Forbidden Fruit (19 page)

She and her family had come by the Erie Canal up to Buffalo on a flatboat with all
their belongings. Lucy later told her grandchildren that she remembered seeing a circus
near Niagara Falls and watching an elephant fall into the water, get sucked into a
whirlpool and ride over the rushing falls. She never forgot that elephant and whatever
lessons it taught her about life’s sharp and sometimes violent turns.

The Millards first stopped in Ohio and then in Plymouth, Michigan, where Lucy’s mother,
Diana Taylor, wasted away from tuberculosis and her two daughters, Lucy and Clarissa,
longed for companionship. Lucy and her family arrived in Michigan around 1850, just
as people from Europe and the eastern United States flooded the state—previously believed
to be nothing but swamps, bogs and Indians—all hungry for the state’s $1.25-an-acre
land. But cheap land was not enough to make Lucy’s father shackle himself to one spot.
He had a mission. It lay in the West, where Mormons had experienced conflicts and
all-out wars, sometimes because they represented the balance of power among political
groups, sometimes because their plural marriages offended members of other faiths
and sometimes because their leaders refused to accept non-Mormon governance. Lucy’s
father and his brother tried to set up a Mormon settlement in Plymouth, Michigan,
but failed. So Solomon Nelson Millard buried his wife and moved to northeast Missouri
near Palmyra, south of an earlier thriving Mormon center in Nauvoo, Illinois, on the
Mississippi River. That’s where Lucy Millard and Isaac Berry became neighbors.

Although Lucy’s father owned no slaves and taught his daughters to treat slaves kindly,
he belonged to a religion that, at the time, preached that blacks were a cursed race
that could not become priests. Even blacks who went to heaven would be servants there,
according to nineteenth-century Mormon theology. Yet Lucy’s father encouraged his
daughters to take water to Isaac in the fields, where he busted the hard ground for
immigrants. He also allowed Lucy to read the Bible to Isaac Berry, “a handsome man,”
according to the late Marguerite Jackson. By then Lucy was close to twenty, an age
when most nineteenth-century women either had husbands and children or had dedicated
themselves to teaching school or tending relatives. Still, she must have thought twice
about giving up everything she knew to keep her promise to find a runaway slave in
Detroit.

“You had to have a strong love to do something like that,” said Isaac’s granddaughter
Marie Berry Cross.

When her journey from Springfield ended, Lucy Millard got off the train in Detroit,
then a city of forty-five thousand people. Next door to the passenger depot of the
Michigan Central Railroad, a billboard directed passengers to the terminals of the
Grand Trunk Railroad of Canada. Shopkeepers sold clothes; carpets; plant, flower and
fruit seeds; paints and varnishes; dry goods and stoves; jewelry; life insurance and
liquor. Wandering around town, Lucy could have seen people riding in horse-drawn carriages
and people visiting the city in ox-drawn carts. Lucy found accommodations in a rooming
house, took a job in a shirt-making factory and began searching for Isaac in Detroit
and then across the river in Windsor. She knew he’d be somewhere sweating out music
and inhaling good times.

One Saturday night, she was walking along a Windsor street, heard a fiddler playing
and recognized the sound of Isaac’s instrument. She stopped a couple entering the
tavern and begged them for a favor. She asked them to tell the fiddler that “Lucy
is here,” says Pointer.

We can only guess what a tangle of emotions their reunion triggered—astonishment,
disbelief, joy, pride in their escapes and optimism about their future. They had found
each other, and their magic was still strong.

In April 1859, Isaac Berry and Lucy Esther Millard were married in the tiny town of
Little River, Canada. He was twenty-seven and she was twenty-one. Oddly enough, two
marriage records show up for the couple, both of them correctly identifying Isaac
Berry but spelling Lucy’s name in different ways, “Lusea Millon” and “Lucy Miller.”
On both certificates she’s identified as a member of The Church of Jesus Christ of
Latter-day Saints. However, she is no longer called white. On one certificate she’s
called an African and on the other a mulatto, as if in marrying Isaac she somehow
stopped being the New York–born and census-counted daughter of white parents and became
black by association. Marie Berry Cross, their granddaughter, says that is exactly
what happened. Lucy had one of her wedding certificates framed and put it over the
head of her bed. It showed two swans fastened to a boat, and the caption read “sea
of matrimony.”

They made their home in Puce, a village near Windsor. They stayed in Canada for nineteen
years and had six of their eight children there. Yet Canada was not quite the Promised
Land. “When they were all over in Canada, the school where they all went divided them
[by color],” according to Marguerite Jackson. “The Berry kids sat with the white kids
and the [children of ex-slave Absalom Johnson] sat on the other side. Then Grandpa
Berry went down there, and the teacher moved [the Berrys] over on the black side.”

