Ideas - How a man escaped slavery by mailing himself to freedom

Episode Date: February 13, 2026

Henry Brown earned the name "Henry Box Brown" in March of 1849. He hatched a risky plan and had himself shipped in a wooden crate, from Richmond to Philadelphia. But that’s less than half his story. In freedom, he uses his escape box as the basis for a subversive magic act that sees him tour the stages of the UK and Canada — his final home. Henry's remarkable story is a must-listen. *This episode originally aired on Feb. 3, 2025.

This program is brought to you in part by Specsavers. Every day, your eyes go through a lot. Squinting at screens, driving into the bright sun, reading in dim light, even late-night drives. That's why regular eye exams are so important. At Specsavers, every standard eye exam includes an advanced OCT 3D eye scan, technology that helps independent optometrists detect eye and health conditions at their earliest stages. Take care of your eyes. Book your eye exam at Specsavers today from just $99, including an OCT scan.

Book at Spexavers.cavers.cautors.com. I exams are provided by independent optometrists. Prices may vary by location. Visit specksavers.com to learn more. This is a CBC podcast. Before we start this Ideas podcast, could you follow us on the app you're using? It's the easiest way to find out about new episodes as they drop. On ideas, there's something for everyone. We talk to deep thinkers and produce compelling stories that help us better understand the world in which we live. The podcast is available every weekday, so our feed has lots to choose from. If you already follow us, thank you so much. Maybe you can give us a review or a rating.

And if there's an episode you can't stop thinking about, please recommend it to a friend. Every little bit you do helps other listeners find ideas. Thank you for listening. Now, on to today's podcast. Welcome to Ideas. I'm Nala Ayyad. Two people are walking in January snow across a graveyard just east of downtown Toronto. A worker at the historic Necropolis Cemetery sweeps the snow off a headstone that's more than a century old. As I was going around, brushing away at the tops of monuments and not trying to find them, I tripped over his stone.

Oh, it's so small. Yeah. Wow. It's a modest commemoration for someone described as larger than life. It's a bit chipped. Can you see what it says? Can you read it? From what I can make out here, it says Henry Brown died June 15th, 1897. And do you think that would be the original stone? That is the original stone, yes.

Let's see. I'm curious what that wording is on the top. Yeah. There is something there. It looks like a Y and an R and maybe another Y. Memory? Henry Brown was a public figure in his time and place, and he traveled far in his 80-plus years,

geographically and otherwise. As a younger man in the 1850s, he wrote about his beginnings in the American South, in Virginia. I was born about 45 miles from the city of Richmond in Louisiana County in the year 8. Born into a harsh reality. I entered the world a slave in the midst of a country whose most honored writings declared that all men have a right to liberty. I was a slave because my countryman had made it lawful, in utter contempt of the declared will of heaven,

for the strong to lay hold of the weak and buy and sell them as marketable goods. His African ancestors were among the millions Forcibly shipped across the Atlantic, abused in body and soul, their freedom denied. In Virginia, that was inflicted on their descendants too, with extreme cruelty at the very moment of birth. Tyrants, remorseless destitute of religion

and every principle of humanity stood by the couch of my mother and as I entered into the world, before I had done anything to forfeit my right to liberty, and while my soul was yet underfiled by the commission of actual sin, stretched forth their bloody arms and branded me with the mark of bondage, and by such means I became their own property. A religious man, Henry Brown, knew evil from good. They robbed me of myself before I had.

could know the nature of their wicked arts and ever afterwards, until I forcibly wrenched myself from their hands did they retain their stolen property? Three decades later, he took that idea of the enslaved as property, as marketable goods, and turned it upside down. Henry Brown stole himself back. The idea suddenly flashed across my mind of shutting myself in a buck. and getting myself conveyed as dry goods to a free state. It worked. He escaped, survived, and invented a new kind of life for himself in order to keep surviving.

With it came a new name. Henry Box Brown. That sounds like an ending, but it's simply one chapter in the astonishing story of Henry Box Brown. The great African magician, king of all mesmerists, the African chief, professor of of electrobiology, Dr. Henry Box Brown. He lived out his freedom, performed, sang, acted, and entertained on stages in the U.S., England, and Canada. Lots of abolitionists were in England for various points of time, Frederick Douglass, Moses,

or William Wells Brown, and I think he might have wanted to see whether things were different in the UK. He fought slavery in his own way. The abolitionists start to feel like Henry Box Brown was making slavery into sort of a circus show. Mr. Brown will leave Bradford on Thursday next, packed up in the identical box, arriving in Leeds by half-past six, then forming a procession through the principal streets to the music hall. I'm not going to say that there isn't sometimes a carnival. of the less atmosphere at some of his performances, but there were still political content.

