Bound for Canaan (40 page)

It was harder than it had ever been to find seamen willing to take a fugitive on board. Free blacks, in particular, were blamed for conniving at the disappearance of any slave who disappeared near a Southern port, and laws designed to keep them apart were growing increasingly harsh. A Charleston, South Carolina, law that was later copied in other ports mandated that free black sailors be jailed until their ships' departure, and that if a captain failed to pay the cost of their incarceration, they were to be “taken as absolute slaves, and sold.” Some ports tried to bar free blacks entirely. Although such laws may not have been fully enforced, they still had a devastating impact. In the 1820s blacks had constituted about 15 percent of sailors working out of Savannah, Georgia; by the 1830s they were only 2 percent. Similar legislation in Louisiana caused the proportion of black seamen working from New Orleans, the biggest port in the South, to plunge from 10 percent to 1 percent. Even where free blacks were permitted to land, slave patrols flogged and jailed them at will. In several cities, black dockworkers were required to wear badges to show whether they were enslaved or free. Slave owners near the North Carolina coast demanded with only limited success that black oystermen and fishermen be prohibited from sailing after dark, a restriction that would have reduced everyone's food supply. Authorities in Wilmington, however, succeeded in banning slaves from piloting or stevedoring on seagoing vessels manned by free blacks.

In June 1842 Harriet Jacobs's friend Peter reported that he had finally found a ship willing to carry her to Philadelphia. “The accommodation had been purchased at a price that would pay for a voyage to England,” Jacobs wrote. “But when one proposes to go to find old England, they stop to calculate whether they can afford the cost of the pleasure; while in making a bargain to escape from slavery, the trembling victim is ready to say, ‘Take all I have, only don't betray me!'” Plans were laid to sneak Jacobs to the harbor. But on the eve of the boat's departure, she panicked. She became obsessed with the idea that she was about to be betrayed. Having spent a quarter of her life in the attic, perhaps she was really terrified that she was no longer capable of surviving in the outside world. At the last minute, another fugitive who had been hiding for several weeks in
a house nearby was substituted for her. Although Jacobs was not aware of this woman, Fanny, her friends obviously were, suggesting that information about fugitives and compliant ships' captains circulated freely among Edenton's blacks.

While Fanny was en route to the ship, Jacobs abruptly changed her mind again and decided that she wanted to leave after all. Peter was sent racing through Edenton to catch the boat before it departed. “The captain agreed to wait at a certain place till evening, being handsomely paid for his detention,” Jacobs wrote. “Faint in body, but strong of purpose,” she was taken to the point of rendezvous by Mark Ramsey, where she found a rowboat waiting for her on the shore.

Once aboard the ship that was to take them north, Jacobs and Fanny were told to keep below whenever there was a sail in sight, but at other times they were allowed to remain on deck. As the ship eased down the bay, past the snake-infested swamp where she had hidden seven years before, and out finally into the deep blue waters of the open Atlantic, revealing a vastness that must have made Jacobs's head spin, all the anxiety that she had somehow managed to suppress during her years in the attic now came flooding out in a torrent. First she became obsessed with the fear that constables would come on board and arrest her, then that the sailors might do her harm, then that the captain himself, a Southerner who had lived most of his life in the slave states, was planning to turn her in. Terrifying as it was, this was freedom.

Ten days after leaving Edenton, the ship arrived at Philadelphia. Jacobs stepped onto the wharf dazed with culture shock, into a maelstrom of jostling draymen, bustling sailors, and stevedores shouting to one another like mountaineers amid alps of barrels and crates. Nothing had prepared her for this city charged with a teeming humanity beyond her imagining. No arrangements had been made for her arrival. She knew no one in Philadelphia, and had no plans except a fixed determination to get to New York, a city she had of course never seen, but where she knew there were people from Edenton. The captain touched her shoulder and pointed out “a respectable-looking colored man,” saying, “I will speak to him about the New York trains, and tell him you wish to go directly on.” By good fortune, this man turned out to be Jeremiah Durham, a minister of the African Methodist Episcopal church, a cartman by trade, and an agent of the antislavery Vigilance Committee, who had been deputed to
keep a lookout for possible fugitives arriving on the docks. Durham found Fanny a place to stay, and took Harriet to his own home, on Barclay Street. There, later that day, an “anti-slavery friend” interviewed Harriet, and promised to help her on her way. When the Anti-Slavery Society offered to pay both women's train fare to New York, “I declined to accept it, telling them that my grandmother had given me sufficient [funds] to pay my expenses at the end of my journey,” Jacobs rather primly replied, evincing the same tenacious pride that sustained her integrity under Norcom's assaults, and her sanity through her years of hiding. One of Mrs. Durham's friends escorted her to New York, the only point in her strange odyssey when she might be said to have been traveling in the company of the abolitionist underground.

