at Harvard University. She is the author of Racial Innocence: Performing American Childhood from Slavery to Civil Rights.
Bernstein applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, Freeman’s Challenge: The Murder That Shook America’s Original Prison for Profit, and reported the following:
The 99th page of the book is the first page of Chapter Five, the chapter that narrates the murder at the heart of Freeman’s Challenge. The murder is the challenge, because it threatens the Auburn State Prison, America’s original profit-driven prison. The chapter is called “Work” because that’s the word William Freeman later used to describe the murder. He had been forced to labor in factories inside the Auburn State Prison, and now his “work” of murder would turn the prison inside-out. The 99th page—and the chapter—opens with the full moon rising on a snowy March evening in 1846. Freeman hides his weapons in the folds of his clothes and starts walking south. He walks almost five miles from his home in Auburn toward the neighboring town of Fleming, where his “work” will begin.Learn more about Freeman’s Challenge at the University of Chicago Press website.
This page gives you a great idea of the whole book! Freeman’s Challenge is a work of history, and every word is based on historical sources—but I wanted the book to read like a novel. I wanted to write the kind of book someone would read in one sitting because they couldn’t put it down (and the book is short, so that’s possible!). To manage that balance, I did massive research to recover William Freeman’s experience. The road from Auburn to Fleming is a great example: historical sources told me what that road was like. I knew the road was narrow and slick with mud and slush; I knew that a nearby lake pulsed against the shore. I knew that owls and wolves lived in the woods alongside the road. These truths enabled me to reconstruct Freeman’s experience.
William Freeman’s voice is very important to the book—and to this page. Freeman never wrote or dictated his own story, but people who knew him reported his words. I wove these quotes into Freeman’s Challenge for two reasons: to do justice to Freeman and to make the book enjoyable for the reader. You can hear Freeman’s distinctive voice on this page: as he’s deciding to start out toward Fleming, he regards the sky. “Just at dark,” he calls it, “edge of evening.” I love how William Freeman used language, and his eloquence shines on this page.
This page is also representative of the book because it describes the everyday racism that affected Freeman and every other Black person in New York State (and beyond). As Freeman walks southward, a white man in a cutter—a small sleigh— comes up behind him on the same road. As the man passes Freeman, he looks suspiciously at him. The truth is that Freeman did plan to commit a crime, but the white man had no access to that information. The white man was suspicious simply because a Black man was walking at night—“walking while Black,” we might call it now.
--Marshal Zeringue