ABSTRACT
I Want to Be Free (2009) by Joseph Slate and E. B. Lewis is another story that represents the flight to freedom. The text begins when the main character, a young male slave, attempts to escape from a plantation. The main character reports what he and the other characters, Big Man, slaves on the farm, a camp of maroons, and a young orphaned slave boy. Throughout the book, Big Man, a White slave owner on the farm where the main character is enslaved, is in a place of dominance. The camp of maroon characters in the book symbolize that there were Black runaways who willingly lived halfway between slavery. Although I Want to Be Free is similar to the other picture books featured in this study because it presents the trope of the cruel White slave master and the resisting runaway slave, it is distinct from the other texts in a few ways in its representation of race.