Jacobs's life in the North would not be without pain, but it would be free. Although she lived until 1897, she would never marry. She would eventually be reunited with her brother John, now a sailor himself, with her daughter, Louisa, who had been sent north by Sawyer to serve as maid in the home of a relative, and with her son, Joseph. But she would never have the family life that she craved. She would find work as a nursemaid, and she would have kind employers who protected her when, after the passage of the 1850 Fugitive Slave Law, she feared recapture. Eventually, she would move to Rochester, New York, where she would oversee the local antislavery reading room, just above the editorial office of Frederick Douglass's paper the
North Star
. In 1861, she would publish an account of her years in Molly Horniblow's attic, a book that she could proudly proclaim was written by none but her own hand, and that offered perhaps the ultimate metaphor for the spiritual claustrophobia of American slavery.

3

Jonathan Walker had expected only four passengers aboard his boat in Pensacola. But on the night of June 19, eluding the eyes of suspicious whites, and of the armed patrols who were supposed to monitor the movements of slaves after dark, seven dark forms made their separate ways to the beach, and one by one slipped onto Jonathan Walker's whaleboat. There was Charles Johnson and his fast-talking brother Moses, plus two
more Johnson brothers, and bowlegged Silas Scott, a brother of Silas, and their friend Anthony Catlett. Each of the men, Walker would later learn, was valued at six hundred dollars. Taken together, they were worth forty-two hundred dollars, a very substantial sum. Silas Scott and Moses Johnson were the property of a transplanted Ohioan, Robert C. Caldwell, who had once studied for the ministry, and was now a second lieutenant in the navy. The others belonged to George Willis, a federal marshal, and to his brother Byrd C. Willis. Walker turned none of them away.

In the light of what happened later, it seems likely that Walker was already ill before the trip began. But the plans had been made, he had given his word, and he was confident—this man who had survived shipwreck, shooting, and tropical fevers—that he was up to the task. In silence, he steered the boat into the harbor, out past the anchored ships with their masts suggesting a forlorn forest of naked trees in the dark, out past the hidden shoals that edged the coast, out beneath the looming battlements of Fort Pickens, toward the barrier islands that sheltered the bay from the open sea. Just before daylight there was a sudden scare. Their voyage was almost terminated before they had even left the bay. The whaleboat was hailed by a pair of fishermen off the low hump of Santa Rosa Island. Asked where he was bound, Walker shouted, “To Mobile!” Then he heaved about and set off up the bay, in the opposite direction. Although they must have been puzzled by this odd behavior, the fishermen let it pass. In this saltwater no-man's-land traveled by smugglers and outlaws, it was unwise to ask too many questions of strange boats in the night.

Walker did not describe his boat in detail, but it was probably a typical New England whaleboat made of light half-inch-thick cedar planks, with the buoyancy to ride over rather than through the waves. Walker did not underestimate the challenge of the journey ahead. But he had reason for confidence. Small though his boat was, barely more than twenty-five feet in length, it was a sturdy craft with fore and main spritsails, and very likely also with a rope-operated device that enabled him to raise the top of the mainsail a few feet higher on the mast, to capture additional wind. Such boats were designed to be sailed in the open ocean, and to withstand almost any kind of weather. In 1821 shipwrecked sailors from the Nantucket whaler
Essex
had managed to sail six thousand miles in almost one hundred days in just such a boat, from the central Pacific to the coast of South America. Walker had laid in several barrels of bread, a hundred and
twenty pounds of pork and bacon, a keg of molasses, cheese, and a barrel of fresh water. It would have been plenty for five men. It was not enough for eight.

