To free a family : the journey of Mary Walker / Sydney Nathans.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Prologue: A Secret Striving -- Reluctant Runaway -- Sanctuary -- "In the Midst of Friends" -- "Never Reject the Claims of Fugitive" -- The Rescue Plot -- "A Spirit Like a Dove" -- A Season of Silence -- "A Case of Heart-Rending Distress" -- If They Die for Their Freedom, Amen -- "The Welfare of Her Race" -- "To Part No More" -- Epilogue: "Their Works Do Follow Them."

What was it like for a mother to flee slavery, leaving her children behind? This book tells the remarkable story of Mary Walker, who in August 1848 fled her owner for refuge in the North and spent the next seventeen years trying to recover her family. Her freedom, like that of thousands who escaped from bondage, came at a great price, remorse at parting without a word and fear for her family's fate. This story is anchored in two extraordinary collections of letters and diaries, that of her former North Carolina slaveholders and that of the northern family, Susan and Peter Lesley, who protected and employed her. The author's narrative reveals Mary Walker's remarkable persistence, as well as the sustained collaboration of the black and white abolitionists who assisted her. Mary Walker and the Lesleys ventured half a dozen attempts at liberation, from ransom to ruse to rescue, until the end of the Civil War reunited Mary Walker with her son and daughter. Unlike her more famous counterparts such as Harriet Tubman, Harriet Jacobs, and Sojourner Truth, who wrote their own narratives and whose public defiance made them heroines, Mary Walker's efforts were protracted, wrenching, and private. Her odyssey was more representative of women refugees from bondage who labored secretly and behind the scenes to reclaim their families from the South. In recreating Mary Walker's journey, this book gives voice to their hidden epic of emancipation and to an untold story of the Civil War era.