Patty Cannon

Patty Cannon was a nineteenth-century criminal associated with the Cannon–Johnson gang on the Delaware–Maryland border. Contemporary accusations and later investigations linked the group to kidnapping free Black people and escaped enslaved people and selling them into slavery in the Deep South.

Cannon was arrested in 1829 after human remains were discovered on property associated with her household and was charged with murder. She died in jail before trial, leaving a historical record mixed with sensational newspaper reporting and later legend.

James McBride’s Song yet Sung uses the historical slave trader Patty Cannon as the embodiment of a violent commercial system on Maryland’s Eastern Shore. The fugitive Liz Spocott begins the novel imprisoned in Cannon’s attic before escaping into Black networks of communication and resistance. Cannon’s presence connects the suspense plot to the documented history of kidnapping and slave trading in the region, while the novel contrasts that coercive network with the hidden routes through which enslaved and free Black communities assist one another.