From This Day Forward (11 page)

One day, after she had hidden for seven years, Harriet had come down from her hole and was talking to her grandmother in the storeroom. Carelessly, the grandmother had left the storeroom door open, and when a neighbor came to buy crackers, and went looking for Aunt Marthy, she looked in the storeroom. Harriet couldn't be sure whether she had been seen, but she was afraid to risk it. The doctor had gone to New York three times looking for her, and had never given up the chase. Though it was incredibly risky, the family decided it would probably be safer for her to try to board a friendly ship that was in the harbor than to take her chances with the doctor. Before she left, Harriet was determined to see her son. “It was an agitating interview for both of us. After
we had talked and wept together for a little while, he said, ‘Mother, I'm glad you're going away. I wish I could go with you. I knew you were here; and I have been
so
afraid they would come and catch you!'” She was amazed. It turned out he had heard a cough one day, and concluded it was his mother. From there on out, he tried to keep people away from that side of the storeroom.

Harriet successfully boarded the ship and sailed to Philadelphia and freedom. Finally. From Philadelphia, she took a train to New York and went in search of her daughter. Ellen's situation was not as advertised; she wasn't going to school and was being treated as a servant rather than a family member. Of course, the little girl couldn't do anything about her circumstances, so Harriet chose to stay in New York, where she could keep an eye on her daughter. That was just fine with the woman Ellen was living with; once Harriet got a job, she started supplying the clothes and shoes her daughter needed. Fortunately for the runaway, she got work as a nursemaid for a sympathetic Englishwoman with a new baby, who had no objection to her visiting Ellen regularly. One of those visits almost spelled the end of Harriet's freedom. A Southern relative was visiting the family, spied the fugitive, and wrote to the doctor of her whereabouts. Fortunately, the children in the family found out about it and warned Harriet. The Englishwoman then arranged for her and Ellen to go to Boston, where slave owners dared not tread. There followed an almost idyllic period for Harriet Jacobs. Her son had been sent to Boston to live with Harriet's brother, who had run away from his master on a trip north years before. Now she had her daughter there as well. She was able to get work as a seamstress and send her children to school. But then her benefactress, the Englishwoman, died, and her husband, Mr. Bruce, begged Harriet to accompany him and the baby to England. She felt she owed him that much. So she arranged for her children's education and housing and left them again.

England was an eye-opener for the fugitive slave. She kept comparing the situation of impoverished Englishmen with that of American slaves, and the English came out far ahead. “The father, when he closed his cottage door, felt safe with his family around him. No master or overseer could come and take from him his wife, or his daughter…. The relations of husband and wife, parent and child, were too sacred for the richest noble in the land to violate with impunity.” The English better than the Americans? Unthinkable to the Northern ladies who were the targets of Harriet Jacobs's work! Grandparents were still handing down tales of the Revolution to their grandchildren. When she returned from England, Harriet went back to Boston, but before long the Bruce family needed her again. There was a new wife and a new baby.

Going back to New York was now fraught with danger because the Fugitive Slave Act had been passed, empowering federal marshals to capture runaways and return them to their masters, and penalizing anyone who assisted the slaves. When word reached Harriet that the old doctor knew her whereabouts and his emissaries were headed her way, the new Mrs. Bruce found the courage to use her own baby as a form of protection. She arranged for her nursemaid to take the baby with her to friends, figuring that anyone who found Harriet would have to return the baby; then the family might be able to help the fugitive. After about a month in the country, the coast was clear for Harriet and the baby to return to New York, but the situation remained precarious even after the news arrived that the old doctor had died. His daughter, Harriet's real owner, now married, seemed just as insistent on reclaiming her slave. She and her husband made their own trip to New York; Harriet and the baby made another escape. But Mrs. Bruce had had enough; she arranged to buy Harriet from the North Carolina family once and for all.

