How Henry Box Brown escaped slavery in a box and became a subversive magician
Viewed today as an early Black performance artist, he lived in Canada and the U.K.
*Originally published on Feb. 4, 2025.
A headstone sits in Toronto's historic Necropolis Cemetery. Over a century old, the inscription reads: "Henry Brown, died June 15, 1897."
Few could imagine the dramatic life story behind this modest marker.
Brown's first decades are described in The Narrative of Henry Box Brown Written By Himself (1849).
Descended from Africans kidnapped and shipped to the American South, he was born in Virginia around 1815.
"I entered the world a slave — in the midst of a country whose most honoured writings declare that men have a right to liberty," Brown writes in his book.
Henry Brown's escape
In adulthood, Brown is enslaved at a Richmond tobacco factory.
One terrible day in 1848, he describes going to a nearby street, to see some 350 people in bondage, "marching under the direction of a Methodist minister, by whom they were purchased, and amongst which slaves were my wife and children."
This personal horror alters Henry Brown.
"I now began to get weary of my bonds; and earnestly panted after liberty," he writes.
He is praying one day, "when the idea suddenly flashed across my mind of shutting myself up in a box, and getting myself conveyed as dry goods to a free state."
Brown pays two locals to help nail him into a narrow wooden postal crate, addressed to abolitionists in Philadelphia, who are ready to receive him.
Transported by cart, steamship and train, Brown's box arrives in the city after 27 hours — some of which he has spent upside down on his head, bearing his full body weight.
But he arrives alive.
Brown's narrative ends in triumph, with the singing of a hymn, as the abolitionists "managed to break open the box, and then came my resurrection from the grave of slavery."
Becoming Henry Box Brown
The 1849 escape of Henry Brown has inspired visual art, performance, and creative writing in our own era, as well as a growing body of research.
But Brown himself was its first interpreter.
Adding Box to his name, he joined other fugitive enslaved people, such as the eminent Frederick Douglass, in giving talks on the transatlantic abolitionist lecture circuit.
Audiences gathered to hear these firsthand accounts, in an era when some did not have the full picture of slavery's brutal realities. Yet the fugitive speakers remained in danger.
IDEAS spoke to Martha Cutter, author of a 2022 book, The Many Resurrections of Henry Box Brown, which features new research about his life.
She notes that "In the United States, there were many fugitive slave laws (that) made it legal for any person to try to take Box Brown or any other slave back to slavery, on very flimsy terms. It's pretty clear that 1850 was a dicey time, a difficult time, to be a free Black man."
Henry Box Brown soon made his way to England, to yet another kind of life.
Performing as Henry Box Brown
Slavery had been abolished in England in 1834, but there was public interest there in hearing formerly-enslaved speakers from America.
However, white abolitionists — if not fellow speakers — began to question Henry Box Brown's bold style of presentation, which included a confident narrative, and various visual props.
"When you didn't kind of stick to a fairly strict script, the abolitionists were not interested in having you represent them…that script of the passive enslaved individual," said Cutter.
Box Brown and the abolitionists parted ways early into his 25 years in England, so he took charge of his own stage presentation. His instincts led him to become a multifaceted entertainer.
An advertisement from 1864, included in Cutter's book, gives the flavour of his shows:
"Professor Box Brown, from Africa and America, will appear as the Great African Magician, dressed in his Native Costume, also as the King of All Mesmerists."
Brown's Magic Act
Despite his adoption of personas, showy promotional stunts, and onstage illusions, Henry Box Brown's political message about the inhumanity of slavery and the wrongs of racism remained unchanged.
Cutter points to the way boxes figured literally and symbolically in his magic act, as vessels of both death and deliverance.
"There's a later performance in England where he talks about the Middle Passage, the horrible voyage of the enslaved from parts of Africa. He…then he gets into his own box as if to demonstrate he had a taste of that Middle Passage."
In 1852, the performer took Thomas Brindley to court. He was the author of slur-laden newspaper review that scoffed at the descriptions of slavery as exaggerated. Box Brown won the suit.
There was also subversive political humour in Henry Box Brown's act. He hypnotized audience members to behave like farm animals, which seemed amusing on the surface, but likely grew out of racist stereotypes of the enslaved as beasts.
Cutter points out that Box Brown the mesmerist is "making white British individuals run around on stage, and gobble down raw cabbage. So he's obviously flipping the script. Yes, this was funny, but it was also about taking control."
Interpreting Henry Box Brown
Viewed from the vantage point of our own era, Cutter's book concludes that Henry Box Brown can be seen as "a dissident and insurgent performance artist."
Scholar Daphne Brooks, who wrote about Box Brown for her 2006 book about acts of escape by the formerly enslaved, Bodies in Descent, agrees.
"There are all these ways that we can think about Box Brown: as performance artist, as visual artist, as public speaker, singer, author," said Brooks.
"He had this limitless resourcefulness in the way of artistic resistance that marks him as exceptional in a field of exceptional individuals who fought their own trafficking."
Henry Box Brown in Canada
Henry Box Brown eventually returned to the United States, more than a decade after abolition in 1865. He brought his second wife and children, who joined him onstage, and sang with him.
He made his home base in Canada: briefly in London, Ont., and then settling in Toronto. It was here, Cutter discovered, that he died and was buried in 1897.
Though Box Brown's story is better known in the U.S., there is growing recognition and research into this last phase of his life.
Three Toronto residents — history advocates Coralina Lemos, Adam Wynne, and Pancheta Barnett — recently worked together to have a laneway named for him, behind a house he lived in on Bright Street in the Corktown neighbourhood east of downtown.
Standing near the sign marking Henry Box Brown Lane, Panceta Barnett says she is delighted to have learned about Henry Box Brown's life, in all its tragedy and triumph.
"This is something that I think is newsworthy," Barnett said.
"It's historical revelation. This is not a time for us to go through life, not remembering these people."
Download the IDEAS podcast to listen to The Amazing Lives of Henry Box Brown.
*This documentary was produced by Lisa Godfrey.
For more stories about the experiences of Black Canadians — from anti-Black racism to success stories within the Black community — check out Being Black in Canada, a CBC project Black Canadians can be proud of.
