Every time we tell these inspiring stories, we also need to put them into context. Maybe X number of slaves escaped on the underground railroad. But how many times that number were killed trying to escape?
— John Chapman
Most Underground Railroad stories have a relatively happy arc:
Slave escapes slavery, gets almost caught, avoids being caught, maybe has another run-in, meets friendly white people, gets to freedom, stays there and disappears into history.
Those are the stories we get told. And they sure do provide lots of emotional relief for those of us who hate that as a country/race/people/species, we ever enslaved anyone.
But in romanticizing these people, we come too close to convincing ourselves that this glimmer of hope stayed alight.
Today's stories end in the kind of pain you can feel only when you love.
That does not make the pain bearable.
Every day, you go to work with your hands. You stand, stoop, carry large objects, rip things, communicate with others and meet a quota.
Your dwelling -- don't even think about calling it a house -- leaks. Rain floods it, sunlight invades it, cold engulfs it, heat bakes it. Deal. And work.
After two weeks, you've earned nothing. If you're sick, you work. If you're injured, you work. If you're not working hard enough, you get whipped. Maybe you don't get as much to eat because you're not working as hard.
After thirty years of this, one day you get a chance to escape.
Only you.
Leave your family and chance freedom? Or stay with your family and lose your chance?
We can't -- I can't -- fully conceptualize that. We can't fully respect the terror of that decision, or the ease of it, or the anything else because reading about slavery isn't slavery. It's reading. Watching a movie about slavery isn't slavery. It's watching a movie.
Only slavery can fully teach us about slavery.
So when we consider running away and leaving everyone else behind and weigh it against continuing to suffer with our families, we do it with modern prejudices.
Manuel ran.
Years later, having saved money at the expense of enjoying life, he went for his children.
He followed the path until it ended, and then he went in as many directions as his heart could take, and his children were nowhere.
As soon as he arrived in Philadelphia, he went to Isaac T. Hopper to tell how the cherished plan of his life had been frustrated. He seemed greatly dejected, and wept bitterly. "I have deprived myself of almost every comfort," said he; "that I might save money to buy my poor children. But now they are not to be found, and my money gives me no satisfaction. The only consolation I have is the hope that they are all dead."
The bereaved old man never afterward seemed to take comfort in anything. He sunk, into a settled melancholy, and did not long survive his disappointment.
Freedom, without his family, was pointless. In the end, given his impossibly heartbreaking choice, he wanted his children dead rather than enslaved.
I can't fault that. Who wants their own flesh to suffer for a lifetime?
If you have read Beloved, you know this story and it tears your heart out.
If you have not read Beloved, you do not know this story and it is about to tear your heart out.
Or you have or have not read Beloved and you rejoice or are about to rejoice. After all, Samuel Curtis hoped his grown children were dead, not still slaves. If we can respect and even embrace his hope -- for freedom from slavery, however it has happened -- we can find some joy in this next story.
On January 28, 1856, Margaret Garner was facing recapture and return to slavery, when she killed her two-year-old daughter, and attempted to kill her other three children, in order to prevent them from being re-enslaved.
In a few minutes...[Kite's] house was surrounded by pursuers -- the masters of the fugitives, with officers and a posse of men. The door and windows were barred, and those inside refused to give admittance. The fugitives were determined to fight, and to die, rather than to be taken back to slavery. Margaret, the mother of the four children, declared that she would kill herself and her children before she would return to bondage. The slave men were armed and fought bravely. The window was first battered down with a stick of wood, and one of the deputy marshals attempted to enter, but a pistol shot from within made a flesh wound on his arm and caused him to abandon the attempt. The pursuers then battered down the door with some timber and rushed in. The husband of Margaret fired several shots, and wounded one of the officers, but was soon overpowered and dragged out of the house. At this moment, Margaret Garner, seeing that their hopes of freedom were in vain, seized a butcher knife that lay on the table, and with one stroke cut the throat of her little daughter, whom she probably loved the best. She then attempted to take the life of the other children and to kill herself, but she was overpowered and hampered before she could complete her desperate work. The whole party was then arrested and lodged in jail.
It tears your heart out because she slit her own toddler's throat so the girl wouldn't have to be a slave again.
It makes you rejoice because she freed her daughter.
How do you kill your own child?
But how do you let her be a slave again?
De little baby gone home,
De little baby gone home,
De little baby gone along,
For to climb up Jacob's ladder.
And I wish I'd been dar,
I wish I'd been dar,
I wish I'd been dar, my Lord,
For to climb up Jacob's ladder.
The story gets worse, as you might expect. Masters raped their breeding-age female slaves commonly enough back in the day, and white Southerners (a word I capitalize out of respect for the language, not the people) nearly universally ... to say they didn't care would be to suggest they might have had reason to. Women were property. Slaves -- not blacks, slaves -- were property.
Steven Weisenburger in his study, Modern Medea: A Family Story of Slavery and Child-Murder From the Old South (1998) theorizes that sexual violation explains Margaret’s motivation for running away and infanticide, finding that Margaret’s pregnancies occurred after Archibald Gaines arrived in Richwood and were concurrent with his wife’s pregnancies.
But Archibald Gaines did have access to Margaret Garner throughout the period in question, and the case for his paternity thus meets a threshold test. But there is more. Not only did Margaret Garner begin having lighter-complected children after Archibald Gaines entered her life; those births also follow a pattern that lifts his paternity to the level of probability. Her births all followed just months after Elizabeth Gaines's. Why? One widely acknowledged rule of nineteenth-century sexual practices held that white women, who otherwise lacked reproductive control, could regulate a husband's sexual access during the last three to five months of pregnancy and for several months postpartum. Historian Bertram Wyatt-Brown comments that Southerners commonly referred to this stretch as the "gander months" because that was when husbands traditionally sought sexual "comfort" with other women. With slaves, if they happened to own them.
It gets worse, of course, because why not? I don't even want to know how common slave rape by the slave's uncle was, but
here is the terror:
For antebellum census-takers were always precise about parsing a master’s slave property as either “black” or “mulatto,” depending on whether the person had one-eighth or more of white ancestry, and this is how we know that while Duke and Priscilla were always listed in census records as “black,” Margaret was categorized as “mulatto.” Who then was her father? We know from his own records that, in 1833, John Gaines was the only adult white male residing at Maplewood. Moreover, there is nothing in the record about Priscilla being “hired out” elsewhere, and her household duties made it unlikely that she ever would have been. That John Gaines was Margaret’s father is therefore a reasonable supposition.
...
Thus in December 1849 Major Gaines abruptly sold Maplewood and all his property in slaves to a younger brother, Archibald, then an Arkansas cotton planter.
So with a few assumptions, we get:
Slave woman is raped by her master and gives birth to a mulatto girl who is raped by her master's brother -- now her master -- repeatedly and predictably over years and gives birth several times. She and her three children by her uncle eventually end up with her new master's brother.
I don't want to know.
The happy ending here is that Margaret Garner was released from slavery two years later by typhoid fever:
fever (usually between 103F- 104F), rashes (flat, rose-coloured spots), vomiting, loss of appetite, headaches, general fatigue. In severe cases one may suffer from intestinal perforations or internal bleeding, diarrhoea or constipation.
Typhoid was
thirty-three percent fatal in 1900, and probably more so in the 1850s, especially if the patient was working through a fever, vomiting what few calories were being eaten and already fatigued from work. In the end,
she told her husband to hope for freedom.
He got it.
Meanwhile, typhoid hits children and young adults hardest.
You can probably guess what I hope happened.