Chapter Twenty-one
M’bole: I have used African greetings for Sule and the blacksmith, two old African men united by their native language and their willingness to risk their lives helping Toby. In Fang, a Bantu language of Gabon and Equitorial New Guinea, m’bole means “hello” to one person, m’bolani means “hello” to more than one person, and am’bolo is the response.
The Middle Passage: Sule’s description of his journey from Africa recounts what is termed the “middle passage,” the transportation of millions of kidnapped Africans to the Caribbean and American continent. Hundreds of slaves were chained and packed close together into the holds of small cargo ships, with inadequate food, fresh air, sanitation, exercise, or medicines. The mortality rate was high, not only from disease but also from abuse, suicide, self-starvation, and murder.
Aloudah Equiano described some of the horror he experienced. “I was soon put down under the decks, and there I received such a salutation in my nostrils as I had never experienced in my life: so that, with the loathsomeness of the stench, and crying together, I became so sick and low that I was not able to eat, nor had I the least desire to taste anything. . . The shrieks of the women and the groans of the dying, rendered the whole a scene of horror almost inconceivable. . . Two of my countrymen who were chained together, . . . preferring death to such a life of misery, somehow made through the nettings and jumped into the sea” (19-20).
Chapter Twenty-two
Conductors and stations: Toby is now in the care of the Underground Railroad, an organized network of people (conductors) in both the North and the South who risked their lives, fortunes, and reputations to rescue and hide escaping slaves and to transport them safely to the next stop (station) along the route. Toby’s first conductors in the South include free black persons, who were always under suspicion, so that Joseph, the blacksmith, and the later funeral director are particularly concerned to keep Toby moving rather than let him remain on their property even overnight if they can avoid it. Stations were usually about 15 miles apart, a good distance for a wagon to make a round trip or a fugitive to walk overnight.
A Lion in a Cage: Sule’s analogy of a lion in a cage is taken from David Walker’s Appeal, an 1829 book by a free black man urging “coloured citizens of the world” to “throw off” a “murderous government” that treats black people far worse than the British ever treated the American colonists.
New Law: While the Compromise of 1850 was intended to resolve tensions between the northern and southern states over the issue of slavery, it instead contributed to increased tensions. While new states would be admitted as free states, the northern states were required to take more aggressive action enforcing the Constitution’s mandate to return fugitives to the South. The provision, known as the Fugitive Slave Act, passed September 18, 1850. It imposed a penalty of $1,000 and six months in prison for anyone assisting a fugitive, and the same fine for any law enforcement officers and members of the US Army who fail to help catch runaways. In addition, because only a simple affidavit and no jury trial were required, free Blacks and persons who had lived as free for many years were suddenly seized and handed over to slave catchers. Officials who found a person to be a runaway were reimbursed $10, while an official who ruled the person free was compensated only $5.
Chapter Twenty-three
Cave in Illinois: Sand Cave is a remote, natural area, in Shawnee National Forest about 15 miles south of Marion, Illinois, near Cedar Grove Church, at coordinates 37.50 N 88.6433W. Even today, there is no parking lot, visitors’ center, or sign to show you the way, so you have to park on the side of the road and hike in from the end of Sand Cave Road. Turn right on an unmarked path and follow the bluff until the cave suddenly appears in the wall. It is about 500 feet deep, 100 feet wide, and 50 feet high.
Nearby to the east, near what is now Glendale, there was once a free Black community named Miller Grove, whose farmers assisted escaping slaves. More information about them is available on the Shawnee National Forest, Sand Cave Website: www.fs.usda.gov/recarea/shawnee/recreation/outdoorlearning/recarea/?recid=81897&actid=119.
Toby’s disguise: Toby’s disguise as a girl and his concealment as part of the funeral party in which people had their faces veiled are typical tricks employed in moving fugitives along the UGRR. No one reported the details of their journeys while slave were still using the network, and many of the memoirs which were eventually written have never been published, but they are discoverable in family histories and local historical societies.
Attic hideaway: My model for the attic was in one of the most amazing fugitive slave tales: the story of Harriet Jacobs, who hid in an attic above her grandmother’s storehouse for seven years. The space was nine feet long and seven feet wide, but only three feet at the highest point of its slope. She wrote in her 1861 self-published autobiography: “at times, I was stupefied and listless; at other times I became impatient to know when these dark years would end, and I should again be free to feel the sunshine and breathe the pure air” (224).
Chapter Twenty-four
Quakers: The people commonly called “Quakers” are members of a Christian community, the Religious Society of Friends. They are committed to peace, freedom, and social justice. During the Nineteenth Century, they were leaders in the abolition movement. They refrained from drinking alcohol, wore simple dress, and spoke a Biblical pattern of speech, as John explained to Toby. The nickname, “Quaker,” was attached in 1650, when founder George Fox said, “I tremble at the word of the Lord” (Fox, ch.IV).
The cellar tunnel: The tunnel and cave under the Quaker living room are based on those discovered under a house in West Chicago, Illinois. The John Fairbank house, built in 1838, had been rented out since 1880 when, in 1941, new owners began poking around in the cellar investigating ways to install heating pipes. They discovered one boulder in the foundation that was not mortared in and pulled it out to discover a sharp turn leading to a 21-foot trench that opened on a cave large enough to accommodate eight people. The cave was then forgotten for almost 40 years until a local historian, looking for a missing link in the UGRR, approached them with a query about the old house on the DuPage River. Researchers examining the cave under the house found a Civil War era boot, chicken bones, a stone marble, a brass pin, a bone button, and part of a Mason jar with an 1858 patent mark. The artifacts are now on display at Northern Illinois University. The house is about 10 miles from my Naperville, Illinois home, and I found its story in a tiny locally-published booklet in the Naperville public library (Turner).
Bondman poem: These lines are excerpts from “The Sentence of John L. Brown,” written in 1844 by Quaker poet and abolitionist John Greenleaf Whittier. John L. Brown was a young white man, sentenced to death in South Carolina for the crime of assisting a young slave whom he had married to run away from her master. The sentence to death by hanging generated so much outrage and pressure from even the British House of Lords, that it was commuted, and Brown was scourged and banished instead.
Chapter Twenty-five
Paducah: None of the documented UGRR sites and few traditions include the river town of Paducah, where 200 steamboats might have landed every day in the 1850’s. Furthermore, the adjacent area of southern Illinois had some communities with notoriously strong pro-slavery sentiments. A letter from a UGRR conductor Seth Conklin to William Still dated Feb 3, 1891 says, “Our friends in Cincinnati have failed finding anybody to assist me on my return. Searching the country opposite Paducah, I find that the whole country fifty miles round is inhabited only by Christian wolves. It is customary, when a strange negro is seen, for any white man to seize the negro and convey such negro through and out of the State of Illinois to Paducah, Ky., and lodge such stranger in Paducah jail, and there claim such reward as may be offered by the master” (Still). Though she had a rich supply of historical tales to share, Merriman Kemp, the long-time Paducah resident and docent for the River Heritage Museum in Paducah told me she had never heard of any stories associating Paducah with the UGRR. She was the first Kentucky resident in my search to send me to Smithland.
Bounty Hunters: The two drunken men who accost Toby and Charles are “bounty hunters,” men who were always on the lookout for slaves running off or even just any black person away from home without a pass. Some more “professional” slave catchers contracted with owners and were paid for specific searches.
Chapter Twenty-Six to Thirty-two Notes
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