All We Were Promised Book Review

First of all, wow! I acknowledge that I haven’t read every slavery novel that exists, but I have read a lot of them and I found this one to be unique. A lot of the novels I’ve read about this time in our history take place somewhere in the South. This book takes place in the North (Philadelphia, PA to be exact). A lot of the novels I’ve read about this time in our history have mostly been from a slave’s perspective. This book is told from the perspective of three Black women: one who was born free, one who ran away from slavery to become free, and one who was actively trying to be freed from slavery. These women are in a city in a free State working together to actively free a slave while not sacrificing their own freedoms and making it possible to be able to legally free more slaves. If this isn’t convincing enough to go grab this book, allow me to continue.

Nell, born free into a prominent Black family in Philadelphia, is part of the abolitionist party in the city. She befriends Charlotte, a runaway slave living as a housemaid in the city with her passing father, and invites her into her world. Evie, a slave to a widowed woman from the South, runs into them while they were fundraising in the market for the Philadelphia Female Anti-slavery Society. While getting to know these three characters for half of the book created a slow pace, I felt like this slow build not only helped craft a solid world in which the book was set but also developed the characters into women I desperately wanted to see succeed in each of their missions.

“Charlotte looked around the hall. The women were legion, united by their opposition to slavery but representing a mishmash of conflicting interests beyond that. Imagine telling this wide-ranging coalition everything that had brought Charlotte and her friends to this moment: a girl smuggled here by a white-passing fugitive, a slave plotting to destroy a white woman's marriage before it started, and a supposedly respectable young woman spearheading an illegal scheme to smuggle a runaway out of town. Captivating as a speech like that might be, every last person involved would be ruined by it.”

Evie desperately wants to be free and while you would think it’d be simple for two women from an Anti-Slavery Society to help her, it proves to be quite complicated. Not only is it illegal to smuggle a slave to freedom, this particular slave poses a threat to Charlotte’s freedom. You see, Charlotte and Evie grew up with each other as slaves on a plantation in Maryland. When Charlotte and her father ran away from that plantation, they crafted new lives that required them to hide that they were ever slaves. Charlotte even hid her past from Nell. This causes a lot of conflict throughout most of the story until it all comes to a head in a shocking way.

Lying for the sake of protecting oneself is a common theme throughout the book and it blows up in the face of every person with a secret to hide. However, the conflict this causes due to others not knowing the truth makes some of the characters that don’t know the others' truths appear naive or selfish. For Nell, Charlotte, and Evie, the resolution of this conflict is explosive, but makes the three of them so much stronger and a heck of a force to be reckoned with.

As I mentioned earlier, the first half of the book had a really slow pace. However, the second half of the book really picked up to the point where I had to force myself to put it down to tend to my responsibilities. I’m so glad that I didn’t let the slowness of the first half of the book deter me from finishing the rest of it because everything the three women went through to fight for freedom was heart-wrenching, brave, and absolutely beautiful. To read about America’s tumultuous history with slavery through the eyes of the characters’ lived experiences in this novel, most of whom were inspired by real people in history, has left me with such a mix of emotions. Grateful for the immediatist abolitionists, like Nell and her neighbors, and heartbroken that these events were ever something Black people had to endure. I feel like Ashton Lattimore did an excellent job shedding light on the Black community’s contributions to the abolitionist movement.