But they were relationships of unequal power, and the terms of that inequality became visible in the criticism Brown received when he departed from the expected posture of the formerly enslaved speaker. When he built the panorama, when he developed an entertainment persona, when he eventually left for Britain and then further from the antislavery circuit into broader performance, he was exercising the ownership he had always claimed over his own story and his own life.
James C. A. Smith’s criticism about Nancy — the charge that Brown had not done enough to try to recover his family — was one expression of this ownership dispute. Smith was arguing, in effect, that Brown’s story was not just his to use for his own purposes; that the family left behind had a claim on his public visibility and the resources it generated. Brown’s silence on this point is not the same as agreement or disagreement; it is simply silence, which the historical record gives us.
The question of who owns an escape story — and what obligations come with the act of survival — does not have a clean answer. Brown was not obligated to be a martyr or a saint. He was a person who had escaped an institution designed to destroy him, and he had the right to build a life that made sense to him. The people he left behind — Nancy, the children, the unnamed fourth — were not his to protect in the same way they might have been had he not been himself owned. The system had taken that from him before he ever took his own freedom.