In this episode, the 19th century life and 21st century afterlife of the extraordinary Henry Box Brown. There are all these ways that we can think about Box Brown as performance artists, as visual artists, as public speaker, as author. He had this kind of sort of limitless resourcefulness. in the way of artistic resistance that marks him as being rather exceptional. Here is Ideas producer Lisa Godfrey. Henry Box Brown comes across sometimes as a kind of historical footnote,

a colorful quick fact, the man who mailed himself to freedom. But there's so much more to his story, and it's evolving even as you hear this. People are uncovering new facts and they're finding rich themes. in the whole of his life. Martha Cutter, for one, she's an academic and an author in Philadelphia. I was working on my previous book, and I happened on the story of Henry Box Brown,

and I got completely fascinated by that story, and I went down this rabbit hole and was obsessed with finding details about his life. Daphne Brooks at Yale was writing about enslaved people finding freedom when she started thinking about Brown. I gravitated towards these kinds of stories of deep and unusual invention, which is not to say that I didn't have such deep admiration and a full out reverence with regards to the bravery of the multitudes. Henry Box Brown's escape story is still the right place to start in understanding him. He told it in so many ways through his life and twice in print, part of the genre known as,

slave narratives. Daphne Brooks says this genre was more intentional than just memoir. It was directed at readers who did not have the full picture of slavery in a time when news traveled slowed, out to create a kind of sympathetic energy in the reader to actually lobby the U.S. government to end slavery. So we're talking about a genre that was political to its core. The first version of Henry's story in print was told to and shaped by a white abolitionist. I think the second book was definitely written by himself. I have some pretty good evidence in my book that he had become quite literate. Despite the odds.

It was illegal for the enslaved to learn how to read, to acquire literacy, and yet so many were able to do so under surreptitious and fugitive means. The second narrative is his voice, It's his attempt to tell the story that he experienced from his own perspective. So I think he takes a lot more control over his own story, over what is traumatic to him, over how he found the strength to do what he did. So the version you're hearing from and we'll hear from now is Henry's version. The narrative of Henry Box Brown.

Written by himself. published in 1851, two years after his escape. It starts with Henry describing his enslaved life. He's working at a tobacco factory in Richmond. The hours are unrelenting and the conditions poor. The enslaved are all considered less than human, a point that his Christian overseer makes clear. Mr. Allen was a very pious man.

He was also a church member. but was much addicted to the habit of profane swearing, a vice which is in slave countries not at all uncommon in church members. He used particularly to expend his swearing breath in denunciation of the whole race of Negroes, using more bad terms than I could hear employ without polluting the pen with which I write. Among the best epithets were hogs, dogs, pigs.

Henry has been able to avoid physical punishment for most of his life, but he has other wounds. He lost his mother at 15. The entire family simply sold away to destinations unknown. Henry calls this torture, and it's a situation that leads him to pay Nancy's slaveholder a fee to make sure it doesn't happen again. He earns that money through what was called overwork. But then comes an awful day.

Henry is betrayed. I placed myself by the side of a street and soon had the melancholy satisfaction of witnessing the approach of a gang of slaves amounting to 350 in number, marching under the direction of a Methodist minister by whom they were purchased and amongst which slaves were my wife

and children. These beings being marched with ropes about their necks and staples on their arms, and although in that respect the scene was no very novel one to me, the peculiarity of my own circumstances made it assume the appearance of unusual horror. This second horror marks a shift in Henry Brown. Within months, he finds himself thinking differently. One day while I was at work, and my thoughts were eagerly feasting upon the idea of freedom, I felt my soul called out to heaven to breathe a prayer to Almighty God.

I prayed fervently that He who seeth in secret and knew the innermost desires of my heart would lend me his aid in bursting my fetters asunder, and in restoring me to the possession of those rights, which men had robbed me, when the idea suddenly flashed across my mind of shutting myself in a box and getting myself conveyed as dry goods to a free state. So Henry buys a postal crate, and he pays two locals, a freed black man and a white shoemaker, both named Smith, to help him. It's all incredibly risky. The box which I had procured was three feet one inch wide, two feet six inches high, and two feet wide. And on the morning of the 29th day of March 1849, I went into the box.

