by Tim Black
As Nikola Tesla was still in the closet, Mr. Greene brought the classroom down on the morning of October 14, 1859, a Monday. Having spent time in 19th century Philadelphia over the previous summer, Mr. Greene chose an open field in Fairmount Park as his landing spot, immediately applying the cloaking device upon arrival.
Minerva glanced out the classroom window. The foliage on the trees was changing, presenting her eyes with a kaleidoscope of colors.”
“We are in Fairmount Park, Philadelphia. From here we will take a horse-drawn streetcar into the center of the city. We are going to meet Harriet Tubman outside City Tavern at 10 A.M.,” Mr. Greene said.
“How do you know that, Mr. Greene?” Samuel asked.
“You see, Samuel, when I was here during our summer vacation, Mr. Tesla and I dropped in, and I spent some time getting to know Mrs. Tubman and to earn her trust. You may not know this, but her mother’s name was Harriet Greene, the Greene spelled as my last name is. That certainly was an ice-breaker between us, as well as playing the part of a Quaker gave me a leg up. When I met her and when I told her I adopted a Negro boy as my son, well she wanted to meet him. So, Samuel, you are about to meet Harriet Tubman, whose birthname was Araminta Ross, and whose childhood nickname was ‘Minty.’ She took the name Harriet to honor her mother. Anyway, we met at Clarkson Hall on Cherry Street, which was or, more correctly, is the headquarters of the Pennsylvania Abolition Society. It was the first place I stopped when I came to antebellum Philadelphia during our summer vacation…and it is where I concocted the idea of having an adopted black son. It certainly was a hit with Mrs. Tubman who was eager to meet Samuel.”
“So that is why you created the adopted son thing,” Samuel said. “To get in good with Mrs. Tubman?”
Sheepishly, Mr. Greene replied, “Yes. Are you mad at me, Samuel?”
Samuel laughed. “No, Mr. Greene; that is pretty cool, actually. It all makes sense now.”
“I knew how much you admired her, Samuel. It seemed to be a perfect way for you to meet her.”
Mr. Greene’s shenanigans surprised Victor. He had to give it to the old man though, he thought. That was pretty good planning. Thorough.
A tiny Nikola Tesla emerged from the closet. Gone was the bushy mustache and the mesmerizing dark eyes, replaced by a little three-year-old boy. The tiny Tesla seemed irritated at his reanimation.
“You are as cute a button,” Bette Kromer said, teasing him.
“Shut your pie hole, Kromer,” Tiny Tesla snapped. “This is not fun for me. You know what is worse than death, being reanimated as a three-year-old.”
“Mr. Bridenbaugh, perhaps you should stay with Mr. Tesla,” Mr. Greene advised.
“A babysitter? How humiliating!” Tesla steamed.
Mr. Greene ignored Tiny Tesla’s tantrum. “Okay, fellow Quakers, let us be off,” he said.
As they walked through Fairmount Park, Victor strode between Bette and Minerva and Mr. Greene ambled between Heather and Samuel.
“So, you decided to call me your ‘son’, Mr. Greene,” Samuel asked, “to get in good with Mrs. Tubman…did it work?”
“Yes, if she shows up, I will know it did. Are you sure it does not bother you, Samuel?”
Samuel smiled. “No, not really. It is pretty much a genius move, Mr. Greene.”
“I’m no genius,” Mr. Greene scoffed.
A real genius never thinks he is, Samuel thought. Mr. Greene was a Mensa man, for sure. His mind was faster than an Internet search engine.
They boarded a streetcar, pulled by horses. Electric trolleys were a latter 19th century invention. The wooden seats were a bit hard on a person’s rump, but the streetcar saved on shoe leather, even if the streetcar hardly moved faster than a person walked.
“This might not seem like much,” Mr. Greene said of the horse-drawn conveyance, “but the streetcar led to the development of suburbs. We are witnessing the beginning of the industrial revolution, which will really take off after the end of the Civil War.”
When they arrived at City Tavern near the Delaware River, Victor said to Minerva, “This is where Ben Franklin made a pass at you Minerva.”
Minerva Messinger blushed and said in denial, “It wasn’t a pass, Victor, it was an invitation to supper.”
“Ha!” Bette Kromer said.
They didn’t go in. They found benches on Second Street and waited. The girls began chatting among themselves and Mr. Greene and the boys stood up and walked around.
