Henry's Freedom Box

Levine, E. (2007). Henry's freedom box. New York, NY: Scholastic.

Henry's Freedom Box is the story of a slave named Henry Brown. At the beginning of the story Henry is a young boy who lives with his family as a slave, but he soon gets ripped away from his family to work for another master. Throughout the story you hear of the hardships and mistreatment that Henry received such as being poked with sticks when he did not do his job to satisfaction or having his family ripped from him. Henry decided that he wanted to be free and came up with a plan to get him to freedom; he would be shipped in a box!

This book is probably one of my all time favorite books! The very first sentence of the book catches the reader, then the illustration of young Henry sitting and staring straight at you keeps the readers attention and has them wanting to know what the boy is thinking and feeling! This book was a Caldecott Honor book so I knew that the illustrations would be good, but I just could not believe how realistic they are. The illustrator, Kadir Nelson, does a great job of adding small details that make the story come to life such as on pages 13 and 14; the illustrator not only adds the small cracks to the skin of the characters like all of the other pages, but also adds detail to the quilt hanging on wall, makes the fire seem like it is burning bright, and even adds the small detail of being able to see the brick in the back of the fire place. Every page in this book jumps out and tells the reader that this is a true event and it even tells you what emotion you should have on each of the pages because of the colors that are used.

One of the main things about the illustrations is that the illustrator adds lines that make you want to touch the pictures. The main thing in all of the pictures in this book that does that for the reader are the people! The lines on their skin make it look so realistic that you just want to touch it to see if it really is the close up of Henry's face on page 15 and 16 is the best example of this.

I can see using this book to introduce slavery to my students. The emotional connection that you make with the characters would be a great way to get my students to understand how emotional it really was.


Big Question:

What would you do if you were being treated unfairly and you knew that it was not right?