Having previously bore three gimlet holes opposite my face for air, and provided myself with a bladder of water, both for the purpose of quenching my thirst and for wetting my face, should I feel, getting faint. Being thus equipped for the Battle of Liberty, my friends nailed down the lead and conveyed me to the express office, which was about a mile distant from the place where I was packed. I had no sooner arrived at the office than I was turned heels up, while some person nailed something on the end of the box. I was then put upon a wagon and driven off to the depot with my head down, and had no sooner arrived at the depot than the man who drove the wagon tumbled me roughly into the baggage car where, however, I happened to fall on my right side.

The next place we arrived at was Potomac Creek, where the baggage had to be removed from the cars to be put on board the steamer, where I was again placed with my head down, and in this dreadful position had to remain nearly an hour and a half. which, from the suffering I had thus to endure, seemed like an age to me. But I was forgetting the Battle of Liberty, and I was resolved to conquer or die. Henry is a heavy-set man, and he spends more than a day in hard transit confined to that tiny box. Cart, steamboat, train. Finally, it reaches its destination in Pennsylvania

where sympathizers, white abolitionists in Philadelphia, are supposed to come, get him, and uncrate him. At which time, a wagon drove up, and I heard a person inquire for such a box as that which I was in. I was then placed on a wagon and conveyed to the house where my friend in Richmond had arranged I should be received. A number of persons.

person soon collected round the box after was taken into the house. But as I did not know what was going on, I kept myself quiet. I heard a man say, let's wrap upon the box and see if he is alive. And immediately a rap ensued and a voice said, Trembling, is all all right within? To which I replied, all right. The joy of the friends was very great. And when they heard that I was alive, they soon managed to break open the box.

And then came my resurrection from the grave of slavery. And so begins Henry's new life. Henry Box Brown. This is the name, Henry Box Brown, what we see on a lot of legal documents such as his passenger records and his death certificate. And the box is not in quotes. How soon after his escape would you say he became almost legendary? Well, very quickly because people started, there were illustrations of his escape and there were songs about his escape. And he started making the circuit of all the abolitionist meetings in Boston and around New England.

And he became quite famous. And he even was on stage with Frederick Douglass. I'm Martha Cutter, professor of English and Africana Studies and American. I'm the University of Connecticut, and I am the author of the book The Many Resurrections of Henry Box Brown. She's discovered new information from archival sources, and she expands on work done previously as by... Daphne Brooks. I'm William R. Keenan, Jr., professor of African American Studies, American Studies, women's gender and sexuality studies, and music at Yale University. That's a lot. Yeah, it's a lot.

As was Box Brown's escape, so rich in its details and meaning, so high in its stakes. It required such an extraordinary level of extreme endurance, a kind of wilyness, and a real sort of spectacular form of risk. There's also the subversiveness of it. The fact that he put himself in a box, mailed himself, so use this federal institution to ironically emancipate himself. Henry was by no means alone in using creative means to escape the South. Take the couple William and Ellen Kraft who famously cross-dressed and performed their way to freedom. Brown soon joins others.

fugitive enslaved people in the north. They give public talks in meeting halls and at conventions. There were folks like William Wells Brown, who becomes kind of a quasi-mentor to Henry Box Brown in some ways. And the most famous black abolitionist of them all, the distinguished Frederick Douglass, author of The Narrative of the Life of an American Slave, published in 1845 and considered to be one of the greatest works of American literature. All of them were out to educate audiences in the New England states. Part of this massive transatlantic lecture circuit designed to fight slavery and to bring about its abolishment.

But how to tell their stories was a source of tension. Frederick Douglass believed the details of escape should be kept secret for others to use. But Henry seems to have been proud to tell his story and ambitious in its telling. He took the boxing itself, referenced it in the same. referenced it in song, in visual print media broadsides. So we could think of the boxing episode as being this kind of foundation that he built upon on the fugitive abolitionist lecture circuit. Inspired by fellow speaker William Wells Brown, he too commissions a panorama paintings that move. Massive pieces of cloth that were then hoisted on opposite sides of the state.

and these large cylinders. And then you'd have stage hands that would crank the cloth across the stage. So they very much were these forms of entertainment that we later see manifest as cinema by the end of the 19th century. A more mainstream version was a travelogue. Pastoral scenes in the U.S. South,

you were given the sensation of moving down the Mississippi River. Abolitionists had huge problems with these forms of entertainment because, of course, what was left out, slavery. Fox Brown's panorama is pointedly called the mirror of slavery. It begins with the African slave trade. It begins with, and these are, you know, actual scenes that are described in the script, the Nubian family in freedom, the seizure of slaves, the interior of a slave ship.