“Granny said one winter all they had to eat was potatoes in Canada,” added Marie Cross.
“Grandpa became a fisherman, and he would catch the big sturgeon.”

Lake sturgeon can weigh as much as three hundred pounds, grow six to seven feet long,
whip water into foam before your eyes and give a fisherman the fight of his life.
Early Detroit settlers considered them such a nuisance that they fed the fish to their
pigs and burned them as fuel in steamboat boilers. However, Isaac caught sturgeon
in wire traps and ate or sold enough to survive.

In 1877, the Berry family traveled from Canada to central Michigan in a covered wagon,
bound for Webers’ Lumber Camp, which was selling cut-over land for $1.25 an acre.
Stephen and Caroline Kahler Todd journeyed with them. Like Isaac Berry, Stephen Todd
originally came from Kentucky. He had escaped from slavery four times, settling in
Indiana. On September 22, 1864, Todd enlisted in the armed forces as a substitute
for Andrew J. Huff of Washington Township, Marion County, Indiana. He served in the
Indiana 28th Regiment of U.S. black volunteers. After meeting Caroline Kahler, the
daughter of German-born parents, Stephen ran away to Canada with Caroline. They were
nearly captured while crossing the St. Clair River in a raft from Port Huron, Michigan,
to Sarnia, Ontario. On August 29, 1874, they married in Windsor, Ontario, according
to Stephen Todd’s pension records. Isaac Berry and his son, William, witnessed their
wedding.

For Isaac and Lucy Berry life in a sparsely populated Michigan wilderness gave them
the freedom they always had sought. The family built a log cabin on their eighty acres
in a part of Mecosta County now known as School Section Lake Park. It faced a still
lake and an eleven-acre island. Isaac planted trees on his land—maple, white cedar
and apple trees, grafting together different species of apples that still bloom on
his old homestead. He set aside two acres for a log schoolhouse in which Lucy became
the first teacher. Isaac also carved and rented out canoes and built two bathhouses,
one for men and one for women, so people could change into their swimming clothes.
In the winter, he spread sand on the ice and let it settle beneath the melting ice,
building a beach, layer by layer, just as he was building a life. And thanks to Lucy,
Isaac finally learned to squeeze sense from words written on paper.

However, both Isaac and Lucy Berry paid a high price for falling in love with each
other and with central Michigan’s birch, pine, beech, maple, hemlock and basswood
trees, white-tailed deer, timber wolves, bobcats and lynxes.

Lucy received just one letter from her sister, Clarissa, and nothing from other family
members. “Granny was cut from the family line,” said Marie Cross. “When she got on
that train, it was the end. She never seen her family again.”

Isaac also left pieces of his heart in Missouri. He never saw his mother, brothers
or sisters again and never shook off his feeling of unease, his sense that someone
was following him with a branding iron, ready to claim him as escaped property. Even
though he lived in Canada for nearly twenty years and then moved to Michigan after
the Civil War, he continued to look over his shoulder in fear of being taken back
into slavery or killed, according to relatives. Lucy always answered the door and
acted as the go-between when strangers came asking for him. Isaac kept close guard
over the details of his life, leaving it to Lucy to talk about his adventures. And
he and Lucy named their children for people they had loved. Mary Clarissa was named
for Isaac’s mother and Lucy’s sister; Louis Harve for Isaac’s brother, Harve; Malinda
Diana for Lucy’s mother, Diana, and their son, Benjamin Nelson, for Lucy’s father,
Solomon Nelson.

The past showed up in other painful disguises, too. While Isaac was still living in
Canada, a neighbor urged him to return to Detroit to play at a dance. But Lucy suspected
a trap and urged Isaac not to go. After thinking it over, he agreed and spent a couple
of nights with a neighbor. The man who’d urged him to go to Detroit later admitted
he’d been motivated by the five-hundred-dollar bounty Jim Pratt had put on Isaac’s
head.

One time Pratt himself came to their home and pounded on Isaac’s door, according to
Pointer Sr. However, the Berrys refused to open the door, and Pratt never tried to
force his way in. Census records from 1860 show Pratt living in Hannibal, Missouri,
some ten miles from Palmyra, and list his occupation as laborer, so it is possible
he lost the farm after selling off his slaves and Isaac’s running off.

