Forbidden Fruit (2 page)

In his petitions he referred to himself as “Yr orator.” He told the court that he
had strong reasons to believe that Davis Floyd planned to strip him of his liberty.
He declared that he was a freeman and could “establish this fact to the satisfaction
of this…Court.” He said he worried that Floyd would take him back to St. Louis and
turn him over to Lacey, who would turn him into a lifelong slave. He informed the
court that he could prove he deserved freedom and that people had conspired to steal
it. Finally, in June 1805, the court released Joseph Antoine, then forty. Yet there
was no way he could ever shed the image of his wife, the woman he loved more than
his freedom, dying in his arms.

Joseph Antoine’s story doesn’t stand alone. Many black husbands risked their liberty
and lives for enslaved wives. They considered freedom a dubious gift, a counterfeit
coin, if they couldn’t spend it on the people they loved.

After the Virginia legislature decided in 1806 that newly freed blacks must leave
the state within a year or be reenslaved, other black Virginia husbands and wives—like
Joseph Antoine—prepared themselves to do the unthinkable. They offered to return to
slavery rather than leave without their wives or husbands. Told to leave Virginia,
a black man named Walker declared that he never would have purchased himself if he’d
known he’d have to leave behind his wife and five children. He had bought his freedom
from Edward Holladay on August 5, 1833. Robin was another black man who discovered
he didn’t like the taste of solo freedom. Freed by Benjamin Ferguson, he left for
Ohio in 1836 but returned to Culpeper County, Virginia: there, he hoped to spend the
rest of his life with his wife. Twenty-four people who knew Robin signed his petition
to stay in the state. A former Giles County slave named Dilly also pleaded with the
Virginia General Assembly to let her stay with her husband, a slave of Abram Nisewander.
Former slave Nelly McIntosh wanted to remain with her relatives and friends, too.
So did Armistead Johns, a freedman from Fauquier County, who preferred slavery to
separation from his wife.

The records don’t show what became of families whose petitions the General Assembly
rejected. Free Virginia blacks, however, had another way of keeping their families
together, but it was even more controversial than returning to slavery. If they had
been freed before 1806, they could stay on in Virginia, buy their own relatives and
friends and become slave owners themselves. Some did just that.

Over the years, Samuel Johnson of Fauquier County filed several petitions asking the
Commonwealth of Virginia to let his wife, two children and three grandchildren remain
in the state. Johnson owned his wife and two children. Peyton Shelton of Fluvanna
County purchased and married a slave named Anna and then asked that Anna be allowed
to stay in the state. Carter Armistead, forty-five, was freed in September 1844 by
Lucinda Armistead, presumably his wife. She had purchased him in 1842 from John Alsop
of Spotsylvania. George DeBaptiste of Fredericksburg owned his wife, Maria, whom he
set free on March 12, 1823. His son, also named George, would become an Underground
Railroad conductor in Cincinnati, Ohio; Madison, Indiana; and Detroit, Michigan.

Others simply left Virginia. This group included Frances Pelham, the free black woman
whose dog officials had tried to take, and her husband, Robert, a farmer, mechanic,
bricklayer and a “successful contractor in masonry construction.”

One of her descendants described Frances as a woman with “an independent and aggressive
nature,” which “caused a restlessness in the Pelham household which was eventually
to cause an upheaval of the family life. This incident of the dog has been given at
various times as the principal factor which caused Robert and Frances Pelham to come
North. This however was only one incident. In and around Petersburg, the Pelhams had
many loyal friends among the liberal minded whites who were urging them to seek some
place where there was less race friction and where the explosive nature of Mrs. Pelham
was less likely to cause trouble.”

The Pelhams left Virginia in 1859, moving first to Columbus, Ohio, where they never
unpacked, then on to Philadelphia and, finally, to Detroit, where they settled because
the schools seemed superior. Other free black Virginians who joined the exodus to
Detroit included a shoemaker and clarinet player named Major Cook; his wife, Priscilla;
and their five children, who arrived in 1848; Alexander D. Moore, a barber and musician
whose band played for dances on the steamer
Hope
; and John Richards and his sister, Fannie, who became the first black schoolteacher
in Detroit.

There are many other stories like this, stories about black men and women who, even
during the slavery era, cared as much about the welfare of their mates as they did
about their own. Henry Bibb, a Kentucky slave, ran away because he couldn’t endure
watching his wife and daughter insulted and abused without being able to step in and
stop it. However, he couldn’t bear the separation and returned to Kentucky again and
again, trying four times to take his slave wife, Malinda, with him. Though he eventually
married another woman in Canada, where he became a leader in the antislavery movement,
a newspaper publisher and Underground Railroad supporter, it’s not likely Henry Bibb
ever forgot his first love.

