Henry is a twelve-year old slave who lives with his father when the novel begins. Henry narrates the novel in first-person view from an undetermined point in the future. Because the author uses the viewpoint of a child to narrate real historical events such as the attack on Harper’s Ferry, he is able to highlight the confusion and hypocrisy of slave-era America.

Henry loses his father in the novel’s first few pages, and is taken by John Brown. Over the course of the story, he grows on Brown, and speaks of him with greater affection than he ever does about his father, although he classifies them each as lunatics and believers. His proximity to Christian zealots has made Henry suspicious of, and skeptical about, religion. It is only when his life is truly in danger during the rebellion that he prays in earnest.

Henry travels incognito as a girl for most of the novel. Indeed, most of the other characters never suspect he is a boy until he reveals it. His need to pose as a girl during the year when he is going through puberty and literally becoming a man raises questions about identity and what it is to be a man and to perform the duties of a man.