Henry Box Brown

The idea came to me one day as I twisted
tobacco in the factory, grieving for family
sold and sent away to North Carolina,
remembering the slave coffle leaving
Richmond—heavy silence broken now
and then by a low whimpering and a clang;
my wife chained to the gang, holding her head
high; the wagon hauling away our children,
their eyes swollen with tears:
Go get a box and put yourself in it.  
I decided I'd rather suffocate
in a crate three feet by two
“and be settled in my grave
than go on living as a slave.”
The trip by rail, if it went well,
would take nineteen hours or more
Richmond to Philadelphia.
If I survived, I would rise
up singing.

A large man, nearly two hundred pounds,
I climbed into that pine crate like one
about to be hung.   I brung along crackers,
water in a beef bladder, my hat
for a fan, a small gimlet for boring air holes,
memorized words of my favorite hymn,
my fear of dark, cramped spaces.
Prayed harder than I'd ever prayed as they
nailed down the lid and wound five hoops
of hickory wood around that box.

Chin resting on my knees, eyes peering
into the void, I faced my fear of
suffocating, drowning.    Endured
strange pains suffered on the upside-down
journey to trainside, the clumsy transfer to the

wooden side paddlers at Aquia Creek,

eyes nearly swollen out of their sockets,
the choke of my swallowed screams,
the slightest bit of air through pinpoint holes,
cold sweat on the steamboat journey—
wrong side up again, the tumble to the ground
as stevedores tossed me down, the crack
of my neck, another darkness—
inside my head.   I suppose I slipped away,
breaking the mortal chains as I lay scrunched up
in my tomb, my spirit rising then and there to possess
the Promised Land.

Finally, the barge transfer:   fishy smell of the
Susquehanna and Delaware; a voice announcing
my arrival in the north where freedom tolled for
every man.   I heard whispers—they thought
I might be dead.   A tapping on the box, All right?  
All right, sir, I said.   I heard the saw and hatchet,
the cutting away of five hickory hoops, the
prying off of the lid.

Wet with sweat, I rose up
from that pine box, singing,
Out of the miry clay!
After that day, everyone called me
Henry Box Brown.

Appeared in Wisconsin Review, 2006 (Vol. 40, No. 2)