Bound for Canaan (17 page)

From the moment they stepped ashore, their fears ceased to be abstract. Many of the settlers in that part of Indiana had come from the South and were notoriously hostile to fugitive slaves. The Hensons' destination was Cincinnati, 150 miles to the east along confusing and unmarked roads, where Josiah hoped for help from the “benevolent men” who had befriended him in 1829. Until they reached Cincinnati, they could not safely trust anyone, white or black. Even free blacks were known to turn runaways in for the reward, and sometimes to serve as decoys for slave catchers. Henson, who had traveled north of the river before, could have no illusions that their passage would be easy, or their safe arrival assured.

The Hensons probably stayed close to the Ohio, passing the river ports of Troy, Leavenworth, New Albany, and Madison, an area that was then very lightly populated. Had they turned north at Madison, through Versailles and Connorsville, they would have found a ready welcome in the Quaker settlements around Richmond; the fact that they did not suggests that they were probably unaware of any source of assistance outside Cincinnati. Instead, they continued eastward along the river, resting in the forest during the day and walking by night, and dodging for cover whenever they heard someone approaching. After about twelve days on the road, they ran out of food. “All night long the children cried with hunger, and my poor wife loaded me with reproaches for bringing them into such misery,” Henson recalled. “It was a bitter thing to hear them cry, and God knows I needed encouragement myself. My limbs were weary, and my back and shoulders raw with the burden I carried. A fearful dread of detection ever pursued me, and I would start out of my sleep in terror, my heart beating against my ribs, and expecting to find the dogs and slave-hunters after me.” Desperate, Henson ventured into a settlement in search of food, apparently their first contact with other people in the two weeks since they had left Kentucky. He went up to the first cabin he saw and asked if he might buy some bread and meat. “No, I have nothing for niggers,” the owner replied. At the next farm, Henson was initially turned away too. However, the woman of the house called him back, telling her husband, “How can you treat any human being so? If a dog was hungry I would give him something to eat.” Laughing, the man told her that she might “take care of niggers,” if she wished, though he wouldn't. To Henson's surprise, the woman quietly gave him some venison and bread, which he wrapped in his handkerchief and carried back to his family in the woods.

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Apart from the sheer physical and mental strain of finding their way through unfamiliar territory, without map, compass, or road signs, fugitives had to run a gauntlet of local constables, slave catchers, informers, and often an unfriendly populace that despised blacks, both free and enslaved. The most dangerous of these were the professional slave hunters
who operated throughout both the South and the North. Most were hired for a flat fee by slave owners who could not afford the time to track fugitives themselves. Others worked on a contingency basis, buying discounted fugitives on the run, and then selling those they managed to catch, for a profit. Rewards for the recapture of fugitives ranged from between twenty dollars or less in the South, to fifty dollars for those who were captured in the free border states, to one hundred and twenty-five dollars, plus travel allowance, for fugitives caught as far north as New England and New York. Recaptures were almost everyday events in the border areas of Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Indiana. However, no fugitives, no matter how far they ran, or how long they had lived in freedom, could feel entirely safe anywhere south of the Canadian border. In 1832 a North Carolina jailer advertised a man he had captured who had been a fugitive for twenty-five years. William Wells Brown and his mother were apprehended 150 miles into Illinois just as they were congratulating themselves on their daring escape from St. Louis. Alexander Hemsley had lived peacefully for years in Northampton, New Jersey, when a band of Southerners suddenly appeared at his door. As far north as Wisconsin, the fugitive William A. Hall was warned that “there are men here now, even where you are living, who would betray you for half a dollar if they knew where your master is.” Hall fled to Canada.

There was no single prototype for the successful fugitive. Some planned for months or years, painstakingly saving money, hoarding extra clothes, and collecting information about river crossings and back roads. Others simply walked away, and hoped for the best. Jim Pembroke carried only a half pound of cornmeal bread for a week-long odyssey from Maryland to Pennsylvania, and nearly starved. William A. Hall, who fled impulsively after a savage beating, carried no provisions or extra clothes at all, but still managed to reach Chicago from Tennessee in three months. Many fugitives carried false documents, which appear to have been surprisingly easy to acquire. Alfred T. Jones, a semiliterate slave in Madison County, Kentucky, wrote himself a pass that enabled him to travel from Lexington, Kentucky, to Cincinnati. “I could scarcely put two syllables together grammatically, but in fact, one half the white men there were not much better,” Jones related.

