Slave narratives are extremely rare. Of the one hundred or so of these testimonies that survive, a mere handful are first-person accounts by slaves who ran away and freed themselves. Today two recently uncovered narratives, as well as the biographies from the men who had written them, join that unique group.

Wallace Turnage was a teenage field hand on an Alabama plantation, John Washington an urban slave in Virginia. They by no means fulfilled. But both men saw chance in the chaos from the Civil Battle, both escaped North, and both left us impressive accounts of their plane tickets to freedom. Passed down through family and friends these narratives tell gripping stories of escape.

Working from an unusual abundance of genealogical material, historian David W. Blight offers reconstructed Turnage’s and Washington’s childhoods as sons of white slaveholders and their climb to black working-class stability in the North, where they reunited their own families. INSIDE A SLAVE NO MORE, the untold tales of two normal men take their place at the heart from the American experience.