Dangerfield Newby, quite literally, died for love. The free black Virginian had raised
enough money to buy his wife out of slavery, but her master either pushed up the price
or turned him down. Meanwhile, Newby, a blacksmith with a smoldering temper, had received
a letter from his wife, Harriet, begging him to rescue her before she was sold. The
letter was no passive slip of paper. It spoke to Dangerfield, sang to him, pleaded
with him and poked him in all of the places where he hurt. Spurred by that letter
and other “Dear Dangerfield” letters from Harriet, Newby joined John Brown in the
doomed raid on the federal armory at Harper’s Ferry, Virginia (now Harpers Ferry,
West Virginia), where two mighty rivers, the Potomac and the Shenandoah, rush into
each other’s arms and flow together to the sea. Like John Brown, he believed the raid
would trigger a black uprising. He also hoped it would be the first step in his rescue
of Harriet and his children. “Newby joined John Brown out of desperation,” according
to Ronald Palmer, who may be a descendant of Harriet Newby’s parents. One of five
black raiders, Dangerfield Newby became the first of the Harper’s Ferry attackers
to die. He was gunned down on October 17, 1859, about noon while trying to escape
from local militia coming across the Potomac River Bridge. It was not an easy dying,
a gentle swooning into darkness. A spike from a gun tore open his throat, people stabbed
his corpse, souvenir hunters ran off with his ears and hogs partially ate his body.
But some say Newby’s ghost still prowls the area, roaming the grounds in baggy pants
and an old slouch hat, the gash across his throat as bloody as ever. Nothing can comfort
him, goes the story, because he failed to rescue Harriet and their children.

Joseph Antoine would have understood Dangerfield Newby’s and Henry Bibb’s desperate
attempts to rescue their wives and children. He probably wouldn’t have understood
why, between 1970 and 1990, the proportion of black women married by age twenty-four
plunged from 56 percent to 23 percent as more black men shambled into prisons, died
young or found it difficult to imagine making enough money to support a family. Joseph
Antoine’s largely forgotten story survives only in his barely legible petitions to
Kentucky’s Jefferson County Court, but it is a powerful reminder of how far some black
men and women once went to determine who and how they would love.

T
he woman’s face looked as familiar as a burlap sack waiting for someone to stuff its
mouth with Georgia cotton. Oh yes, sweet Jesus, James Smith knew that face. The woman’s
face seemed as much a part of James Smith’s past as the taste of hoecakes snatched
from ashes and the high tenor saxophone wail of hounds. The woman’s face might have
seemed as familiar as that jail cell in Richmond where a branding iron had seared
James Smith’s face and neck, his skin hissing and sputtering like salt flung on flames
and then surrendering, Lord God, to the pain.

But was this really the wife he had left behind in Virginia with a short kiss and
a long prayer? Was this the face he’d imagined each time he crossed a river whose
name he didn’t know or outran a bounty hunter too slowed down by whiskey and rage
to catch him?

Smith would tell reporters later that his legs trembled on an October day in 1850
as he neared a house in Sandwich, Ontario. It was the home of a woman who could have
been the wife for whom he’d longed, prayed and searched for seventeen years. Finally,
he gathered all of his strength into one ball and tossed it to the woman, whispering
the name that he’d been waiting so long to say: “Fanny?” And, according to newspaper
accounts, she answered, “Yes,” and greeted Smith as her “beloved husband.”

In 1852, antislavery newspaper editor Henry Bibb described this reunion between two
fugitive slaves calling themselves James and Fanny Smith in a five-part series in
Voice of the Fugitive,
a Canadian antislavery newspaper. The series described one of the most incredible
love stories ever plucked from the pages of the Underground Railroad, the sometimes
organized and sometimes improvised slave-aiding network that gave fugitives food,
transportation, directions and, sometimes, information about safe havens and the slave
hunters tracking them. Yet James Smith’s story is more than the tale of a man punished
for praying and more than the saga of a couple who wouldn’t turn their love loose.

It’s a story about faith.

Not the puny, soft-fleshed kind of faith that people embrace when they’re in the mood
for a Sunday-morning stroll with God. There was no flab in James Smith’s faith. No
weak or neglected spots. He had the kind of faith that was muscular enough to withstand
beatings and endure jail terms. He had the kind of faith that kept pace with him as
he shambled away from his family in chains. He had the sort of faith that made him
pray out loud when silent prayers would have saved him from torture.

