Lift Your Light a Little Higher: The Story of Stephen Bishop: Slave-Explorer

Grab your lantern and follow the remarkable and world-famous Mammoth Cave explorer—and slave—Stephen Bishop as he guides you through the world’s largest cave system in this remarkable homage to the resilience of human nature.

Welcome to Mammoth Cave. It’s 1840 and Stephen Bishop is the perfect guide.

By the light of his lantern, the deepest, biggest cave in all of the United States is revealed. Down here, beneath the earth, he’s not just an enslaved person. He’s a pioneer. He knows the cave’s twists and turns. It taught him to not be afraid of the dark.

And watching all the visitors write their names on the ceiling? Well, it taught him how to read.Were you to tour Kentucky’s Mammoth Cave in the middle of the nineteenth century, there’s a good chance that a slave named Stephen Bishop would have been your guide. Not that you would have known his name—as he narrates in this fictionalized account, Bishop would simply have been called Guide, but that moniker only hints at his relationship to the cave. Bishop’s owner may have tasked him with its exploration, but Bishop put his heart into the job, traversing areas considered impassable and identifying such cave dwellers as the eyeless fish and albino craw- dads. Although the highlights of Bishop’s years at Mammoth Cave emerge from the text and Henson’s closing note, the first-person narration takes a form closer to reflection than biography, focusing on how he was a freer man in the cave than he could be above ground. “Down here, I am Guide—a man able to walk before other men, not behind; a man able to school even the brightest scholar.” Collier’s mixed-media collages underscore this message, contrasting the stiff and stoic poses of Bishop with his family above ground with the more animated and expressive depictions of him in the cave that was his virtual domain. Children drawn to cav- ing adventure may find fewer thrills than they hoped for (little is said, for example, of Bishop’s discovery of the Bottomless Pit), but those who with a fascination for unsung heroes and adventurers will be pleased to call Mr. Bishop by name.