But then it shifts into what, you know, I like to think of as these, escape suites. So you get Alan Kraft escaping from slavery. You get the scene of Henry Box Brown, himself narrating his own escape from slavery. It shows audiences the reality of what has happened, but also delivers us to the future, the hope of emancipation. It's a really bold and massively ambitious artistic statement made by a formerly enslaved individual in his collaboration with reformist painters and other abolitionist orators on the lecture circuit. As a Christian, Henry Box Brown calls out the religious hypocrisy of Southerners in his narrative. And with his panorama, he demonstrates the gap between America's values and its institutions by showing

iconic scenes of U.S. patriotism and national pride, the city of Washington, D.C., so there's a kind of irony here between what it means to be American and also, you know, the chivalets of American freedom that are represented by the enslaved having to free themselves. Free themselves, and yet even in the free northern states in 1850, live in fear. Martha Cutter. In the United States, there was the fugitive slave law, and there were many fugitive slave laws, and it made it legal for any person who wanted to to try to take Box Brown or any other slave back to slavery on very flimsy terms. This was particularly true for those speaking out living their lives in public, such as the orators, such as Henry Box Brown.

there was this brawl in Providence where Box Brown claimed that his former enslaver sent men to try to take him back into slavery. The evidence on that is a little bit mixed, but it's pretty clear that 1850 was a dicey time, a difficult time to be a free black man. And he was getting to be quite famous. And so it wouldn't have surprised me if there were other attempts to take him back. So I think that's the main reason why he left. Having journeyed from the south to the north of the United States, in the fall of 1850, Henry Box Brown decides it's now time to leave his homeland. He travels across the ocean. Lots of abolitionists were in England for various points of time.

Frederick Douglass, Moses Roper, William Wells Brown, and I think he might have wanted to see whether things were different in the UK for him. You're listening to ideas and to a documentary. about Henry Box Brown, who escaped from slavery and became a touring performer. Ideas is a podcast and a broadcast heard on CBC Radio 1 in Canada, on US Public Radio, across North America on Sirius XM, on World Radio Paris, and in Australia on ABC Radio National, and you can also stream us around the world at cbc.ca.ca slash ideas. Find us wherever you get to. your podcasts. I'm Nala Ayyed. This program is brought to you in part by Spex Savers. Every day,

your eyes go through a lot, squinting at screens, driving into the bright sun, reading in dim light, even late night drives. That's why regular eye exams are so important. At Specsavers, every standard eye exam includes an advanced OCT 3D eye scan, technology that helps independent optometrists detect eye and health conditions at their earliest stages. Take care of your eyes. Book your eye exam at Specsavers today from just $99, including an OCT scan. Book at Spexsavers.cairs.cairs.com. I exams are provided by independent optometrists. Prices may vary by location.

Visit Spexavers.cavers.cai to learn more. If you're worried about feeling lonely in the afterlife, why not hire a corpse bride? In Lindsay Wong's new novel, a grad student becomes a corpse bride to pay off her family's debt. If that sounds made up, think again. Here's what Lindsay told me on my podcast bookends. In Chinese culture, there's this idea of an array. deaf marriage. It's called Ming Hun. And so sometimes they'll just try to find another dead body or they'll try to find a living person. Usually a marginalized person, they'll kill them and

put them in a coffin. Check out the rest of that conversation on bookends with me, Matea Roach, wherever you get your podcasts. Professor Martha Cutter has researched and written a book called The Many Resurrections of Henry Box Brown. It contains a lot of visual artifacts, including advertisements for his stage shows in England. Great attraction caused in England by Mr. Henry Box Brown, a fugitive slave who made his escape from

Richmond in Virginia, packed up in a box. Their tone is not quite what you'd expect for a speaker-educating audiences as part of a transatlantic lecture circuit run by abolitionists. And Martha Cutter says the abolitionists themselves

increasingly felt that way too. When you didn't kind of to stick to a fairly strict script, the abolitionists were not interested in having you represent them. Even someone like Frederick Douglass didn't want to stick to that script of the passive enslaved individual. Henry, who escapes in a box, who shows white audiences a panorama called the mirror of slavery, didn't quite fit that script either. But there was even more to it. Tuesday, May 20th, two live pigs to be given away with other presents.

