Chapter Eleven

Man by the well: Toby’s family may have heard stories about people like the man by the well. Harriet Tubman escaped from slavery after she met a Quaker woman who offered to show her the way to her first safe house, or “station” on the Underground Railroad (UGRR).

Punishment for escapes: The punishments that Toby had heard about for attempts at escape are typical. Slave holders knew that if other slaves saw successful escapes, they would never be able to keep their slave “property.” As a result, they were willing to whip, brand, and brutalize their slave to the point of severe injury or death to prevent further losses. In this way, slavery brutalized and destroyed the sensitivities of owners.

 Family Escape: Although it was unusual for a whole family to escape from slavery, it sometimes did happen. I began my story with Josiah Henson’s account of his escape from Kentucky with his wife, son Tom, and two young daughters, ages two and three years. His wife did indeed use the cloth intended for Tom’s pants to make a giant backpack to carry the girls, and when it appeared the escape would have to be aborted, she argued that they would have to go forward with it because the master would be expecting Tom to wear his new pants.

Mama’s chant: Toby’s Mama remembers some of her African heritage and language. In this scene, she is offering the closest thing she can to an animal sacrifice and calling upon her ancestors to deliver her from danger. I have taken the scene from the story of Olaudah Equiano, who wrote that before he was kidnapped from Africa, he often saw his mother make offerings of the blood of beasts at the graves of her ancestors. “When she went to make these oblations at her mother’s tomb, [she] spent most of the night in cries and lamentations” (12).

Chapter Twelve

Gabriel’s infected leg: Before the discovery of antibiotics, even a simple injury could result in death by infection. Though the vinegar Daddy poured into Gabriel’s wound would have killed some germs, but unless the wound was clean and dry, more bacteria would certainly grow there.

Chapter Thirteen

 Skunks and tracking: The odor of a skunk’s spray is detectable for well over a mile, and possibly up to three miles downwind. Still, everything I read indicated that even a skunk would not throw well-trained dogs off from tracking a man. The weakest link in dog tracking can be the trainer, who like Master Allen, might be expected to pull the dogs off the scent.

Witch’s Burr: The seeds of the sweet gum tree. They are one to one and a half inches in diameter with rigid woody spikes sharp enough to pierce  a callous.

The Magic Root: The story of the magic root comes from the Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass. After being beaten and running into the woods, Douglass encountered Sandy Jenkins, who sent him back to his master protected from further beatings: “He told me, with great solemnity, I must go back to Covey; but that before I went, I must go with him into another part of the woods, where there was a certain root, which, if I would take some of it with me, carrying it always on my right side, would render it impossible for Mr. Covey, or any other white man, to whip me” (72). Emboldened by the root, Douglass resisted his master’s attempts to beat him, and vowed never again to be a slave in spirit. Though he remained in slavery another four years, he was never again beaten (74-75).

Chapter Fourteen

 Flying crow: The image of a bird flying free is an important one in this story. Slaves saw birds as free to move and fly without constraints, and the image is common in African American literature, for example, in the poem by Paul Laurence Dunbar, “Sympathy,” which uses a caged bird to symbolize a chained slave. His lament is repeated as the title of Maya Angelou’s 1969 autobiography, I know Why the Caged Bird Sings.

Toby’s Journey: The trip from the fictitious Allen farm, along Cane Creek east of Clinton Kentucky, to Columbus, on the Mississippi River, would be about 12 miles northwest as the crow flies, but of course Toby was crossing through the least accessible route, hiding in the stream, cabin, and forest, and traveling on sore, bare feet, so I doubt he would travel even one mile an hour. (Another reason to envy the free-flying crow!)

Chapter Fifteen

 Iron Bluff: The iron-rich red bluffs where Toby sat overlooking the Mississippi River are now preserved as Columbus-Belmont State Park. The City of Columbus moved uphill, to the east of the bluff in 1927, after a flood swept away nearly all of the buildings. Even today, looking out across the river, rural Missouri is a sea of green treetops.

Slave Jail: According to Kentucky’s Underground Railroad online site: “By the time of the Civil War, Kentucky was known as a ‘slave-growing’ state, responsible for supplying African slaves for Southern plantations. According to historian George Wright, ‘Ownership of slaves was profitable to Kentucky whites; the slave trade shipped approximately 80,000 Africans southward between 1830 and 1860’” (Kentucky’s). In 1850, 23% of Kentucky’s white males owned enslaved African Americans, so there was probably some slave trade conducted at the Mississippi port of Columbus.

Chapter Sixteen to Twenty Notes https://www.ellensorenson.com/chapter-sixteen-twenty-notes/