Underground to Canada (15 page)

“But can we go to school and learn to read?” Julilly's eyes grew round with wonder.

“Would they let somebody like me come?” Liza lifted herself painfully to look up into the face of tall Ezra Wilson.

“
I'm
learnin'.” Ezra smiled down at her and rubbed his grey-flecked hair. “Now I guess I'll just end all this warnin' talk by sayin' that I made up my mind that salt and potatoes in Canada are better than pound-cake and chickens in a state of worry and suspense in the United States. Now, let's eat lunch.”

While he talked, Julilly remembered what Massa Ross had told them a long time ago in Mississippi— that escaping into Canada would be hard and that living in Canada would be hard, too. But it didn't seem to hurt to remember this. She and Liza could work, and salt and potatoes weren't bad for eating when no slave owner was around to threaten or whip.

One night Ezra Wilson talked about St. Catharines … how Lester worked there as a porter in the Welland House Hotel where a special pipe brought magic mineral water to all the guests. He told how former slaves helped to build the hotel, and how many of them worked there now.

“It's a grand place.” Ezra spread his long arms wide and high. “A big porch runs along the front of it, and all the fine people sit there rockin' away in their chairs.”

Julilly and Liza were excited and yet worried about arriving in the town. They talked continually to one another in the jogging wagon. How would it be to live in a town and not be a slave? How would Lester look? If only Adam had lived to welcome them, too.

Julilly yearned to ask Ezra Wilson if he had ever seen or heard of a handsome black woman called Mammy Sally. But she didn't dare. As long as no one had heard of her, there was always hope that she would come to Canada. But if they did know, and something bad had happened to her, Julilly wanted to put off the knowing of it as long as she could.

On the morning of the third day, Ezra told them that the town they were coming to was St. Catharines. At first it looked like the other villages they had travelled through. There were large and small houses, mostly built of brick. Trees and shrubs and flowers grew everywhere. But on the streets of St. Catharines were many black folks just like them. When they came to the part of the town where the shops were they saw many more.

“They aren't dressed fancy,” Liza said to Julilly, “but they aren't wearin' rags.”

At the end of the street they saw a large two-storey building with a wide porch running across the front of it—the
Welland House Hote
l. Ezra pulled in the reins to slow the horse. In front of the hotel stood a light-skinned coloured man with freckles. He wore a tight suit that buttoned up the front with shining gold buttons.

“It's Lester,” Julilly shouted. She jumped from the wagon and ran toward him.

Lester grabbed both her hands in his and looked at her fondly. Julilly searched his face. Lester was well and content, but the anger was still in his eyes and the pride was still in his high-held head. Julilly was glad. The beatings and chains hadn't crushed him down like a snake.

Together they saw Liza trying to crawl over the back of the wagon. Lester ran toward her and picked her up in his arms. The three of them stood together for a moment in a tight happy circle. Tall, kind Ezra Wilson joined them. Then Lester placed Liza gently on the dirt road beneath them. As he did so, he glanced toward a door at the far end of the Hotel.

“You'll want to see her right away in the kitchen, Julilly,” Lester said.

“Her? Kitchen?” Julilly was puzzled. Was it someone wanting to give her a job in the kitchen?

“It's a surprise I planned for you, Julilly,” Lester said. “I made Ezra promise not to tell.” Angry, hostile Lester became surprisingly sheepish.

A woman opened the far back door. Julilly stared. She was tall and dark skinned with a white kerchief about her head. But her hair was grey. Her face was wrinkled. She was old. Then the woman came toward them—limping, but with long, full strides.

“Mammy Sally,” Julilly cried and ran into her mother's outstretched arms.

“Child, child.” Mammy Sally sang the words over and over again.

Finally she held Julilly at arm's length. Her eyes were radiant.

“June Lilly, you have grown.” She looked again with grave concern. “You have become a woman.”

Julilly didn't hear. Being with Mammy Sally again was like shifting a hundred-pound sack of cotton from her back and just taking on a two-pound load instead. But it also filled her heart with such a joy she wanted to shout and sing. Instead, Julilly put a strong arm around her mother to support her.

“How did you know, Mammy, how did you know to come out that door and meet me?” she asked.

“Land, child, didn't Massa Ross tell you I was here, or did Lester keep it a secret from him too?” Mammy Sally laughed and tears streamed down her cheeks.

Julilly remembered Liza. She led her mother to the hunched, thin girl who stood quietly on the road.

