Passenger on the Pearl: The True Story of Emily Edmonson’s Flight from Slavery
by Winifred Conkling
Publication Date: Jan 26, 2016
List Price: $10.95
Format: Paperback, 176 pages
Classification: Nonfiction
Target Age Group: Young Adult
ISBN13: 9781616205508
Imprint: Algonquin Young Readers
Publisher: Workman Publishing Co., Inc.
Parent Company: Workman Publishing Co., Inc.
The page-turning, heart-wrenching true story of one young woman willing to risk her safety and even her life for a chance at freedom in the largest slave escape attempt in American history.
In 1848, thirteen-year-old Emily Edmonson, five of her siblings, and seventy other enslaved people boarded the Pearl under cover of night in Washington, D.C., hoping to sail north to freedom. Within a day, the schooner was captured, and the Edmonsons were sent to New Orleans to be sold into even crueler conditions. Through Emily Edmonson’s journey from enslaved person to teacher at a school for African American young women, Conkling illuminates the daily lives of enslaved people, the often changing laws affecting them, and the high cost of a failed escape.