In the end, most fugitives relied on pluck, physical stamina, and the north star, the single reliable guide for fugitives who, with only the rarest
exceptions, were incapable of reading road signs, where they existed. Charles Ball carefully furnished himself with a “fire-box” containing flints, steel, and tinder; a greatcoat given him by his master; a needle and thread; a linen bag filled with parched corn; and a stolen sword for protection. He guided himself as best he could by the north star during a grueling nine-month odyssey that took him from Georgia to Maryland. Although he started out with a sense of the approximate route that he had to travel, he frequently found roads that he thought were carrying him north were in fact leading him in another direction entirely. Sometimes, when clouds obscured the stars, he discovered to his grief that he had been walking for hours or days in a circle, or zigzag. One night he wandered directionless for hours in pitch darkness, in a bog with the mud and water over his knees, totally lost. Another time, nearly discovered by a party of patrollers, he became so confused that the stars seemed “out of their places,” and he remained for three days concealed in a thicket, for fear that any direction he set off in would prove to be the wrong one. On still another occasion, upon coming to a crossroads, he spent eleven days hidden in the woods, waiting for a clear night so that he could take his bearings by the stars before choosing which fork to take. It took him two months just to reach the vicinity of Columbia, South Carolina, “so near the place from which I had first departed, that I could easily have walked to it in a week, by daylight.”

Jim Pembroke, who lived only a short distance below the Mason and Dixon Line, in Hagerstown, Maryland, knew only that Pennsylvania was a free state. “But I know not where its soil begins, or where that of Maryland ends,” wrote Pembroke, who became known in freedom as Reverend James Pennington. “My only guide was the
north star
, by this I knew my general course northward, but at what point I should strike Penn, or when and where I should find a friend, I knew not.” Pembroke had been born on the Eastern Shore of Maryland in 1807, and was given along with his mother and an older brother as a wedding gift to a son of his master, a wheat farmer. Trained as a mason and blacksmith, by adulthood he had become a valued craftsman within the limited cosmos of plantation life. Like Josiah Henson, Pembroke viewed his work as a moral endeavor. “I had always aimed to be trustworthy; and feeling I had aimed to do my work with dispatch and skill, my blacksmith's pride and taste was one thing that had reconciled me so long to remain a slave.” He endured the daily insults of slavery until, one day, his master savagely caned him sim
ply for looking him straight in the eye. “After this,” Pembroke wrote, “I found that my mechanic's pleasure and pride were gone,” and he decided to run for Pennsylvania. The thought of fleeing threw him into a confusing tumult of “hope, fear, dread, terror, love, sorrow,” and deep depression. He knew the risks. Other slaves in the neighborhood who had run away and been caught had been punished with severe flogging and exile to the Deep South. But he also felt that if he did not make his attempt now, driven by shame and rage, he might never make it at all.

Pembroke's first sensation of freedom was sheer terror. He spent his first day of it squatting fearfully behind a corn shock, very hungry, and almost more depressed than he could bear, “chilled to the heart,” and unnerved by fears of utter destitution. He passed the second day hiding under a bridge, eating sour apples that gave him diarrhea. The third night, he discovered that the road he had been following led southward toward Baltimore rather than north to Pennsylvania, and that he had been walking most of the time in the wrong direction. Impulsively, he now decided to continue on to Baltimore, in hope of sneaking aboard a boat that would carry him north. He soon encountered a young white man with a load of hay, who instantly recognized that Pembroke was a runaway and warned him that there were slave patrols nearby, directing Pembroke to a certain house, where an “old gentleman” would “further advise” him. Pembroke was so confused by having lost his direction, however, that he forgot what the young man told him and, worrying that he might become even more lost, decided to stay on the road that he was following. After he traveled only a short distance, the boy's warning was proved apt when Pembroke was stopped and seized by several white men when he was unable to produce free papers.