According to their headstones, Isaac Berry died in 1914 and Lucy Berry in 1928. They
are buried side by side in Mt. Hope Cemetery in Mecosta County, Michigan. Engraved
on Lucy’s headstone is a flaming torch, the perfect emblem for a woman who never lost
her fire.

This couple’s story comes to life at annual August reunions attended by descendants
of the original fifty-eight pioneer families—some free blacks and others runaways—who
settled in central Michigan starting in the 1860s. The pioneers married each other,
eventually becoming one family.

They hold their reunions in School Section Lake Park, a tree-shrouded park and picnic
grounds that contains a monument and plaque honoring the area’s original “Negro Settlers.”
That park was Isaac and Lucy Berry’s original home. The families who eat and share
memories there at reunions have a lot to talk about while their children skip stones
across the face of the lake.

They talk about old Tom Guy, who sometimes paid people with chunks of smoked shoulder
and ham to clear his fields, and Grand Norman, who stashed his money in tin cans and
buried them around his sixteen-acre homestead.

They remember whiskey distiller John Bryant, who moved to the area, raised hogs and
called himself John Bracey.

They talk about Simon and Polina Sleet, who ran away from separate plantations in
Kentucky and their children from a third. Simon died at age 104 in Boyne City, Michigan.

They talk about Arthur Cross, who preached for thirty-eight continuous years, baptizing
179 people and delivering more than twenty-five hundred sermons. He also performed
more than one hundred marriages.

They remember Mary C. Berry Pointer and Mary Johnson Luke, who served as midwives
to the community of Little River.

They remember Merze Tate, a descendant of black pioneers in Isabella County, who became
the first black American to receive a bachelor of arts degree in literature from Oxford
University. She published five volumes on international affairs.

They remember a time when African-Americans found ways to turn suffering into art,
crises into opportunities, desire into religious fire and tears into joy.

And they remember Isaac and Lucy Berry, one black, one white, one walking, one riding,
and their search for a green hideaway, their own personal Palmyra, where love could
glow and grow under free skies.

T
heir story isn’t the sort of saga you’re likely to see in any made-for-television
movies about slave escapes. Who’d believe a story about a mixed couple who pretend
they’re not really married, a slave who dies to save other runaways and a dying white
man who leaves his wife and children to his slave?

Oh, it’s easy enough to imagine Jane King Walls, the well-bred and well-traveled daughter
of a white nineteenth-century landowner, baking an apple pie in her wood-burning stove.
It’s just as easy to picture her playing the old upright piano in her little Canadian
log cabin with pebble and dirt floors, a spinning wheel and high-backed chairs.

It is not at all easy to imagine Jane’s dying white North Carolina husband, Daniel
Walls, asking his best friend and slave, John, to take care of his family. It is almost
impossible to picture black John and white Jane falling in love in the 1840s, fleeing
together on the Underground Railroad and winding up in a Canadian village.

Yet the cabin John Freeman Walls built in 1846—furnished with an old upright piano
and blue-and-white gingham curtains and table-cloths—still stands in Puce, Ontario.

This drama began in 1813 in Troublesome Creek, North Carolina, when two baby boys,
one white, one black, were born on the same day. John’s mother, a slave from Guinea,
lived, but Daniel’s mother died in childbirth, according to research gathered by Bryan
Walls, a descendant of John and Jane Walls. The two boys grew up best friends, always
playing together. It was common practice to give a white child a slave of his or her
own age to play with—or, in some cases, abuse, beat and practice on to become a petty
tyrant. However, Daniel and John became actual friends. But Daniel’s father, Eli Walls,
whipped John severely when he spotted the two boys playing master and slave one day,
with black John pretending to be his white son’s master. John’s father, Hannabal,
wanted to kill his master for whipping his son over a game. Instead, Hannabal ran
away. During the long chase, his heart apparently gave out—he fell dead. John Walls
knew then that he, too, would chase freedom one day, but he couldn’t have suspected
he’d chase it with his master’s widow.

As Daniel Walls lay dying from an unknown illness, he freed John and left Jane and
his four children in the care of his friend, urging John to look after them. Soon
Jane Walls, an educated, deeply religious and slavery-hating woman, and John Walls,
a slave who had been taught to read, found themselves in love. They knew it wouldn’t
be safe to stay in North Carolina, so they left Troublesome Creek and headed north.