The abolitionists start to feel like Henry Box Brown was making slavery into sort of a circus show. Growing concerns about Henry led to a rift with the abolitionists. Soon, his anti-slavery message is delivered in a whole different package. He becomes a showman. For six nights only, Professor Box Brown from Africa and America will appear as the great African magician, also as the king of mesmerists. He's got to earn his living. The amazing life of Henry Box Brown continues in England. Ideas producer Lisa Godfrey follows.

Or to be honest, doesn't quite follow. Because from oration and a panorama to magic and hypnosis? There's some indication that he learned magic while he was enslaved. There are oral accounts of that. So I think that's fascinating too. Maybe he learned it, but he couldn't use it. And the panorama? You might see the panorama, but you might also see Brown performing these really interesting magic tricks, some of which involve boxes appearing and disappearing.

And I think the symbolism there is really interesting. The one in which he passes a watch through a series of boxes. And so it seems to reference this time and his time in the box and the kind of enduring legacy of the box. Boxes, disappearances, escapes. These are now classic elements in any magic show. but Henry was one of the first. He used that box in his performance throughout his life. So he would, for example, in one performance in Leeds,

he jumped out of the box. He was in the box for like two and a half hours and he jumped out of the box on stage. And there's a later performance in England where he talks about the Middle Passage, the horrible voyage of the enslaved from parts of Africa to the Caribbean and onward other parts of Europe

sometimes or to the United States where many died, many were enchained. He talks about the middle passage and then he gets into his own box as if to demonstrate he had a taste of that middle passage. It was part of his name

but also part of his show in really interesting ways. The box is significant for Henry. It could have been a tomb if the box went the wrong way or it was never found but also a womb in that he was born into freedom.

Unfortunately, that wasn't exactly the case because of the fugitive slave law. He's not entirely free in body or spirit. He's a flamboyant entertainer, but with serious intent. There was still political content. His mesmerism, his hypnosis, it all seems fun on the surface. One of my favorite shows is where he's got all these individuals on stage, and he hypnotizes them, and he makes them, well, he makes them do a bunch of things.

First of all, they have to act like they're freezing, and they chase imaginary insects, and then they act like they're hot. But eventually, he convinces them that they're sheep. And they run around on all fours, gobbling down raw cabbage. And when they wake up, they're chagrined to hear all about this as the newspaper report goes into detail. It's another subversive moment in the show. He's making white British individuals run around on stage

and gobble down raw cabbage. And they're the spectacle. He's not the spectacle there in that scene. So he's obviously flipping the script. Yes, this was funny, but it was also about, like, taking control. Frederick Douglass talks about in his autobiography, how the slaves were treated like animals, and they were just thrown mush and had to eat it with their hands.

And Brown talks about that in his own autobiography a little bit, too, the view of the enslaved as animals. He used particularly to expend his swearing breath in denunciation of the whole race of Negroes, hogs, dogs, pigs. Henry Box Brown had left the United States behind, but as a black man, he still faces prejudice and skepticism. Slaver had been abolished in England in 1834, but of course that doesn't mean that, you know, racism didn't still exist there. And I think by and large, he found it to be a fairly liberal society overall, but he encountered instances of racism there as well.

He was called the N-word. He was called Sambo. This one guy who was a newspaper guy wrote this horrible review of one of his shows. This was a guy named Thomas Brinley in 1852. He called it a gross and palpable exaggeration of the difficulties of enslavement. So he was more of an apologist for slavery, Brinley, and he called Brown a fraud. He's called him baboonish and said he enacted nocturnal antics. and he called him a bedeweled and oily Negro.

As he would several times in his life, Henry fights back in court. Brinley, who put two really disgusting reviews in the newspapers that affected Brown's shows. Brown was able to sue Brindley, and he won. So that's interesting. I'm not sure if that would have happened in the United States. Control emerges as a clear theme in his performing life, As a magician, an escape artist, a hypnotist, the act makes him an authority figure on that stage.

I think he has access to this world of knowledge that the audience doesn't, you know, this sort of, he did a second site performance as well where he would have the audience and guess what the person on stage was holding in their hand. And this is coded communication, which was pretty common under slavery, to have a code where you, you know, you could speak to people without them. the enslaver knowing what you were saying. So there is like this, not only this access to this knowledge that his audience doesn't have, but this deeper knowledge from other spheres that the audience is completely unaware of, but that does allow a certain degree of taking power, especially from one who was supposed to be powerless. Henry experiments with personas in his show. His promotions call him a professor, a doctor, a king, a prince.