The first three days were an ordeal. Headwinds pressed them back toward Pensacola. Repeated squalls lashed the craft as it tacked painstakingly eastward. There was no shelter, no way to keep dry. Sleep must have been virtually impossible, certainly for the already weakened Walker, whose navigational skill was in constant demand. On June 26, the stormy weather finally broke, and the party made its first landfall at St. Andre's harbor, near present-day Panama City, barely one hundred miles east of Pensacola. They had averaged about fifteen miles a day, far less than Walker had hoped for. For the first time in a week, however, the men at least were able to dry their clothes, cook food, and replenish their water supply. Restored, they put to sea again that evening. The following day, they at first made better time, but Walker then made a misjudgment that cost them precious hours. Hoping to avoid having to tack around Cape San Blas, he steered into St. George's Sound, in the vicinity of present-day Port St. Joe, intending to manhandle the whaleboat across the neck of the peninsula at the southern end of the sound. But when they reached it, they found the distance over the sand was too great. They were forced to retrace their course around the peninsula, and to fight their way around Cape San Blas after all. In the midst of these maneuvers, they were spotted by another boat, the first that had approached them since they left Pensacola Bay. Several of the fugitives were sent ashore to hide in the spiky grass, as a precaution. But their luck held, and the strangers turned away before the fugitives were noticed.

On July 1 Walker and his party reached Cedar Key, nearly four hundred miles from Pensacola. Things were far from well in the whaleboat. On top of his original illness, Walker was now felled by sunstroke, which typically produces crippling headaches, fever, distorted vision, and, if untreated, delirium. He needed shelter and rest. Neither was possible. For days on end, Walker lost track of time. He would later recall, “I remember looking at the red horizon in the West, soon after sundown, as I thought for the last time in this world, not expecting to behold that glorious luminary shedding its scorching rays on me more.” When he was lucid, he offered what direction he could, but the fugitives' freedom now depended as much on the strength of their backs at the oars as it did on
Walker's impaired navigational skill. They were desperately short of water. They made several landfalls, hoping to replenish their supply, but without any luck.

Walker's laconic account of the voyage conveys little of what the mood was like, but especially during those first rain-soaked days when their progress was so agonizingly slow, it must have been grim. For the seven fugitives, the whaleboat had become as claustrophobic as the attic of Harriet Jacobs, a strange illusion of freedom hemmed in on every side by a prison of sea and sky. With them traveled seven lifetimes of slavery, of thwarted lives, broken families, fragile hopes. Their physical discomfort was extreme. They were crusted with salt, wet most of the time, and in constant danger of dehydration. There was never enough water. There was no room to lie down. Men slept where they sat, when they could sleep at all. But there was no way to turn back now, for either the fugitives or for Walker.

Fortunately, the weather held good. In spite of Walker's infirmity, they made fairly good headway down the west coast of the peninsula, sailing when there was breeze and rowing when there was none, past long miles of some of the world's most spectacular sand beaches, gleaming white off the port side. They were now averaging something like fifty miles a day. As long as they avoided being seen, and found water, they would be safe. The odds were now on their side. Nearly everyone in the Territory lived either along its northern edge, or in Key West, at the far end of the chain of islets that curled westward into the Gulf like a monkey's tail. The rest of the peninsula was virtually empty of people, apart from the mysterious Seminoles and Miccosukees who lived unseen in the trackless interior. For days on end, mile after mile, the coastline had been a bright ribbon of white sand on the eastern horizon. Now, as the whaleboat neared the peninsula's tip, the sand disappeared, to be replaced by the deep, vast gloom of mangrove swamps.

Walker's discomfort was extreme. In addition to the effects of sunstroke, his entire face was blistered from sunburn. As he lay numbly in the rocking whaleboat, parched and half-mad from the sun, he could not help asking himself why he was here, so far from the windscoured but familiar fields of Cape Cod, among fugitive strangers, facing sure and swift punishment if he was caught. The implacable answer was always the same, and it kept him going, struggling for consciousness when nothing else could:
slavery, “the most heinous, unjust, oppressive, and God-provoking system that ever cursed the dwellers of earth.” Calmly, he concluded that what he was doing must “secure approbation of that great ‘Judge of all earth, who doeth right,' and before whose presence I soon expected to appear.”