During their flight to freedom, John killed two wolves with an ax, according to Bryan
Walls’s book
The Road That Led to Somewhere.
When a slave catcher overtook them, Jane pretended to be John’s owner and whipped
him to prove it. Finally, they reached a Quaker safe house in Indianapolis, where
they married. Around most people, though, John pretended he was the husband of a fugitive
slave woman traveling with him and Jane. While the couple still lived in Indiana,
Jane, accompanied by a group of former slaves, returned to North Carolina and led
nine slaves to freedom. When slave catchers came after the group, three male slaves
lured the bounty hunters away from the women, one slave losing his life. Jane returned
to North Carolina once more to say good-bye to her father. Then she and John and a
former slave named Corliss traveled on the Underground Railroad from Indiana to Ohio
and on to Canada. Eventually, they settled in Puce, Ontario, in Maidstone Township,
on rich land some distance from the Detroit River so easily crossed by slave hunters.
They encountered prejudice and rejection in Canada, but there were no whips, no overseers,
no violence. In fact, John and Jane Walls’s home became a place of refuge for other
fugitives. The area’s first church services were held in their home until a building
was erected for the First Puce Baptist Church.

John died in 1909 at ninety-six and Jane a year later at eighty-eight. Both are buried
in the cemetery behind their old log cabin, the original homestead John built in 1846.
Today that cabin is part of an Underground Railroad museum operated by the Wallses’
descendants. People who visit the John Freeman Walls Historic Site and Underground
Railroad Museum in Puce get a chance to reenact the journey of a runaway slave on
a trail running through nearby woods. The experience includes the sound of dogs yelping
and men shouting.

All the same, it is nearly impossible to picture the long and difficult road that
brought John and Jane Walls to Essex County, Ontario, at a time when loving each other
was just about the most dangerous thing they could do.

What kind of people crossed the color line during the slavery era and immediately
afterward, a time when the Southern code required white women to remain beyond the
reach of black men and black women to experience white lust but never love?

Were those who risked their lives to violate these taboos trying to make a statement
against slavery, enthralled by forbidden fruit, naturally rebellious or simply unwilling
to deny the urgings of their hearts?

What did Molly Welsh and her slave husband, Bannaka, have in common with Richard Loving
and Mildred Jeter, the white man and black woman whose desire to live as man and wife
in Virginia finally wiped out slavery-inspired U.S. laws banning mixed marriages?

Why did a fugitive slave named John Hall dare to take an Englishwoman as his fifth
wife after burying four black wives? Why did Prudence Crandall’s decision to open
a Connecticut finishing school for black girls stir up fears that her school would
encourage intermarriage?

What was a black female cook named Mary Jane thinking when she tried to elope with
a white gentleman aboard a steamboat in 1856, protected by nothing except a veil?
And why were there no laws shielding black women from owners who raped them and produced
new slaves, but tons of laws designed to keep white women from having mulatto children
who would eventually be free? The answer to that last question is obvious: planters
lost money when white women produced free children but made money when they impregnated
their own slaves. But what drove people like John and Jane Walls to risk so much for
an uncertain future?

Molly Welsh knew the penalty for breaking Maryland’s laws against marrying across
the color line, but how many women could resist a tall, dark and handsome prince who
carried his dignity with him like a cape? Certainly not Molly Welsh. She had been
in trouble before and knew its texture and smell.

She had been nearly hanged in England for spilling milk while working as a dairy maid
on a cattle farm, possibly in Wessex County. After the cow she was milking knocked
over its pail, she was arrested on charges of stealing milk, a felony that carried
the death penalty. However, Molly Welsh could read and that made her eligible for
a pardon as well as shipment to America to help build the new colony. Instead of a
noose, she faced life in America as an indentured servant required to work a certain
number of years to pay off the cost of her journey.

She arrived in the province of Maryland around 1683 and was purchased by a tobacco
planter with an estate on the Patapsco River. She worked seven years to pay for the
voyage and earn the money for land. She won her freedom around 1690 and set up her
own farm, first working alone and then purchasing two slaves from a ship anchored
in the bay. One was Bannaka, or Bannke, a dignified and thoughtful man who had been
captured by slave traders. He belonged to the Wolof tribe, a tall people known for
their good looks and grace and for giving America the banjo and such words as
yam, banana, jive
and
dig.
Bannaka was believed to be the son of a tribal chieftain in Senegal on the western
coast of Africa. Unlike her other slave, Bannaka was not a good worker, preferring
to spend his time thinking and tinkering with inventions. Around 1696, Molly freed
and married him anyway. By that time, it had become illegal in Maryland for a minister
to marry a Negro and a white woman so it may have been a common-law marriage. As of
1684, any such woman who married a black man or had his child lost her freedom and
became a servant.