The African prince, I think that's him. It's about connecting to a longer history of power and a larger cultural backdrop. He did dress up as Native American. Some people say he would go in red face, which was sort of like yellow face or black face. It was derogatory. I think it's also possible, like lots of people in the South who were African American also had Native American ancestry. So it's possible he really thought he was Native American in part.

But I think it's also like alluding to this other group of individuals who have a various kind of power outside the dominant mainstream of white culture. He also acts in several stage plays, one of which it's called the Nubian captive. And he plays an individual who is, he's actually a slave owner who then gets enslaved. And in that play, he ends up rescuing his wife from slavery and ends up realizing that slavery is wrong and bad. Henry Box Brown did subversive, smart, and just plain colorful things with personas. But his actual character is called into question by James Smith. He is the freed black man who had helped Henry into his box back in Virginia when he escaped and then later appeared on stage with him on the abolitionist circuit.

Smith and Box Brown part ways at some point. And then James accuses Henry of being a cheat. They had a bitter falling out at some point while they were in England about the finances of the panorama. Worse, he says Henry is abandoning his children and his wife, Nancy, sold away in Richmond. So he claims Brown never tried. Brown had all this money. He never tried to finance her by her out of slavery. So we have two different opinions there. Martha Cutter found a document horrifying in its details where Henry says, he did make an attempt. In my book, I talk about a letter where he claims he tried to buy her out of slavery.

He tried and tried, but the master refused. And eventually he found out that the master had taken Nancy, was having relations with her. He was raping her. Henry Box Brown later marries for a second time in 1855 to an English woman named Jane Floyd. They have children together and all eventually perform as family singers. Martha Cutter sees evidence that Brown took the second family to visit Virginia, a decade after slavery was finally abolished in the U.S. Since Richmond held terrible memories for Henry, she wonders if he had a specific mission.

I do believe that when Brown came back to the United States in 1875, he went to Virginia to try to find any living relatives, try to figure out what might have happened to Nancy. So that's my theory is that he went to Richmond and he tried to trace the relatives and he was unsuccessful. But so that's a piece of the story we really don't know. And maybe in the future we can figure more out about that from, for example, DNA research could help there. By 1881, audiences in England are starting to dwindle for the Henry Box Brown show. So he decides to return to North America for good this time. He tours his show in the northern U.S. and also across the border into Canada. He was very itinerant throughout his life.

I think he had a bit of wanderlust, and he traveled a lot from place to place even when he was performing in the United States back and forth. But he also traveled back and forth from London, Ontario, to parts of Michigan for performances. He eventually settles in Canada, in Toronto, and stays for the rest of his life more than a decade. I think the fact that he was in Toronto for that much time indicates to me that he, He found it to be a good environment. There was a lot of art. And I mentioned in my book, like, there's this guy, Butler, Jerome Butler, I think his name is. And he had this music store.

And Brown rented his apartment from him for one year. And if you look at pictures of Butland's music store, there's all these flyers for artists in the window. And so I think he enjoyed Toronto because it's part of a circle of artists. In Canada, Henry has familiar kinds of friends and familiar foes. I talk about in my book a performance he did in St. Lawrence Hall, and I think that was 1886. And the recounting of it in the newspaper is very racist. He was performing, he was singing, and he was doing magic, and he was performing with his wife, who he had married in England, who was a white woman, and the daughter was Annie, and they were performing together. And the reporter talks about these dark complexioned women.

Well, Jane was white, so I'm not sure. and Annie was mixed race, but he talks about them bleeding out songs like they were sheep, bleeding them out, and has a lot of derogatory things to say about the performance by Brown. So I think there's some evidence that in that performance that he was dealing with a kind of racist ideology of African Americans or Africans in Canada. A few years later, a review in a Brantford, Ontario newspaper, praises the Brown family for their singing. of spirituals and for bringing plantation energy to the event. The reviewer's tone is positive, almost nostalgic. That doesn't surprise Martha Cutter, who teaches Africana and American studies.