“Samuel, City Tavern is where the Founding Fathers hung out and ate their midday meal and swigged quite a bit of ale,” Victor said. “It was quite fun meeting Franklin and Jefferson and the others.”
Samuel smiled in response and said in a bit of one-upmanship, “I rowed George Washington across the Delaware. I am even in the painting.”
Victor laughed. “You win,” he admitted. Catching horseflies for Thomas Jefferson paled in comparison to rowing the Father of His Country across the Delaware River to kick some Hessian butt.
“Here she comes,” Mr. Greene said, nodding in the direction of a woman walking alone on the Second Street sidewalk.
Harriet Tubman, then thirty-seven, was a small, slender woman, five feet in height. Plainly dressed, save for a colorful brown headscarf, she might have passed for a colored maid instead of the most successful conductor in the history of the Underground Railroad. But Samuel had read that Harriet Tubman was a master of disguise, and her plain dress was a way of blending in, not causing any attention to come her way. Still, he noticed her droopy left eye, a condition which was the result of a beating she received as a child by an overseer on the plantation.
“Hello, Nathan,” she said to Mr. Greene, without a smile. She was all business. She looked over at Samuel Chandler.
“Is this your son?” she asked Mr. Greene.
“Yes…Samuel, this is Mrs. Tubman,” Mr. Greene replied.
A smile crept across Harriet Tubman’s face. “Boy, you are a tall drink of water, ain’t cha?”
“Yes, ma’am, I guess I am,” Samuel said. Seeing Harriet Tubman nearly made him speechless. He wanted to ask Harriet Tubman about her convex forehead. Was that due to the beatings she sustained as a slave? Like her left eye? And her chiseled chin, implied a no-nonsense hardness. From what Samuel had read, Harriet Tubman was one tough cookie. She might not look like much, but she was a dynamo.
“Your father has spoken highly of you. He says you can read and write. That may become useful to us as we go into Maryland.”
“Excuse me?” Samuel said.
“I want you to accompany me on a rescue and it would help if I had someone along who could read. On the last trip, I had to hide my face behind a book and I wasn’t sure if the book was held up right or upside down,” she said and began to laugh. “I was on a train and two men were talking about me, slave catchers, and well I hid behind the book but to this day I don’t know if the book was upside down or not.”
“You must have had it right,” Samuel said. “Because you are here.”
Harriet Tubman smiled. “Your father said that you were smart. It seems he was right… Who are these other young people, Nathan?” she asked, pointing to the girls and Victor.
“My nephew and my nieces,” Mr. Greene said.
“Are they all Quakers?”
“Yes.”
“Which is the one you call Heather?”
“Here, Mrs. Tubman!” Heather shouted.
Harriet Tubman put a finger to her lips in a gesture of silence. “Shhh, child. There may be a slave catcher nearby, even in Philadelphia. The Fugitive Slave Law does that,” she added. “The devil slave catchers even steal free Negroes right off the street and take them South and sell them into slavery.”
Harriet Tubman patted Heather’s shoulder. “Don’t worry, girl. I have an important task for you to carry out. I want you to go with me into Maryland and help me rescue my sister. I want my sister to feel the sunlight of freedom on her face. When I escaped from slavery and cro
ssed into the free state of Pennsylvania, there was such a glory over everything; the sun came like gold through the trees, and over the fields, and I felt I was in heaven. Imagine, heaven in Pennsylvania.”
“Where are we headed, Mrs. Tubman?” Samuel asked.
“To Cambridge, Maryland. Well near it, anyway. We are going to rescue my sister, Rachel.”
Samuel tried to recall something about Harriet Tubman’s niece from Catherine Clinton’s biography of Harriet Tubman, but his mind drew a blank. What was it? he wondered.
“Why do you need me?” Heather asked.
“Well, my plan, is if we have a white woman along with us, pretending to be our mistress, then we can travel by train to Maryland and by day. I can pretend to be your body servant and Samuel can pretend to be your bodyguard. Can you pretend to be uppity, Heather?”
Heather looked Harriet Tubman in the eye. “Yes, ma’am.”
Harriet Tubman shook her head in disapproval. “Don’t make the mistake of calling me ma’am when we are traveling,” she said. “A white woman would not ever do that. We may be riding down, but we will be walking back and at night, from one station to the next. Delaware is not so bad, because most colored folks in Delaware are free.”