Pembroke's captors held him in a nearby tavern and immediately identified him as a “runaway nigger.” Knowing that if he told them the truth, he would receive a hundred lashes from his master, and as likely as not be sold away to the Deep South, he continued to maintain that he was a free man until his captors decided that he would go with one of them and remain at his house until they learned if there was a reward for his capture. Left under the observation of the owner's small son, Pembroke managed to make his escape after dark, fleeing into nearby woods, and eluding his pursuers after a desperate race. Unable to see the north star through the rain, Pembroke zigzagged all night through tangles of vines and briars, ut
terly terrified of recapture. At one point he even heard horsemen nearby, discussing their search for him. “Every nerve in my system quivered, so that not a particle of my flesh was at rest,” he recalled. Too frightened to travel by road, Pembroke continued across country. He was almost starving now, having eaten nothing for days except raw dry corn that he painstakingly chewed kernel by kernel. In desperation he decided to risk traveling by daylight, and to find out where he was. Shortly after dawn on the sixth day, he arrived at a toll gate that was operated by an elderly woman. She informed him, to his immense relief, that he was already in Pennsylvania. When Pembroke asked her where he might find work, she directed him to the farm of a Quaker “who lived about three miles away, whom I would find to take an interest in me.”

The Quaker, William Wright, later the leader of the Underground Railroad in the Gettysburg area, provided the fugitive blacksmith with room and board in return for chopping wood. In the course of his six months' sojourn with the Wrights, they taught him to read and write, and introduced him to arithmetic, astronomy, and the Bible. They eventually decided that the danger of recapture made it imperative for Pembroke to move farther away from the state line. After reluctantly leaving the security of his benefactors, Pembroke made his way “in deep sorrow and melancholy” toward Philadelphia, where, probably with an introduction from Wright, he found shelter in the home of another Quaker farmer, where he spent the next seven months, more or less taking charge of the farm. Then, passing through Philadelphia, he made his way to New York, where he would eventually achieve a prominent career in the ministry and, in 1838, play a small but poignant role in the northward flight of Frederick Douglass. He would also become a stationmaster on the Underground Railroad.

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The Hensons, too, like Pembroke, would find people to “take an interest” in them. Josiah left his family hidden in the woods outside Cincinnati while he went into the city in search of the “benevolent men” he had met the previous year. Since Henson's last visit, the “bright, beautiful” little city had
been torn by dreadful racial strife. City officials had directed all the city's three thousand blacks to register with the authorities, post a cripplingly expensive five-hundred-dollar bond for good behavior, or identify themselves publicly as slaves. Those who failed to do so would have thirty days to leave the city. Blacks reacted initially with despair. If the laws were enforced, they protested, “we, the poor sons of Ethiopia, must take shelter where we can find it. If not in America, we must beg elsewhere…where Heaven only knows.” When they continued to protest, white dockworkers raided the shanty towns, assaulting black families and demolishing their homes. In the aftermath, more than half of Cincinnati's black residents left the city, mostly for Canada. Henson's friends nevertheless welcomed him warmly, and just after dusk he brought his wife and children safely in. “We found ourselves hospitably cheered and refreshed,” Henson recalled. “Carefully they provided for our welfare until our strength was recruited, and then they set us thirty miles on our way by wagon.”

On their own once again, Henson and his family continued northward, heading for Lake Erie, about 150 miles farther north. Their friends in Cincinnati do not seem to have prepared them very well for what lay ahead. The interior of the state then was still largely unsettled. The Hensons traveled for days along the old military road that was cut for the War of 1812 and ran from Dayton to Detroit, through vast hardwood forests of oaks, poplars, and walnuts, clambering over fallen trees, picking their way through banks of briars, and racked with anxiety about being recaptured, attacked by wild animals, or murdered by Indians. Josiah's many talents do not seem to have included wilderness survival skills. Although they were surrounded by abundant wildlife—flocks of five hundred wild turkeys were not uncommon in the region at that time, and shoals of fish in some rivers were known to cover half an acre—the Hensons again ran out of food. They were saved by a chance encounter with a band of unexpectedly friendly Indians, probably a last remnant of the Wyandot or Shawnee. The Indians, who had never seen black people before, surprised the terrified Hensons by feeding them “bountifully,” and providing them with a “comfortable wigwam” for the night.