Bound for Canaan (39 page)

Only around Norfolk, Virginia, and in coastal North Carolina did the saltwater underground resemble, at times, the networks that existed along the land border between the slave states and the free. In the 1830s, for instance, the abolitionist son of a slaveholder with links to Robert Purvis and the Philadelphia Vigilance Committee concealed fugitives in timber vessels bound for Philadelphia from the port of New Bern. North Carolina's web of tidal estuaries drew fugitives from inland plantations to the coastal lowlands, where there were good hiding places in the swamps as well as a large population of black watermen, slave and free, who might help in making contact with Yankee sailors. Wilmington had a particular reputation as a haven for fugitives. In October 1849 a letter to the
Wilmington Journal
complained that “it is almost an every day occurrence for our negro slaves to take passage and go North.” This was surely an exaggeration, but it nonetheless suggested the existence of activity that slave owners were aware of, but unable to completely stop.

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Even for fugitives able to pay their way, finding passage on a vessel bound for the free states could take months or years. Henry Gorham, a fugitive carpenter, remained in hiding for eleven months before managing to get aboard a schooner. Another, Ben Dickinson, waited for three years. For Harriet Jacobs, a nineteenth-century Anne Frank who lived entombed in an attic crawlspace and was given up as if for dead by almost everyone she knew, it took seven years. Jacobs's account of her life in slavery, published in 1861 under the deceptively innocuous title
Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl,
harrowed Victorian readers with its blunt sexuality. It also revealed, like no other slave narrative, how one black family invented an underground cell dedicated to the survival and escape of a single, beloved human being.

Jacobs spent her entire life as a slave in Edenton, North Carolina, a small port on Albermarle Sound, near the mouth of the Chowan River. Jacobs's extended family stood poised unsteadily on the fault line between slave and free. Born in 1813 and orphaned early, she was raised by the family matriarch, her grandmother, Molly Horniblow, a woman so highly esteemed for her probity and piety that she could even count white people among her personal friends. One of them, by agreement, using Horniblow's own savings, bought her out of slavery and emancipated her. The same woman also bought Horniblow's son Mark Ramsey, Harriet's uncle, and deeded him as a slave to his own mother. (North Carolina law required that free blacks prove they owned sufficient property so as not to become dependent on public charity, a condition that was fulfilled by Horniblow's ownership of her son, who was valued at four hundred dollars.) Horniblow's daughter Betty remained a slave, but married informally to a free black sailor, known to Harriet Jacobs simply as Stephen. Another of Horniblow's sons, Joseph, was sent to New Orleans to be sold, but had escaped on a ship to the North a few years before. Harriet, of course, was a slave, like her brother John, both of them the property of James Norcom, a prominent middle-aged medical doctor whose large and predatory sexual appetite would eventually drive her to flight.

As a child, Jacobs was treated well by the Norcoms. She was trained for household service as a ladies' maid and seamstress, and could look for
ward, in slavery's terms, to a life of relative privilege. A photograph taken of her in later life shows a light-skinned, placid-looking woman with a broad oval face, and a small mouth that might well have been pert and humorous in the flush of youth. She obviously had charm and spunk, as well as intelligence, having learned to read and write at an early age. Then, when she was fifteen, “a sad epoch in the life of a slave girl,” Norcom began to “whisper foul words” into her ear. “He tried his utmost to corrupt the pure principles my grandmother had instilled,” she would write. “He peopled my young mind with unclean images, such as only a vile monster could think of. I turned from him with disgust and hatred. But he was my master.”

It is hard to understand what restrained Norcom from simply raping her. He was already reputed to have fathered eleven children by other slaves. The rape of a slave woman by her master was not a crime. Jacobs sometimes suggests that he wanted her as a willing partner, and at others that outright rape was beneath his dignity as a prominent member of the community. Norcom was also, she wrote, “hard pushed for house servants, and rather than lose me he had restrained his malice.” But she knew that it would be only a matter of time before she had to submit to him.

