Springs
Toledo’s Knock-Out Essay on John Brown as Liberator
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| Springs Toledo |
I’m
happy to report that the Winter 2019-Spring 2020 issue of 360 Review
Magazine features a story by Springs Toledo, an old friend, an alumnus of
the 1996 Mont Alto (Pennsylvania) conference on John Brown. Toledo is a seasoned author, widely known as
one of the foremost authorities on boxing and a string of notable works on the
subject: The Gods of War (2014), In the Cheap Seats (2016), and Murderers’
Row: In Search of Boxing’s Greatest Outcasts (2017). Less known to his boxing following, however,
is the fact that he is the author of The Hanging of Old Brown: A Story of
Slaves, Statesmen, and Redemption (Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 2002).
Toledo’s
latest essay on the Abolitionist, “Old John Brown’s Freedom Ride: An American
Outlaw & Twelve Fugitive Slaves,” is a wonderful narrative about Brown’s
role in liberating a party of enslaved people from Missouri in late 1858, and escorting
them along a perilous and difficult winter trek that culminated with their
entry into Windsor, Ontario, just across from Detroit, Michigan. His story is beautifully written, poignant
and fascinating. What adds to this fine
essay is that Toledo provides insights based upon research on the lives of the
liberated black people in Canada.
Beautifully illustrated, this piece is definitely recommended.
You
may read “Old John Brown’s Freedom Ride” by clicking on the this link:
Who Needs The Good Lord Bird
When One Has Huck Finn and John Brown?
Robert Wells’s groundbreaking novel,
Passing Through to the Territory (2010), “is a profound meditation, told
with wit and insight, with compassion and anger about the United States in
mid-19th century just before the outbreak of our great Civil War” (Louis Segal,
Ph.D.). As historical fiction, it is a
work of genius that both extends the narrative of Huckleberry Finn and counters
the slander against John Brown that has enjoyed such wide acceptance in the
United States in the past. Segal
continues that Passing Through to the Territory is “written in the voice
of Huckleberry Finn and, by extension, in the voice of Mark Twain, and herein
gives an account of Huck and Jim Daniels’ experiences after their abandonment
by Twain in the closing chapters of Twain’s Huckleberry Finn.” However, Wells makes a brilliant connection,
linking the story of Huck and Jim to antebellum Kansas territory, “Bleeding
Kansas,” and slavery to John Brown and the coming of the Civil War.
Readers may know that I’m not the
biggest fan of fiction, but I look forward to reading this brilliant contribution,
which already is on my short list of valued fiction about John Brown.
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