That should have been good news for Harriet Jacobs. It
was not. She couldn't stand the idea that she was a piece of property to be bought and sold: “A human being
sold
in the free city of New York! The bill of sale is on record and future generations will learn from it that women were articles of traffic in New York, late in the nineteenth century of the Christian religion.” Still, it was a relief. And when Harriet Jacobs arrived at the Bruce doorstep, she quickly learned that she was now free. Legally. That to her was the end of the story. It wasn't the usual ending of a story aimed at women, a romance where the heroine lived happily ever after, but it was a happy ending even so. “Reader, my story ends with freedom; not in the usual way, with marriage. My children and I are now free!”

Ellen and William Craft: A Daring Escape for a Life Together

The Crafts' tale,
Running a Thousand Miles for Freedom,
sold as a suspense story when it was published in England in 1860. And it does read like a good mystery. But there's no mystery in the two central themes of the tale: the couple's abhorrence of slavery and their attachment to each other.

Both Crafts grew up in Macon, Georgia. Ellen's first master was her father; her mother was his slave. Because she looked so much like the children of the family, the mistress was eager to get Ellen out of the house, so, at age eleven, the little girl became a wedding present for the mistress's daughter. William Craft's first master decided he needed new slave stock, so he sold off William's aged parents, separating them after many years of marriage. Then, when the master started speculating in cotton, he mortgaged William and his sister to a bank, which eventually auctioned them off to the highest bidders. William was bought by a cabinetmaker. He and Ellen had grown up knowing each other, as slaves would in a town the size of Macon. Eventually they fell in love, but the young slave woman refused to get married.

William later explained Ellen's resistance to matrimony: “My wife was torn from her mother's embrace in childhood, and taken to a distant part of the country. She had seen so many other children separated from their parents in this cruel manner, that the mere thought of her ever becoming the mother of a child, to linger out a miserable existence under the wretched system of American slavery, appeared to fill her very soul with horror; and as she had taken what I felt to be an important view of her condition, I did not, at first, press the marriage, but agreed to assist her in trying to devise some plan by which we might escape from our unhappy condition, and then be married.” But “after puzzling our brains for years,” they could see no way to maneuver through one thousand miles of slave territory to a free state, so they finally decided to ask their masters' permissions to be married. Once wed, they decided to “settle down in slavery, and endeavor to make ourselves as comfortable as possible under that system.” That's what they did until December 1848, when Craft concocted a clever scheme to make their break for freedom. Once they decided on it, only eight days later they succeeded.

The fact that Ellen was almost white, and that William could work extra for money in his job in the cabinet shop, made the daring plan possible. The basic plot was simple: she would disguise herself as a man in need of medical care in the North; he would be the slave accompanying his invalid “master.” Ellen thought the scheme was silly; she couldn't imagine that she could carry it off. But the more she thought about it, the more she wanted out. So she told William that she would try to do her part if he would buy her costume. Not wanting to arouse suspicion, he went to different parts of town at different times to buy everything his wife needed, except trousers, which she made. As a ladies' maid in a city house, Ellen had a room of her own where she was able to keep all of her new things hidden.

Slaves were often given a few days' vacation at Christmas-time. After all, masters didn't have to fear that they could go anywhere. No public transportation would carry them without their masters, and Georgia was too far south to worry about walking to freedom. William and Ellen each went to their owners for permission to take some time off so no one would go looking for them right away. Their masters gave them passes allowing them to travel, though neither was able to read the documents. That made Ellen realize that she couldn't write either, and wouldn't be able to register in hotels. They solved that problem by putting her right arm in a sling. Once she had donned the full costume, William thought her smooth face might also be a problem. So they put a poultice under her chin and tied a handkerchief around it. Ellen worried that traveling with men would make her nervous. For that problem a pair of tinted glasses to cover her eyes did the trick. Then William cut off his wife's hair and “found that she made a most respectable looking gentleman.”

