How I Found the Seed for The Ballad of the Fugitive William Parker from My Own Family Tree By Cristin O’Keefe Aptowicz

My mother passed away in May 2015, six months after the release of my narrative nonfiction book, Dr. Mütter’s Marvels. When I heard that the book had made the New York Times best seller list, my mother was the first person I called, both of screaming incoherently and laughing through tears. She was the reason I wanted to be a writer in the first place, instilling in me a deep love of books and of stories, especially true ones. 

In the wake of her unexpected death, I started diving into her side of the family tree, desperate to learn more about her. The story she had always told us was simple: her American blood line consisted entirely of Irish Catholic immigrants, who fled to Philadelphia to escape the potato famine, and then set about intermarrying other Irish Catholic Philadelphians for generations until my mother broke the streak by marrying my father, a Ukrainian Roman Catholic named Aptowicz. 

And that story turned out to be largely true, with one exception: my mother’s mother’s mother, a woman named Mary Price.

Mary Price, it turned out, wasn’t Irish Catholic at all. She was old-stock German, and her branch of the family arrived in Philadelphia in the early 1700s. And it was in chasing down more information on this mysterious Price family branch that I discovered something that stunned me: the Price family had been an active part of the Pennsylvania Underground Railroad.

I owe this discovery to an 1883 book called The Underground Railroad by R.C. Smedley. Smedley wasn’t a historian or a writer. He was a country doctor who treated in his medical practice many of the brave men and women who had served in the area’s Underground Railroad. As he grew older, he soon found himself watching a generation of freedom fighters dying off, their stories dying with them. He set out to record their testimonies, determined to put into print the incredible things they and their neighbors had done during a dangerous, extraordinary time in American History. And it is in this book that I found my family. 

“Large quantities of exquisitely clean and nicely mended clothing were frequently sent by the many descendants of John Price, a Dunkard minister…” the book wrote about my seventh great grandfather, “He and his wife were strongly opposed to slavery, and opposition to it became hereditary in the family.” As it turned out, my ancestors were seamstresses of the area’s Underground Railroad, stitching together new outfits for groups of fleeing freedom-seekers in a single night. 

But that’s not all I found in Smedley’s book. A name kept appeared more than seventy times: William Parker. And one event was mentioned constantly alongside it: the Christiana Riot.

I had lived in New York City before, during, and after 9/11, and the way the people in Smedley’s book talked about the Christiana Riot felt eerily familiar “That happened before the towers fell,” we’d say, or “that was after the towers fell,” knowing the listener would know exactly what we meant. That we were talking about seismic, paradigm-shifting event that cracked the country in two, into before and after. That’s how the people in this book talked about the Christiana Riot. Yet, I had never heard of it. Despite being born and raised in Philadelphia, and apparently having family on my own tree entangled with it.

Here’s what I’d learned. The Christiana Riot—now renamed the Christiana Resistance—was a pre-dawn standoff between enslavers and the formerly enslaved, set into motion by the newly passed 1850 Fugitive Slave Act. At its center was William Parker, a man who had escaped slavery himself as a teenager and had spent the next decade quietly building a mutual-defense organization, uniting the region’s free and fugitive Black population and developing an unlikely yet steadfast ally in the area’s famously nonviolent white Quaker community.

It was to William Parker’s front door that an enslaver named Edward Gorsuch came with a posse, in search of the four men he considered his “property,” and it was Parker’s wife who blew a horn out of a window at the top floor of the house, alerting the community to what was happening. Soon, the fields surrounding Parker’s house were filled with neighbors—Black and white, men and women—carrying scythes, guns, and rocks, determined that Gorsuch would be returning to Maryland empty-handed. 

By the end of that standoff, the enslaver lay dead and his posse had scattered or lay wounded. By the next morning, the federal government had descended upon the sleepy farming village of Christiana, arresting dozens of men and eventually charging them with treason — because, under the Fugitive Slave Act, to refuse to aid an enslaver in reclaiming his human “property” was argued to be levying war against the United States. 