Molly Welsh may have reasoned that no one would pay attention to what she did at her
farm in the wilderness. She withdrew from her white neighbors and changed her name
to that of her husband. They had four daughters—Mary, Katherine, Esther and Jemima.
Mary married a native African named Robert and their firstborn son, Benjamin, became
a thinker just like his African grandfather. In fact, Benjamin Banneker—the name had
been Anglicized by then—became America’s first black scientist. He was around twenty-two
when he made a wooden clock. A self-educated mathematician and astronomer, he watched
the night sky with a crude telescope or traveled it with his imagination. He also
created almanacs and assisted in surveying the federal territory that was to become
the District of Columbia.

Benjamin Banneker never married, but his sister Jemima married Samuel Delaney Lett
around 1758 in Baltimore County, Maryland. Samuel was a white man who had a black
stepfather. The Letts had eight children. Glenn Barnett II of Columbus, Ohio, has
compiled a list of Jemima’s descendants over the centuries, most of them living in
Ohio and Michigan. Their last names include Lett, Stevens, Cummins, Cummings, Norman,
Pointer, Harper, Morgan, Lucas, Harris, McGinnis, Chapman, Johnson, Payne, Sleet,
Weaver, Caliman, Male, Sawyer, Cook, Green, Berry and others.

Prudence Crandall also crossed the color line when she knew that it was dangerous,
but her “crime” was less obvious than Jane Walls’s and Molly Welsh’s offenses. In
1833, Crandall owned just about the largest and best-looking house in Canterbury,
Connecticut, but that didn’t stop people from pelting it with dead cats and chicken
heads, rocks and rotten eggs, insults and threats. People also dumped manure in Crandall’s
well, refused to sell her food or medicine, held meetings where her representatives
couldn’t speak and even tossed her in jail.

In the eyes of her neighbors in the prosperous village of Canterbury, which had a
jewelry store and small factories, the white Quaker-bred schoolmarm had betrayed them
by admitting a black girl to what was supposed to be an elite school for their white
daughters. An editorial in the
Norwich Republican
made the nature of Crandall’s transgression even plainer. She was, the newspaper
charged, trying to turn black girls into ladies and make them more desirable to white
bachelors. In other words, she stood accused of promoting what had become the crime
of all crimes, intermarriage.

Prudence Crandall was twenty-seven when residents of Canterbury invited her to move
there from Rhode Island in 1831 and start a boarding school for their daughters. Her
face was a curious blend of hard and soft, strong and yielding qualities—soft, curved
lips, strong chin, wide, lustrous eyes and heavy eyebrows. The steely part of her
nature won out. Her school opened in November 1831 and became an immediate success.
However, after Crandall began reading the
Liberator,
William Lloyd Garrison’s uncompromising antislavery newspaper, she decided she should
help educate blacks.

In January 1833, a black girl named Sarah Harris, daughter of an industrious black
farmer, entered Crandall’s boarding school. Harris wanted enough education to become
a teacher herself. Slavery was still alive in Connecticut in 1833, though the 1784
gradual emancipation act provided that black and mulatto children born after March
1 of that year would become free at age twenty-five. In 1797, another bill reduced
the age of freedom to twenty-one. However, Connecticut did not completely abolish
slavery until 1848.

The moment Sarah Harris enrolled in Prudence Crandall’s school, the citizens of Canterbury
showed their true colors. Some parents took their daughters home, no doubt believing
Crandall would soon back down. Instead, she recruited other black students and, in
February 1833, dismissed her remaining white students to open a school for “young
ladies and little misses of color.” The school reopened in April with fifteen black
students from Philadelphia, New York, Providence, Boston and Connecticut. That’s when
the stew really hit the stove.

Under pressure from Canterbury’s leaders, the state legislature passed Connecticut’s
so-called Black Law, on May 24, 1833, just six weeks after Crandall’s school reopened.
The law banned private schools for nonresident blacks. Crandall was arrested, tried
and convicted of breaking this new law; however, the Connecticut Supreme Court threw
out her conviction on a technicality. Crandall wanted to press on, but in September
1834 her school was set on fire. The fire was extinguished quickly, but the town’s
rage still flamed. Men armed with crowbars and clubs smashed the school’s windows
and threatened students. Crandall, who had married a preacher named Calvin Philleo,
finally closed her school and shelved her dreams. After her husband’s death in 1874,
she moved to Kansas, where she had a brother named Hezekiah. In 1886, the Connecticut
state legislature granted her a small pension. She was then eighty-two. In 1995, Connecticut,
which once had gone so far as to forbid anyone from wearing garments that didn’t match
their place in society, finally recognized Prudence Crandall’s courage. She became
Connecticut’s official State Heroine.