"Bibb's compelling narrative of escape and recapture, of love and renunciation, is virtually unique in the annals of the slave narrative. Bibb offers a striking self-portrait of a man caught between two worlds, a slave past that he could not cast off or forget, and a future in freedom to which he urgently desired to commit himself. Bibb's dilemmas touch our sympathies in ways that Frederick Douglass, who seemed to assimilate and succeed in the North without so much as a longing look backward, does not move us. --William L. Andrews, coeditor of the Library of America anthology Slave Narratives

"I was brought up in [Kentucky]. Or, more correctly speaking ... I was flogged up; for where I should have received moral, mental, and religious instruction I received stripes without number, the object of which was to degrade and keep me in subordination. ... I have been dragged down to the lowest depths of human degradation and wretchedness, by Slaveholders."--Henry Bibb

"This new edition will be invaluable to students and scholars of the slave narrative tradition and of the broader African American literary tradition. Demonstrating sound scholarship and an eye for detail, Heglar's introduction shows how Bibb's story diverges from other slave narratives in its emphasis on the importance of the slave family."--Christopher De Santis, author of Langston Hughes and the Chicago Defender