Ashamed and frightened—Norcom said that if she breathed a word about his demands, he would kill her—she chose the single expedient that seemed open to her: she became another white man's mistress. Samuel T. Sawyer was young, politically ambitious, and as a graduate of the College of William and Mary, and a descendant of a colonial governor, considerably higher in social status than Norcom. Jacobs seems to have cared for him, but her involvement with him was also an act of calculated self-interest. She was counting on him to purchase her and the two children that she had by him, and counting on him, too, to emancipate them, to open for them the gateway out of slavery that she could never open on her own. “Seeing no other way of escaping the doom I so much dreaded, I made a headlong plunge,” she would write. Not surprisingly, Norcom resented this liaison. That he allowed it to continue reflected the mannered relations among white men of his own class more than it did sensitivity for Jacobs's feelings. She was still his slave, and the sexual pressure with which he surrounded her continued unabated. Despite the ambiguous alliance with Sawyer, preservation of her self-respect in the Norcom household
was a daily, if not hourly, struggle. She worried constantly about her own fate, and about her children growing up in slavery. Sawyer repeatedly offered to purchase Jacobs, but the doctor refused to sell. When Norcom removed her from his house in Edenton, to his isolated plantation outside town, and away from Sawyer, she decided to flee.

On a June night in 1835, Jacobs climbed out a window of Norcom's home, slipped to the ground, and began to run. She ran all the way to Edenton, five miles away, to the home of a woman friend, and begged to be taken in. She planned to stay there until Norcom stopped searching for her, and then somehow find a way onto a ship bound for the free states. Her uncle Mark and her aunt Betty's husband Stephen both worked on ships. One of them would be able to stow her away, she felt sure.

When Norcom discovered that Jacobs was missing, he immediately assumed that she would try to escape by sea. Advertisements distributed by Norcom described her as “corpulent,” curly-haired, and probably “tricked out in gay and fashionable finery.” He had every northbound vessel in the harbor searched, and the state law against harboring fugitives read aloud to every crew. His men then searched every place in town where he thought Jacobs might be, including Molly Horniblow's home on King Street, a few doors away from his own office. Until then, Horniblow had no idea that Harriet was even gone. When Harriet made contact with her, her first reaction—the kind of thing that must have won Horniblow the affection of so many Edenton whites—was to urge her granddaughter to do her duty and return to Norcom. However, when she understood that Harriet would never go back of her own volition, no matter what the consequences, she mobilized the family on her behalf.

Jacobs never suggested that the Horniblow clan was part of any organized underground network that extended beyond Edenton. Yet they knew immediately what had to be done to put Jacobs beyond her master's reach, probably because they knew from observation and experience what had worked for other local fugitives, and what had not. They knew that her friend's house was sure to be searched. Therefore they arranged for her to hide temporarily in the last place that Norcom would ever think to look: the home of a slave-owning but sympathetic white woman, Martha Blount, who had an affection for the Horniblows that overrode her loyalty to her own caste. One day, while Jacobs was there, Norcom himself came
to the house on a visit, and she had to be hurriedly concealed under a plank in the kitchen floor, where she listened in a state of nervous collapse as the familiar voice resonated terrifyingly over her head.

It was becoming clear that escape from Edenton would not be as easy as Jacobs had thought. Mark Ramsey, Harriet's brother John, and even her two small children had been locked up in jail, in an unsuccessful effort to flush her out. Even after their release, thanks to Sawyer, the men were watched so closely that they abandoned the idea of trying to slip Jacobs aboard a boat. A more permanent hiding place would have to be found for her. In the meantime, she had to be moved. One night, a former apprentice to her father, whom Jacobs identified only by the pseudonym “Peter,” brought her a set of sailor's clothes and a “tarpaulin hat,” and in this disguise escorted her to the harbor. There they were met by her aunt Betty's husband Stephen, who rowed them three miles down the bay to a forbidding place known as Cabarrus Pocosin, a dense cypress swamp known to be a resort of bandits and runaways. There was a reason it was rarely searched by slave catchers. “As the light increased,” Jacobs wrote, “I saw snake after snake crawling round us. I had been accustomed to the sight of snakes all my life, but these were larger than I had ever seen. As evening approached, the number of snakes increased so much that we were continually obliged to thrash them with sticks to keep them from crawling over us.”

While Harriet and Peter fended off water moccasins, Mark Ramsey constructed a hiding place in the attic of the Horniblow house, where she would be able to remain indefinitely. This was actually little more than a crawl space about four feet high at its peak, over a storage shed that stood against one side of the house. Ramsey had built a cupboard in a corner beneath the attic, and cut a trap door into its ceiling, so that food and whatever else Harriet needed could be passed up to her. When Peter escorted her back to the Horniblow house and up to the attic the next day, she never imagined that she would not stand again in the open air, or feel the damp Carolina earth again under her feet, until 1842, seven years later. General opinion in Edenton held that she had succeeded in slipping away to the North. Only Molly Horniblow, Mark Ramsey, Aunt Betty and her husband Stephen, and Peter knew where she was. It was not thought safe to tell even her children. When asked where their mother might be, they were taught to say, “in New York.”