“Liza came with me,” Julilly said simply to Mammy Sally. “We are like sisters.”

Mammy Sally touched Liza gently on the head. “You gonna live with us, Liza. I'm buyin' us a little house.” She stood proud and tall before all of them. “We'll walk there now.”

They all started walking down the wide dirt road—Liza, Julilly, and Mammy Sally in the lead with Lester and Ezra behind them.

“We are free and we are together.” Mammy Sally almost sang the words. Then she paused and looked long and joyfully at the strangely dressed girls beside her.

She started walking again and said, “Freedom isn't easy. We black folks can't read and we can't write and the white people in St. Catharines don't want us in their schools…We are poor, but we are buildin' us a church and buildin' us a school. We are poor, but we get paid for the jobs we do. We are poor, but some of us are buildin' houses on the land we own. We are poor, but none of us is slaves.”

Mammy Sally's words became a song. There was a rhythm and a rising cadence to each new line. They all began marching toward a grove of tall, green pines.

Julilly glanced at her mother's face. It had deep wrinkles. The hair that shone beneath her kerchief was powdery white with specks of grey. There were scars on Mammy's neck. She'd been lashed with a whip. She limped when she walked. But her head was high and her voice rang with courage and deep joy.

Julilly put a strong arm around her mother to support her. She pulled Liza along with her other hand.

Mammy Sally needed her. Liza and Lester needed her. She was growing up. There was a lot for her to do in this great new land of freedom.

MR. ALEXANDER ROSS

Alexander Milton Ross
, a naturalist and physician, was born on December 13, 1832, at Belleville, Upper Canada, and died in Detroit, Michigan, on October 27, 1897.

In undertaking this mission to help the slaves to freedom I did not disguise from myself the dangers I would most certainly have to encounter, and the certainty that a speedy and perhaps cruel death would be my lot in case my plans and purposes were discovered.
¹

Alexander M. Ross

An outspoken abolitionist … was Alexander Milton Ross….In 1855, when he was 23, he decided upon an active career of running fugitives from the deep South to Canada. Ross made at least five trips to the southern states, posing as a birdwatcher; and in five years he was instrumental to the escape of 31 or more blacks…John Greenleaf Whittier dedicated one of his poems to Ross.
²

There died in the city of Detroit, on October 27, 1897, a man whose services in the abolition movement and during the Civil War were of so self-sacrificing and daring a character they gained for him the tributes not only of the abolition leaders but of Lincoln himself. Alexander Milton Ross, M.D., Canadian by birth…had a career that deserves to be better known…Wendell Phillips declared, “No higher heroism, courage or tenacity of purpose was ever displayed than by you in your chivalric efforts to help the slaves to freedom.”
³

He was a distinguished ornithologist, cited by European governments and learned societies for original and painstaking work on birds of North America….His Canadian accent made him supposedly a neutral in internal affairs of the U.S. and letters of introduction established him as a naturalist of international standing …Wandering through fields and woods in the South, he had a rare opportunity to talk to slaves, to provide them with a little money, and information on how to travel and where to stop.
⁴

Notes

1.
Memoirs of a Reformer
by Alexander M. Ross. p. 41

2.
The Blacks in Canada
by Robin W. Winks, p. 260

3.
“A Daring Canadian Abolitionist” by Fred Landon, librarian at London, Ontario, article in the
Michigan History Magazine
, 1921, p. 364

4.
Make Free—The Story of the Underground Railroad
by William Breyfogle, p. 190

MR. LEVI COFFIN

Levi Coffin
, a businessman, Quaker leader and Abolitionist, was born in 1798 in New Garden, N. Carolina, and died in Cincinnati, Ohio, in 1877.

I am opposed to the whole system of slavery, and conscientiously believe it to be a sin against God and a crime against man to channelize a human being and reduce God's image to the level of a brute, to be bought and sold in the market as cattle or swine.
¹

Levi Coffin

Levi Coffin, by his devotion to the cause of the fugitive from boyhood to old age, gained the title of President of the Underground Railroad, but he was not at the head of a formal organization. In truth the work was everywhere spontaneous. Unfaltering confidence among members of neighbouring stations served better than a code of rules … decision and sagacity of the individual was required rather than the less rapid efforts of an organization.
²

He and his wife aided more than 3,000 slaves in flight.
³

For 33 years, he and his wife, Catherine, received into
their home
in Newport, Ind., and Cincinnati, O., more than 100 slaves every year.
⁴