She says the echoes of slavery persisted back then as they persist now. In a lot of fields today that deal with slavery, we talk about the afterlife of enslavement and neo-slavery, new slavery. We talk about the idea that enslavement seems like it's a long time ago, but for many people, it's very real, it's very current, it's still with them, and it certainly is still with us in the United States via all kinds of economic gaps, generational wealth is still much higher amongst white people. We didn't have a civil rights, civil rights act signed into law until the 60s. The notion of the plantation, plantation energy, it's sort of everywhere. I mean, you see this in a film like 13th. What happened right after slavery was the incarceration of black men for the most

minor crimes. And it's ongoing today with the incarceration of people, African and African-American descent, black and brown men in prisons. And they lose all kinds of rights because of that, the right to vote, the right to have education. You can't apply for a lot of educational loans if you've been incarcerated, the right to apply for certain kinds of mortgages. So the plantation is an ongoing space that hasn't changed over time. still out there and it still needs to be dealt with. You've spent a lot of time piecing together Henry Box Brown's movements, his personas, the different ways that he represented himself. If he was sitting across from you, what psychologically, what kind of personality would you

imagine him to be? I imagined him to be the sort of larger than life person that he would be full of energy and laughter and stories. I mean, he seemed to be a great storyteller. And he would come across as somebody. You're like, can I believe all these stories this guy is telling? I think I can. But what's, I mean, let's not forget, this is trauma, trauma narrative, right? He was enslaved.

He lost his wife and children. He had to exist in this box. He was always defined by this box. But he would tell a lot of stories, whether they were true or not, I think, is less interesting than how he's shaping them to take control of this trauma and to create a story in which he's always the hero. You said a central question for you was if he truly escaped that box of enslavement of trauma and loss.

It's hard to perhaps tell based on archival documents and things like that. But what would you imagine about that? I don't know if I think he did want to actually escape. the box. I think the box was really important to how he created these shows, which were, yes, entertaining, but they also had this underlying political message of the omnipresence of slavery, the ubiquity of forms of enslavement going forward into the future. And I think ultimately, when we talk about trauma, trauma, some people say you never escape trauma. Some people say it's unescapable. Once you can talk about it, it's not trauma anymore. But there's also a school of

trauma theory that talks about the more you come back to this trauma, the more you take control over it. And that doesn't mean you're ever going to escape it, but there's a school of trauma therapy where they actually have people in their mind and in other ways to reenact these events. And they have found that over time, sometimes that helps people have less flashbacks. So I think for Brown, it was about taking control of the space of the box because it was always going to be part of him. Literally, it was part of his name. You call him something very contemporary at the end of your book. You say he was, quote, a dissident and insurgent performance artist who recognized the limits of freedom in his own time and place, but who also points to a future world in which these limits have been transgressed, if not transformed.

Does he feel contemporary to you? He does. And I think that's why he appeals to many contemporary artists, because, you know, I mean, I'm a, huge fan of Frederick Douglass, but he's kind of a little bit more dignified. He has a certain kind of persona that he presents throughout his life, whereas Brown is always changing. I spoke to Daphne Brooks about this, too. I am the author of Bodies and Descent, spectacular performances of race and freedom 1850 to 1910. I asked her if she thinks of Henry Box Brown as an artist.

Oh, absolutely. He, again, was tapping into so many different expressive forms in order to fight the evil institution. The fact that he was a singer, the fact that he saw a visual art as being something that could be weaponized against slavery, the fact that his unboxing act anticipates Houdini, who doesn't appear until the late Victorian era. So there are all these ways that we can think about Box Brown as performance artists, as visual artists, as public speaker, author. He had this kind of limitless resourcefulness in the way of artistic resistance that marks him as being rather exceptional in a field of exceptional individuals who fought their own trafficking. So he's been an inspiration to recent writers and artists and performers. Why does he feel like such a contemporary figure to us?

There are reports of Box Brown really being comfortable with his own spectacle. So not just in utilizing spectacle aesthetically. But he was known for, and we have evidence of this in the 19th century press, he was known for having, quote, quote, flashy clothing, you know, for having a kind of penchant for deeply striking sartorial style. And that kind of extravagance is certainly something we're comfortable with, you know, in the modern context. But I think it also speaks to his ability to revel in his. own adornments, something that Zornnail Hurston would write about come to the 1930s in her essay characteristics of Negro expression. This is a really powerful statement of self-fashioneding, you know, self-fashioning as resistance, self-making, reinvention. That's an American story,

but it's also an African-American story. In your essay, you call him a figure whose acts may have made him, quote, too excessive, too performative, too glam to register as legible acts of social and political resistance. This kind of outsized self-representation can be read in many ways as a response to the violently limiting definitions of black being that were placed upon enslaved peoples, right? If you were told you were not human, if you were told that you were three-fifths as citizen, three-fifths human, juridically, you call attention to the fact that they're constructed, that we construct ourselves representationally and that we can seize back the tools of representation in order to invent all sorts of different ways of being perceived in the world. Do you think there are people we kind of miss today as being socially and politically resistant who carry on that kind of mission in a way that that is glamorous and entertaining

and we almost miss how significant they are and what they're saying? So that's a radical tool and it's a tool that's been used by generations of people of African descent. under duress, living under duress. And it's certainly an aesthetic that lives on in our popular culture. One of our greatest and most innovative forces in popular music culture, Beyonce, has, of course, made use of these kinds of aesthetics of spectacle to tell larger than life, but also historically rooted stories about the African-American freedom struggle. So I guess I I would say that Box Brown's aesthetics are kind of endemic to the expressive African-American experience. Henry Box Brown died in Toronto in 1897.