The trial that followed was a sensation, with a sitting congressman for the defense, a sitting senator for the prosecution, and a sitting Supreme Court justice presiding. The country held its breath as it waited to hear the answer the question: would the U.S. government really hang men for the crime of protecting their neighbor?

And while the story did intersect with some famous names—Frederick Douglass, Lucretia Mott, William Lloyd Garrison, Thaddeus Stevens, and John Brown, among them—what pulled me in were the ordinary people at its center. Ordinary people who, when an extraordinary moment demanded it, stepped up.

There’s an old saying that no one is truly dead until the last person speaks their name. When my mother passed, I was desperate to find ways to keep her with me, to hear her name. Diving into my family tree felt one way I could do that, never imagining that I’d find my next book there. 

The Ballad of the Fugitive William Parker is dedicated to my mother, and her mother, and her grandmother, Mary Price. And with it, I hope readers will help keep the stories of these extraordinary “ordinary” Americans—like my ancestors, like William Parker—alive. 

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A Best Book to Read this Fall According to The Boston Globe and the Los Angeles Times

For fans of Master Slave Husband Wife and Django Unchained comes the extraordinary forgotten story of an event known in its day as “the first shots of the Civil War,” from the New York Times bestselling author of Dr. Mütter’s Marvels.

The year, 1851. The place, a Quaker farming community turned Underground Railroad stronghold, where a Maryland enslaver had journeyed in pursuit of four men who’d fled his plantation years before. In a few hours, he’d be dead…and twenty-seven men from the village of Christiana would be rounded up and put on trial. Not for his murder, but for treason—for waging war against the United States, at a time when it was a crime against the government to obstruct an enslaver looking to reclaim his “property.”

This is story of what happened in Christiana that September morning—and in the ensuing “trial of the century,” which saw the president himself advise the prosecution on strategy and a sitting congressman serve as lead attorney for the defense. But The Ballad of the Fugitive William Parker is also a much larger tale, one spanning decades, following a whole startlingly diverse community of abolitionists in their fight to convince their fellow Americans of the subversive idea that now found itself on trial: that the nation ought to live up the ideals it was founded on, and respect all men as equals.

It’s a story that whisks readers from the quiet farmlands of Lancaster County—where a self-emancipated man named William Parker, whom legend had it bullets could not kill, rallied his neighbors to ride out each night to battle the slavecatchers who stalked their countryside—to Philadelphia’s genteel Society Hill, where socialite Harriet Forten Purvis had the ear of the mayor (and a cellar filled with fugitives). It’s stylish, propulsive, intimately human tale of bravery, ingenuity, and hope—and of ordinary people with little in common who came together to stand against injustice…and won.

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Cristin O’Keefe Aptowicz is a  New York Times best selling poet and historian. She is the author of eight books of poetry, most recently  Against Vanishing (2025),  How to Love the Empty Air (2018), and  The Year of No Mistakes (2013), which was named the Book of the Year for Poetry by the Writers’ League of Texas.

Her first nonfiction book,  Words In Your Face: A Guided Tour Through Twenty Years of the New York City Poetry Slam , was named one of five Notable Books on Exploring Poetry by  The Washington Post and U.S. Poet Laureate Billy Collins wrote that it “leaves no doubt that the slam poetry scene has achieved legitimacy and taken its rightful place on the map of contemporary literature.”

Her second nonfiction book,  Dr Mütter’s Marvels: A True Tale of Intrigue and Innovation at the Dawn of Modern Medicine (2014) spent three months on the  New York Times bestseller list and was included on several “Best Books of the Year” lists, including those by Amazon, NPR’s Science Friday,  Library Journal ,  School Library Journal ,  The Guardian , and  The Onion’s AV Club, which called it “a nearly perfect piece of non-fiction.”

She has been awarded fellowships and residencies by the National Endowment for the Arts, the University of Pennsylvania, the Amy Clampitt House, and Hedgebrook, among others. She lives in Philadelphia with her husband, the novelist Ernest Cline, and their two children. Her new historical nonfiction book,  The Ballad of the Fugitive William Parker , is out this fall from Simon & Schuster.