Twenty Eight Years a Slave; Or, the Story of My Life in Three Continents

Twenty-Eight Years a Slave is more than a narrative of bondage. It also functions as a meditation on what freedom demands after emancipation. Born enslaved in Virginia, Thomas Lewis Johnson survived twenty-eight years of captivity before forging an improbable life that carried him across North America, Great Britain, and West Africa. First published in 1909 and largely forgotten since, Johnson’s memoir is at once a slave narrative, a missionary autobiography, a travel account, and a scrapbook of a life lived in motion.
Johnson’s title deliberately echoes Solomon Northup’s famous Twelve Years a Slave, but the resemblance is instructive rather than imitative. Where Northup’s narrative ends with the recovery of freedom, Johnson’s begins to ask what freedom is for. In his telling, the years of bondage, formative as they were, occupy only a fraction of a much longer life shaped by faith, migration, labor, and service. His memoir chronicles suffering endured, and authority claimed: the making of a Black spiritual leader navigating the racial, religious, and imperial worlds of the late nineteenth century.
This new annotated edition restores Johnson’s most expansive version of his work and places it in conversation with the traditions it both draws upon and quietly revises. With a substantial introduction and contextual notes, it presents Johnson as a transatlantic figure whose life unsettles neat categories of nation, genre, and belief. Humble yet audacious, rooted yet restless, Johnson reminds us that freedom, once gained, is not an ending, but an obligation.