Before dawn they said a quick prayer and he peered out of her room, urging her on: “Come my dear, let us make a desperate leap for liberty!” But she “burst into violent sobs, and threw her head upon my breast. This appeared to touch my very heart, it caused me to enter into her feelings more fully than ever.” They knew that if they were caught, they would not only be severely punished, they would probably never see each other again. But Ellen mustered her courage and each of them crept out of the house and went off in different directions to the train station. It was December 21,1848. William went directly to the “colored” car; Ellen bought tickets and went to the “white” one. The cabinetmaker came looking for them, “having presentiments that we were about to ‘make tracks for parts unknown.'” But the train left the station before he spotted his slave. It was the first of many close calls.

A friend of the family Ellen worked for sat down next to
her, and she was afraid he'd recognize her voice. So, in addition to being bandaged at the face and hand, she became deaf as well. Fortunately, the man got off the train before long, while the Crafts went on to Savannah, where they boarded a steamer for Charleston. Think of it, these were people who couldn't read or write, who had never been out of small-town Georgia, and now they were braving travel by land and sea through the slave states with detection likely at any time. On ship, Ellen went to bed early to avoid conversation, while William made a fresh poultice and explained his “master's” illness. They made it safely to Charleston, and for all their trepidation, they still couldn't resist going right to the lions' den—registering at the hotel frequented by that champion of the slave system, Senator John C. Calhoun. It was such a bold act that they loved telling about it. The fugitives had planned to take a ship directly from Charleston to Philadelphia, but discovered it didn't run in the winter, so they had to make the trip in many stages, sailing first to Wilmington, North Carolina. When they reached the dock, the ticket taker refused to sign for “the master” whose arm was in a sling, and it looked like the couple might be stranded in Charleston. Then a young man who had been with them on the boat from Savannah showed up, somewhat the worse for wear with brandy, and vouched for “the gentleman.” Crisis averted.

From Wilmington, the travelers had to catch a train to Richmond, Virginia. A family on the train became concerned about the state of William's “master,” and gave the slave a ten-cent piece, telling him to be attentive. With some irony, Craft reports, “I promised that I would do so, and have ever since endeavored to keep my pledge.” Richmond meant a change of trains, this time to a ship's landing a little beyond Fredericksburg. On that train “Mr. Johnson,” the name Ellen had taken, got into a conversation with a woman traveler. The woman kept talking about her slave, Ned, who had surprised her by running away. “Did he have a wife?” “Johnson”
asked. Oh yes, it turned out, a sickly wife whom the woman had sold to someone in New Orleans, where the warm weather would do her good. “I suppose she was very glad to go South for the restoration of her health?” inquired “Johnson.” Oh no, the slave had gone on about leaving Ned and the baby, which surprised her owner because “July” was such a faithful servant. As the woman sang the praises of the slave, “Johnson” finally asked, “As your ‘July' was such a very good girl, and had served you so faithfully before she lost her health, don't you think it would have been better to have emancipated her?” “No, indeed I do not!” came the reply. The woman then launched into a tirade about the evils of freeing slaves. It was a story aimed right at women who would pity separated lovers, women who might take up the cause of abolition.

Next came a steamer to Washington, D.C., and then a train to Baltimore, the last slave port. It was Christmas Eve, and Philadelphia, the first stop in free territory, was within reach. But at the Baltimore train station, a major glitch developed. An officer, “a full-blooded Yankee of the lower order,” demanded that William and his “master” get off the train, saying, “It is against my rules to let any man take a slave past here, unless he can satisfy them in the office that he has a right to take him along.” In terror, they went into the office and learned that they would not be able to go farther, even though they had tickets to Philadelphia. The Crafts had no idea what to do; they were petrified that anything they said would give them away. But the other passengers clucked at the “Yankee officer” for unnecessarily hassling an invalid on Christmas Eve. And when the conductor of the train from Washington arrived and said that the pair had traveled together from there, the officer relented and allowed them to board. Christmas and freedom were in sight.