His ordeal began around 1833, when Smith—probably not his real name—decided he wanted
to join his owner’s Baptist church, one of the denominations that especially appealed
to blacks longing for emotional and expressive religion. The desire for religious
expression was strong among people from a continent where the gods, some good, some
evil, lived inside everything and gave things their special qualities. Some slaves
would go out into midnight fields and pray in ditches or cover their heads with iron
pots to muffle the sound of their prayers. Meanwhile, the slave preacher became magician,
healer, preacher, politician and, sometimes, martyr. “There were black ministers before
there were black churches,” Dr. Stacy Williams declared in a 1980 lecture before Detroit’s
Council of Baptist Pastors. “…Some were even preaching to their slave masters. The
black minister had to sing, pray and preach under conditions which many times brought
lashes to his back. But his image as a leader and as God’s man had been established.
There developed a craving in the hearts of the Black-slave subjects for a meeting
place of their own where they could serve God according to the dictates of their consciences.”

However, joining an organized church was a large ambition for a slave. Organized religion
was a prize many slave owners kept locked up in their own kitchens, serving only thin,
carefully cut slices to religion-hungry servants. Some slaves went to church with
whites and sat in rear pews or balconies, listening to white preachers tell them that
whites were superior, that God sanctioned slavery and they’d go to heaven if they
obeyed their masters and mistresses and stopped stealing chickens. Others attended
their own churches, where trusted white observers watched the services and made sure
they stressed the joys of the afterlife and the need to accept one’s fate. Yet many
people feared that slave religion—like reading and writing—fueled rebellions. Nat
Turner, the Virginian whose band plundered plantations and beat, beheaded and killed
more than fifty white men, women and children in 1831, had been a preacher, claiming
biblical signs and omens urged him to strike. After Nat’s rebellion, all nighttime
religious meetings were prohibited and no blacks, free or slave, could hear colored
preachers or ministers. They could only listen to white preachers and only during
the daytime. Twenty-four-year-old Gabriel Prosser—who, like Smith, lived in Henrico
County, Virginia—had been hanged in 1800 for his plot to march on the city of Richmond,
seize the arsenal, strike down the whites and liberate slaves. He, too, had won followers
by predicting God would strengthen the hand of rebels.

So James Smith’s request to join any church, even the church his Richmond, Virginia,
area master attended, was no small matter. The church’s minister said he would have
to talk it over with “William Wright,” the name Smith coined for his master in his
newspaper interview. Smith’s master eventually gave him permission to join the church,
but Smith had to assure him that he would be a good and faithful servant and would
work harder, if possible. However, no one foresaw how seriously James Smith would
take his faith or how it would consume him.

He became a man who could stay up all night after sweating in fields all day, a man
who roamed his plantation telling other slaves to plead for light and beg for release
from the God who could free any spirit. Though he still worked as hard as ever, Smith’s
devotion troubled his master, who worried that his fervor might spread and disturb
the daily patterns of plantation life. To discourage Smith, his master sometimes kept
him tied up all day on Sundays or had him whipped until blood dripped down his back.
Yet he continued converting slaves. Finally, his owner sold James Smith to a slave
trader from Georgia, warning his new master of Smith’s passion for wading in religion
and urging other slaves to join him in its waters.

“I can soon break him of that practice when I have him staked down with his face to
the ground and his back striped and checked with the lash—with salt and red pepper
well rubbed into the gashes, he will give up and forget his religion,” his new master,
Mr. White, said, according to the story Smith told the
Voice of the Fugitive.

As he bundled up his clothing for the last time and said good-bye to his wife and
two children, Smith felt “as if my poor heart would break with grief.” The family
prayed together one last time, and then Smith’s new master took him in chains, his
ankles chafing from the shackles tying him to the slave caravan. He wound up at a
cotton plantation with at least three hundred slaves. He lived in a hovel with ten
people and was strictly forbidden from holding religious meetings. However, he soon
began singing and praying, and others joined in. The slave driver reported him to
the overseer, who ordered a hundred lashes for Smith. When the driver brought Smith
to the cotton gin house for his beating, he demanded to know why the man prayed. He
even offered to stop beating Smith if he would promise not to pray again. Smith refused
the man’s offer and took his whipping. The next night he ran away, but the tracking
dogs quickly found him, and the search party dragged him back to the plantation.

He now worked with a heavy chain and a clog of iron trailing him; at night, he was
yoked to a block of wood. For slaves with a history of running, such restraints were
common. Other instruments of torture sometimes used on runaways included thumb screws,
billy clubs and the speculum oris, a device that allowed plantation officials to force-feed
slaves who tried to starve themselves to death.