Martha Cutter discovered that fact in her research, as well as the location where he was buried. I discovered that he had sued Toronto General Hospital in the 1890s, and that on 1880s, and that led to the idea that he had died in Toronto. I did find the cemetery records for Necropolis, and so we went there, my husband and I went there, and we were able to find it and put some flowers there and take pictures of it. His headstone in the Necropolis,

among city builders and historic figures, is worn down. But his life is coming into vivid focus through the efforts of writers and scholars and artists. He was someone ahead of his time who still has a president, presence in our moment. His life story and his fight still interests and inspires people. It's quite a busy name, isn't it? Yes, yeah. It is. It's important. I call it a living lane.

I met up with three of them, Panchetta Barnett, Corey Lemos, and Adam Wynn, a kind of Scooby-Doo trio, determined to discover more about his connections to Toronto and to honor his place in the city. I had phoned Corey mentioning that I had come across a story about a man by the name of Henry Box Brown and where he was living in in Toronto and the story said Corktown, but it didn't give a specific address. Corktown is located in the downtown east area of Toronto. Coralina Lemos and I am a Corktown resident, a history enthusiast and chair of the Corktown Residents and Business Association. He called me and copied Panchetta. I'm quite an advocate for research, not only with the black community,

but anything pertaining to that area. And Corey went through the historical records and actually was able to identify the exact house where Mr. Box Brown lived for many, many years in Toronto. Adam Wynn, and I'm the chair of the Toronto and East York Community Preservation Panel. Panchetta did upload a picture from Beecher. behind the properties.

And at that point, I said, well, there's a laneway there. Let me find out if it's a public laneway. If it is a public laneway, we can at least try and dedicate it to Henry Box Brown. So that's how the laneway project started. Corey went door-to-door collecting neighbors' signatures in support. The whole effort took three years.

But in 2024, the laneway was officially dedicated. And a year later, we stood in the cold and we talked at the place where Henry Box Brown Lane now meets North Star Way. The North Star was the guiding light for the indigenous to begin with and for escaped enslaved people. And Chetta Barnett, Chair Honorific Street and Lane Naming Committee at the Toronto and East Jaw Community Preservation Panel. Names have power, the place has power. The act of naming this laneway reclaiming that history has power, and he is somebody in Toronto's history that not too many people know about.

Reading his book, I really felt taken back when he lost his wife. I felt, I felt, I heard the chains being dragged as she walked in front of him. I seen her face. Horrible, these people must have endured. to say, you know, life or death, getting away, not taking it anymore, any longer. I mean, he could have been killed in the box. He thought he was going to die because the blood was in the head, in the brain. So this is something that I think is newsworthy,

it's historical revelation for people to know that this is not a joke, and this is not a time for us to just sit back and just go through life, not remembering these people. and someone like Henry Box Brown. What a man. You've been listening to a documentary on the life of Henry Box Brown, as told by

Martha Cutter and Daphne Brooks. Reading from the narrative of Henry Box Brown by Andre Sills. Pete Morrie read the advertisements for Henry's performances in England. Thank you to Scott Curry at the Necropolis Cemetery and Charlie McAvoy of In-Tune Studio in Stratford.

This episode was produced and presented by Lisa Godfrey. I feel very honored to have discovered him. How do you feel? Yeah, we just have a little tip of the iceberg here. Lisa Ayuso is the web producer for ideas. Our technical producer is Danielle Duval. Our senior producer, Nicola Luxchich. Greg Kelly is the executive producer of ideas, and I'm Nala Ayad.

There may be other people out there who know about rock. Brown, who know things about him. His daughter, Annie, lived till 1970, and she had many children. So if there's anybody out there who knows stuff about him, either relative or non-relative, I'd love to hear from them. I mean, the story will go on. You can reach us at Ideas at cbc.ca.ca. For more CBC podcasts, go to cbc.ca.ca slash podcasts.