplement Northup’s own narrative, Twelve Years a Slave, with print and online resources; an index and a timeline that interweaves historical events and Northup’s own story are also included. EB - Copyright 2012 The Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois.

School Library Journal - 04/01/2012 Gr 5–8—Using a format similar to that of their 5000 Miles to Freedom (National Geographic, 2006), the Fradins tell the dramatic story of a free African American man from New York who was tricked, drugged, and sold into slavery in 1841. They draw upon Northup's 1853 memoir and their own research to describe his 12-year ordeal, from his fear and confusion when he awoke in a Washington, DC, slave market to his journey by ship to New Orleans to his brutal treatment at the hands of slave masters and overseers. The Fradins also discuss his ceaseless and often-dangerous efforts to prove his identity and reclaim his status as a free man and reunite with his wife and three children. The authors place his story into the context of antebellum America by examining how Northup's memoir affected the national debate about slavery. The text is supplemented with black-and-white reproductions of period documents and illustrations, modern location photos, and maps. This book will help readers understand the constant dangers that even free blacks faced, the brutality of slavery, and how the abolitionist movement used the accounts of escaped and freed slaves to shape public opinion. It offers much more detail than Mary Young and Gerald Horne's Testaments of Courage: Selections from Men's Slave Narratives (Watts, 1995), which includes a chapter on Northup.—Mary Mueller, formerly at Rolla Junior High School, MO - Copyright 2012 Publishers Weekly, Library Journal and/or School Library Journal used with permission.

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