But the whippings didn’t work. Smith would still pour out his feelings and let them
fill up all the space in a room. He prayed for his family. He prayed for acquaintances
and friends. He prayed for the people who beat him. He prayed for the people who were
thinking about beating him. Perhaps he prayed as fervently, as fiercely, as Dr. C.
T. Walker, born a slave in Georgia. Dr. Walker preached an entire sermon on “The Second
Coming of Jesus Christ,” mostly by repeating two words, “He” and “coming,” until they
became hammer blows, lightning bolts, roaring drums: “He’s coming, He’s coming, coming,
coming, He’s coming.” Not only did Walker’s sermon convert many listeners, some people
actually dove under their seats, convinced that Jesus would stride in at any moment,
too bright to bear. James Smith must have radiated that kind of power, too.

He was certainly compelling on one particular night. That was the night the plantation
slave driver, who was black, heard James Smith praying for both him and the overseer,
men who had beaten and bloodied him. In the Old South, black slave drivers or foremen
sometimes worked under the slave owner or overseer, disciplining and supervising field
hands. Caught between the white and black worlds, some became cruel while others found
ways to give their fellow slaves small nuggets of kindness. The slave driver on Smith’s
plantation was so overwhelmed by Smith’s prayers that he unchained him. He asked him
to continue praying. He asked for forgiveness for his cruelty. And he urged Smith
to run off, promising that he wouldn’t try to recapture him. That night, Smith did
what so many runaway slaves separated from their families did. He set off for his
former home in Virginia, hoping to find his wife.

He traveled for six to eight weeks, hiding during the day and journeying by night.
Finally, he found the plantation where he’d last seen his family. Since it was the
middle of the night, he did not dare knock at the door for fear of rousing someone
who’d start shouting or screaming. Instead, he eased open the door and crept inside,
moving toward the corner where his wife used to sleep. Suddenly, a white man wielding
a pistol and knife lunged at him, yelling that he would shoot him if he took another
step. On orders from the white man, one of the slaves clubbed Smith in the head, knocking
him senseless.

The next morning, James Smith awakened swimming in blood, tied with cords and lying
in a horse cart driven by the overseer. His captors took him to a Richmond jail, where
he spent several months. While in jail, he learned from another slave that his wife
had been sold to a trader who took her to Kentucky. He also learned that his sufferings
weren’t over. One morning, his master flogged him and branded his initials on the
side of his face and back of his neck with a hot iron. The devil was real, but Smith
still called on God. A few days later, a man named William Graham bought him at a
public auction. Smith lived with Graham for about three years, finally deciding it
was time to seek that place of refuge, that land of Canaan, he’d heard so much about:
Canada.

However, Smith made the mistake of sharing his secret with another slave, who agreed
to come with him. Any slave sharing information about a planned escape risked discovering
that a supposed friend was really a traitor, ready to turn him in for a few dollars,
a few pats on the head or a few slugs of whiskey. Two slaves had spilled Gabriel Prosser’s
plan to their owner. A house servant also had betrayed Denmark Vesey. Handbills circulated
in Kentucky and southern Ohio warned slaves about a black man named Robert Russell,
who operated in and around Ripley, Ohio. For a fee, he would help slaves escape to
Cincinnati, and for another fee, he would capture and return them to their masters.
Despite the existence of such treachery, Smith felt he could trust his friend. But
for half a gallon of whiskey and one dollar, his “friend” became his enemy.

White men waited for Smith when he rendezvoused with his friend. They captured and
beat Smith and forced him to listen as his supposed friend recited the details of
their escape plot. However, Smith’s captors drank so much whiskey, they became careless.
They sloshed slugs of whiskey down Smith’s throat, and he fooled them into believing
he was dead drunk, harmless as a log. Certain Smith would be out cold until the next
morning, his captors went to bed and left the runaway slave stretched out on the kitchen
floor. An hour later, Smith took off, bound for Canada.

The old dog Smith had trained to hunt raccoons and possums followed him, hiding with
him beside mossy logs. The dog had helped him hunt at night to avoid starving on the
skimpy rations Smith’s master doled out. Unfortunately, the animal loved Smith too
much for its own good. It kept on following him, yapping at every twitch and tremble,
growl and yelp, crackle and rustle in the woods. Fearing the dog would cause his capture,
Smith decided to hang it. He looped a rope around its neck and led it to a tree. The
dog didn’t resist; in fact, Smith later told Henry Bibb that the animal seemed to
understand what was happening. Like the biblical Isaac who had calmly watched his
father, Abraham, prepare to slit his throat and offer his burning body to God, the
dog seemed willing to surrender his life if it would help—or so it seemed to Smith.
While he pondered whether or not it was right to sacrifice a loyal friend, Smith heard
a sound that made him forget all about his old hunting dog. The bloodhounds were coming
now, mournful-looking, sorrow-spreading dogs capable of following a trail more than
two weeks old and pursuing it with a relentless stride for more than a hundred miles.
If they cornered him, he would be yanked back to a life where he had been beaten and
separated from his wife simply for praying. He released his dog and began to run,
but the hounds overtook him.