## The Question of Who Owns an Escape Story
One of the most interesting tensions in Henry Box Brown’s post-escape career is the question of who owned his story — who had the right to tell it, who had the right to decide how it should be used, and who had the right to object when they thought it was being used wrongly.
The abolitionist movement, which had invested resources and reputation in Brown’s emergence and promotion, had a stake in the story. The circuit needed compelling speakers; Brown was compelling. The movement’s fundraising depended on keeping audiences engaged; Brown’s story engaged them. The publishing of the narrative involved a publisher (Brown and Stearns’s collaborator), a printer, distributors, and a network of venues that expected the book to be on sale at lectures. All of these created interests in how the story was used.
Brown’s own sense of ownership was unambiguous. The story was his. The escape was something he had conceived and executed. The suffering was his — the burning hand, the twenty-seven hours, the years of paying to keep Nancy near, the grief after her sale. Whatever use others wanted to make of it, his was the primary claim.
This is not a simple opposition between an exploited individual and exploitative institutions. The abolitionist movement provided Brown with platforms, audiences, income, and the social infrastructure that made his public life possible. McKim and Still and the Philadelphia committee had received him with the full knowledge that they might be arrested for doing so. These were not relationships of pure exploitation.