This series of three books (The Vanishing Woman, The Disappearing Man, and The Tubman Train) is based on true stories of how slaves escaped from their southern masters in pre-Civil War days. The crux of each tale is true, but parts are fictionalized. The Vanishing Woman covers the escape of Ellen Craft, a White-appearing slave, escaped in 1848 by posing as a white man, while her husband William pretended to be her slave. After multiple adventures and near-misses at being caught by slave hunters, they arrive in Philadelphia and eventually immigrate to England. The Disappearing Man deals with the story of how Henry Brown mailed himself to Philadelphia in a wooden box. The Tubman Train looks at how Harriet Tubman escaped her owners and then returned south over and over to bring back relatives and other Blacks who wished to escape the south.
These books emphasize a part of American history that is now being rewritten historically. A certain white southern governor is now touting that this state of involuntary servitude between Whites and Blacks was “beneficial” to Blacks, glossing over the fact that in the sixteenth through nineteenth centuries, a Black diaspora occurred in which West and Central Africans were shipped to the Americas via the Atlantic slave trade with an estimated two million people being killed. There is a strong religious element in each story which lots of spirituals interspersed in the prose, but that is to be expected from anything published by Kingstone Media, a company that develops religious comic books and movies. Author Peterson acknowledges the brutality of slave life with its whippings, hangings, family separations, etc. that Blacks endured, but doesn’t dwell on these adversities, rather sanitizing it to an “acceptable” level. The prose in these books is rather simplistic with a lot of “telling” rather than “showing,” and a vocabulary appropriate for 10-14 year old kids. The books are just under 300 pages with short chapters. These books would be a good first introduction to upper grade school and junior high readers, but great literature they are not. Peterson has two other volumes out that follow similar patterns: The Lincoln League and The Dixie Devil.
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The Underground Railroad Series (The Vanishing Woman, The Disappearing Man, and The Tubman Train) (Kingstone Media, November 1, 2012) is available through Amazon.
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