A young boy living in mid-nineteenth century Missouri relates the many adventures that he and his friend Jim, an escaped slave, experience as they travel down the Mississippi River on a raft.

Django, a former slave-turned-hired gun, heads back to the plantation to free his wife, Broomhilda, from the tyrannical plantation owner Calvin Candie, with the help of a German bounty hunter Dr. King Shultz.

A Roman slave attempts to win his freedom by setting up his young master with a virgin courtesan already promised to someone else.

A magnificent tour de force chronicling a young slave's adventures as she makes a desperate bid for freedom in the antebellum South. Cora is a slave on a cotton plantation in Georgia. When Caesar, a recent arrival from Virginia, tells her about the Underground Railroad, they decide to take a terrifying risk and escape. Though they manage to find a station and head north, they are being hunted. Their first stop is South Carolina, in a city that initially...

Honor Bright is a modest English Quaker who moves to Ohio in 1850, only to find herself alienated and alone in a strange land. Nineteenth-century America is practical, precarious, and unsentimental, and scarred by the continuing injustice of slavery. In her new home Honor discovers that principles count for little, even within a religious community meant to be committed to human equality. However, drawn into the clandestine activities of the Underground...

"In 1856, Henry Shackleford is a young slave living in the Kansas Territory, a battleground between anti-and pro-slavery forces. When legendary abolitionist John Brown arrives in the area, an argument between Brown and Henry's master quickly turns violent. Henry is forced to leave with Brown, who believes he's a girl. Over the ensuing months, Henry--whom the eccentric Brown nicknames 'Onion'--conceals his true identity to stay alive, eventually finding...

After escaping from a plantation in North Carolina, Addy and her mother arrive in Philadelphia, where Addy goes to school and learns a lesson in true friendship.

Sarah, a fourteen-year-old slave living in Maryland in the 1850s, tries to escape to freedom in the North through the Underground Railroad, knowing that her path to freedom will be filled with danger.

Trying to shape a new life of freedom in Philadelphia after having been a slave, Addy finds inspiration from a new friend.

Presents ten slave narratives that provide insight into the cruelty and degradation of the slave system; and includes a chronology of events, biographical and explanatory notes, and an essay on the texts.