Review: Journey Back to Freedom by Catherine Johnson

I’ve had Olaudah Equiano’s An Interesting Narrative for a long time and it’s probably the book that has most often been at the top of my reading pile that has fallen back down it. This is because I’m ‘not in the mood for it’ or that it seems ‘heavy’. I’m not sure I want to face something as depressing and soul-crushingly sad as the transatlantic slave trade. Perhaps it’s some buried racism in me. 

I’m working in a number of classes in my new school, classes that have a corridor with all the levelled reading books in it. These books are not only scheme books but some proper books as well and I saw that one was about Olaudah Equiano, called Journey Back to Freedom. I also saw it was by Catherine Johnson and that name tugged my memory somewhere.

Sadly, that memory was The Curious Case of the Lady Caraboo, a book I’d found cheap and exploitative, making up faux rape backstories for a character who was far more peculiar and interesting to have that fictional slop put on her. At least Olaudah Equiano was African so Johnson couldn’t artificially blacken him up in ways that act counter to the main narrative.

Alas, because I haven’t yet read his Interesting Narrative (and because it’s deep in some box, some-where) I can’t really assess this book for egregious changes in history to serve her story. From the notes at the back it seems that Johnson didn’t fully get on with Equiano. There’s the big stuff, that he worked on slave ships and as an overseer even as a free man. She also describes him as sounding smug. He wheeled and dealed his way out of chattel slavery, I think he has something to be smug about. 

However much as I was willing to rag on Johnson, Journey Back to Freedom is a decently told story to children that puts across what slavery and the slave trade actually were and the horrors of that while still connecting it with things they understand and can somewhat relate to.

It also emphasises how slavery was experienced differently in different places. Being indulged in England, working hard but as a team with free people on the ships, and the worst kind in the plantations of Jamaica. There’s a really good point that the slave owners of Jamaica went beyond the evil of owning people for the sake of free labour but actually developed a desire to hurt the slaves for no reason - even if it was counterintuitive to their productivity. I doubt there are any stories for primary-aged children that include the word ‘sadism’ but this came close.

There are exciting moments told in simple language, when a stupid captain ignores Equiano and the rest of his crew and steers his ship into rocks, or the battle at sea where a musket ball passed through his officer’s cheek. There’s also a good representation of the rough-and-tumble camaraderie of the ship.

Despite my animus against Catherine Johnson, I think this is a very good and readable account and a good introduction to Oluadah Equiano, which adds a little more nuance and detail about the slave trade. 

There is another children’s book about Equiano by Dr Robert Hume called Oluadah Equiano, The Slave with the Loud Voice but I should probably stop reading children’s versions of his story and get on with reading the real thing.