Notes

1.
From a letter quoted in
The Underground Railroad—From Slavery to Freedom
by Wilbur Siebert, p. 592

2.
Ibid., p. 69

3.
Ibid., p. 87

4.
Ibid., p. 111

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Beattie, Jessie L.,
Black Moses, the Real Uncle Tom
, The Ryerson Press, Toronto, 1957

Bolka, B. A. (ed.),
Lay My Burden Down—A Folk History of Slavery
, University of Chicago Press, 1969

Breyfogle, William,
Make Free—The Story of the Underground Railroad
, Lippincott, 1958

Browin, Frances Williams,
Looking for Orlando
, Criterion Books, 1961

Buckmaster, Henrietta,
Flight to Freedom
, Crowell, 1958

Coffin, Levi,
Reminiscences
, Arno Press and The New York Times, 1968 (reprinted from a copy in the Moorland-Springarn Collection, written in 1876)

Drew, Benjamin,
The Narratives of Fugitive Slaves in Canada
, John P. Jewett and Co., Cleveland, 1856. Facsimile edition by Coles Publishing Co., Toronto, 1972

Gara, Larry,
The Liberty Line—The Legend of the Underground Railroad
, University of Kentucky Press, Lexington, 1967

Garrighan, Sally,
The Glass Door
, Doubleday, 1962

Lester, Julius,
To be a Slave
, Dial Press, 1968

Ross, Alexander Milton,
Recollections and Experiences of an Abolitionist
, Rowsell and Hutchison, Toronto 1875

Ross, Alexander Milton,
Memoirs of a Reformer
, Hunter, Rose & Co., Toronto, 1893 “The Search for a Black Past,” Life Magazine, November 22, 1968

Siebert, Wilbur H.,
The Underground Railroad—From Slavery to Freedom
, Macmillan Co., 1898

Smedley, R. C.,
History of the Underground Railroad
, Arno Press and The New York Times, 1969

Walker, Margaret,
Jubilee
, Houghton Mifflin, 1966

Winks, Robin W.,
The Blacks in Canada, A History
, Yale University Press, 1971

Winks, Robin W. (gen. ed.),
Four Fugitive Slave Narratives
, Addison-Wesley Publishing Co., Reading, Mass., 1969

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

The quotation from Martin Luther King Jr. is taken from p. 1 of
Conscience for Change
, published by CBC Learning Systems in 1967—the printed form of the 1967 Massey Lectures. Reprinted by permission of the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation.

The spirituals on pages 9 and 26 appear respectively on p. 107 of
To be a Slave
by Julius Lester (Dial Press, 1968) and on p. 315 of
Jubilee
by Margaret Walker (Houghton Mifflin, 1966).

The idea for the incident on pp. 114 to 121 was found in a description of the slave Magog on p. 134 of
Make Free—The Story of the Underground Railroad
by William Breyfogle (Lippincott, 1958).

I am indebted for the information on St. Catharines' history to
The Negroes of the Niagara Peninsula
, written by Ivan Grok, a retired history teacher in St. Catharines, Ontario.

Ezra Wilson's statement about “salt and potatoes in Canada” on p. 181 is a direct quotation from
The Narratives of Fugitive Slaves in Canada
by Benjamin Drew, p. 39. (Facsimile edition published by Coles Publishing Co., Toronto, 1972.)

Underground to Canada

About the Book

About Barbara Smucker

Discussion Questions

Additional Resources

 

A Puffin Readers Guide

ABOUT THE BOOK

June Lilly, known to everyone as Julilly, is a twelve-year-old slave girl living with her mother on a plantation in Virginia during the 1850s. At the beginning of the story, the owner of the plantation, Massa (Master) Hensen, must sell some of his slaves to raise money, and everyone is worried about who will have to go. When the slave trader arrives, Julilly is separated from her mother and, along with many other younger children, is forced onto the rickety old wagon bound for the plantation of Massa Riley, in Mississippi. The slave trader also takes three strong male slaves—Ben, Lester, and Adam—and chains them to the wagon, forcing them to keep up as the chains cut into the skin around their ankles. During the long trip to the Deep South, Julilly rides in the wagon with the small children, and even though she is scared and very upset, she does her best to keep their spirits up and look after them in the nighttime cold, the scorching sun, and constant hunger. When the long trip and harsh conditions become too much for Adam, Ben, and Lester, Julilly finds the courage to climb out of the wagon and help them too, which earns her Lester's respect.