John Parker's life is filled with many experiences that influence his definition of freedom. As a slave, the thing that people take for granted is the thing that he desires more than the world itself. He risks everything to gain what as a human, he deserves.
As a small child, Parker's idea of freedom was not nearly as evolved as it comes to be. At first, his longing for freedom is simply one of physical escape. On his first trek to be traded, he experienced one of his first glimpses of enslavement, being forced to walk "chained to an old man" (Parker 26). Luckily, the kind old man gave him freedom of movement by making "the weight of the chain as light as he could" (Parker 26).
During his period of enslavement, he becomes "resentful of the freedom of nature" (Parker 27). Through his resent of the freedom of nature, he throws a rock at a bird with all of his "youth and heart of hatred" (Parker 27) hoping to kill it and with it its freedom to simply live. These things that surround him that cannot even comprehend the freedom that they are experiencing are not being fettered by the emotional and physical chains of enslavement, while he, a human being, is.
A crucial part of the procuring of his and others freedom is his ability to trick others into getting what he wants. His first incident involving this is the occurrence with the well, it gave him a taste of the thrill of breaking the rules and to be able to "get away with things and not be caught" (Parker 28). This skill is used several times throughout his various attempts at freedom for himself, but ironically is of no great use in his own final escape from slavery.
Perhaps the most pivotal part of his progress to freedom is an incident in which he had no control over. After beating the white woman, he has two choices risk his life in his run for freedom, or stay and inevitably be beaten and killed for his crime. He had nothing to lost, he chose "to take the boat that night" (Parker 35), which is possibly the most important decision he had ever made up to that point.