As she waited for a boat to carry her north, through weeks that turned into months, and then into years, the “dismal little hole” in which she dwelled became her entire world, a prison in which she could neither stand upright nor crawl more than a few feet in any direction, but which was paradoxically the only place on earth where she was truly free. Her physical discomfort was extreme. At night, mice ran over her bed. In summer, the heat was intense. When it rained, water tainted with turpentine poured through the flimsy roof, soaking her bedding and clothes. Her limbs grew numb from disuse. Occasionally, her only luxury, Harriet's grandmother would close the shutters in the storeroom and allow her to come down and walk in circles, stretched to her full height. At first she lived in total darkness. This was so unendurable that she was finally given an auger to drill a “loophole,” as she called it, about one inch across, in the wall, to let in a pencil of daylight and a trickle of fresh air. During the day she read the Bible by holding it at a certain angle in front of the hole and sewed garments that her grandmother would give as presents to Harriet's children. With her eye pressed to the hole, she watched the people of Edenton pass by. Sometimes she saw Norcom on the way to his office, and she saw her own children, as far beyond her reach as if they lived on a star, and friends going about their normal lives, utterly oblivious to her presence nearby. Her isolation tested her faith to its limits. “Sometimes I thought God was a compassionate Father, who would forgive my sins for the sake of my sufferings,” she would write. “At other times, it seemed to me there was no justice or mercy in the divine government. I asked why the curse of slavery was permitted to exist, and why I had been so persecuted and wronged from youth upward. These things took the shape of mystery, which is to this day not so clear to my soul as I trust it will be hereafter.”

During her years in the attic, the nation grew by two more states, Arkansas and Michigan, Andrew Jackson retired from the presidency, to be followed by Martin Van Buren, and William Henry Harrison, who would drop dead after just three months in office, and then another slave owner, the seventh to hold the country's highest office, John Tyler of Virginia. Texans would fight a war of independence and establish slave-holding in what had been a free province of Mexico. A national depression would ravage the nation's economy. Railroads would be transformed from a novelty into a necessity. And abolitionism, an eccentricity at the coun
try's political margins in 1835, would surge with messianic fervor from lecture halls to become a national movement. But none of this would touch Harriet Jacobs. In Edenton, the smaller gears of history turned too. Aunt Betty's husband Stephen sailed north and never returned, choosing freedom over family. Aunt Betty herself died sometime later. Norcom finally decided to disencumber himself of Jacobs's brother and children, and sold them, unwittingly, through an intermediary, to his archrival Sawyer, who took on John as his personal manservant. In 1838 Sawyer was elected to Congress, as a Whig, and took John with him to Washington, and afterward to New York. One day John walked out of the Astor House hotel and into the Manhattan traffic, and never looked back. The note he left for Sawyer said: “Sir—I have left you, not to return; when I have got settled, I will give you further satisfaction. No longer yours.”

Now only Molly Horniblow, Mark Ramsey, and Peter knew that Jacobs was still in Edenton. They were constantly looking for a way to get her on board a ship, but none seemed realistic, or safe. Stowing away was both difficult and very dangerous. Slave catchers were always on the lookout for fugitives. Specially appointed inspectors searched seagoing vessels, and fumigated their holds to drive fugitives up on deck. A fugitive from Georgia who stowed away on a sloop carrying a cargo of turpentine was killed by the fumes when the hatches were sealed, trapping him in the hold. Another lashed himself beneath the bowsprit of a deepwater steamer. He lasted through twenty-four hours of drenching by bone-chilling water before begging for help. The captain gave him a suit of dry clothes, but turned him over to the authorities in Newcastle, Delaware. (A Philadelphia newspaper cruelly made light of this tragic incident, commenting that the shipowner should only charge the man half-fare, since the fugitive had “come half the way as a fish.”) In fact, it was typical for frightened or angry captains to dump stowaways with the authorities at the nearest Southern port. In December 1844 Captain Gilbert Ricketson, the nephew of one of New Bedford's most prominent abolitionists, would go out of his way to surrender not only a fugitive who had come aboard the
Cornelia
at Portsmouth, Virginia, but also the ship's black steward, who had brought him aboard and concealed him. Two years after that, when a slave who escaped from New Orleans in a merchant vessel landed in Boston, Frederick Douglass reported bitterly in the
North Star
, “He
was hunted like a partridge on the mountain, secured and sent back to hopeless bondage.”