Mr. Greene explained for his students. “Delaware has slavery, but no slave can be sold out of state or brought in from another state. Consequently, slavery was, ah is, phasing out in Delaware. It was...ah is... the only slave state that is like that. And the free black population in Delaware was…is… the highest percentage of any state.”
“We still have to be careful, even in Delaware,” Harriet Tubman cautioned. “But your Uncle Nathan is right, Delaware has many free colored people and they are helpful to the Underground Railroad. Maryland is a different world, though,” Mrs. Tubman added. “Now, we need to be outside the plantation in Maryland on Saturday night to rescue my sister, Rachel. Sunday is a slave’s day off and the master won’t notice a slave is missing until they don’t appear in the fields on Monday. So that gives us a day’s head start, before they sick the dogs on us.”
“Dogs?” Heather asked.
“Bloodhounds,” Mrs. Tubman explained. “I will pack a case with clothes for my sister, clothes worn by another woman, and Rachel will change into those clothes. We will leave her other clothes in a boat and float the boat downstream. The dogs should follow the scent from her clothes down the river. We want the slave catchers to think we escaped by boat across the Chesapeake and headed for Baltimore,” Tubman explained.
Samuel was impressed. He knew that Harriet Tubman was illiterate, but she was savvy, possessed with “street smarts” that in the Underground Railroad business were much more essential than “book learning.”
Mrs. Tubman continued. “I would like to go South on Wednesday. Samuel and Heather, meet me at the Pennsylvania Abolition Society at Clarkson Hall, tomorrow at 10 A.M.”
“How long do you expect to be gone, Mrs. Tubman?” Mr. Greene asked.
“About two weeks, give or take a day or two,” Mrs. Tubman said. “Now, if you will excuse me, there are things I need to do. Until tomorrow then,” she added and then walked away in the direction from which she had come.
Mr. Greene gathered his group together and said: “We are going to split up, like we did back in Gettysburg. Samuel and Heather will accompany Mrs. Tubman. Professor Bridenbaugh will float along to help in case of emergency. Victor, Minerva, Bette and I, along with Tiny Tesla will proceed to Harper’s Ferry, Virginia. West Virginia in our time, as West Virginia broke away from Virginia during the Civil War. Now, if either Samuel or Heather have cold feet, now is the time to speak up. You don’t have to go on the rescue if you do not wish to…it could be dangerous.”
“Opechancanough was pretty dangerous,” Heather commented. “I don’t think anyone could be as dangerous as him.”
“To spend time with Mrs. Tubman is a dream come true, Mr. Greene. It is worth whatever risk comes up.”
“Let’s not ruin her record, kids. Harriet Tubman’s Underground Railroad always delivered its passengers. She had a spotless record.”
“How will we go, Mr. Greene?” Heather asked.
Mr. Greene walked over to a bench. He extracted a map from his coat and laid it out on the bench. It was a modern map of Delaware and Maryland, ripped from a road atlas that Mr. Greene had purchased at AAA. He pointed to Seaford in the lower corner of Delaware, then moved his finger across the page to Maryland and the town of Cambridge, nestled next to the Chesapeake Bay.
“You will take the railroad from Philadelphia to Wilmington and switch trains to go south to Seaford, Delaware. From there you will walk across the Maryland border and head for Cambridge, stopping a few miles from the town. Somehow, Mrs. Tubman will notify the slaves at the plantation. She has done this several times, so the slaves on the plantation have probably already been notified that she is on her way. A message could have been sent to a station master on the Underground Railroad, a white man, who would then tell one of the slaves who worked away from the plantation, and that slave would return at night to the plantation and take the message. It was all fairly elaborate,” Mr. Greene said.
They walked through Fairmount Park and returned to the classroom where Professor Bridenbaugh seemed a bit befuddled with the three-year-old Nikola Tesla who appeared to have boundless energy and a short attention span.
Mr. Greene’s face registered worry. As a seven-year-old after the Battle of Gettysburg, Nikola Tesla was a sentient being. As a three-year-old, however, he seemed a bit unhinged. He stood on a desk and jumped to another, laughing as he completed each leap.
“Nikola stop!” Professor Bridenbaugh shouted. To no avail.
Victor had an idea. He went to the computer, sat down and said to the group. “Everyone, please take your seat. I would like to try something. If that is alright with you, Mr. Greene?”
“Okay, I think I know what you are going to do…go back in time?”
“Yes,” Victor said. “Let’s go back to before Mr. Tesla was born so that he will become a ghost again. He seems a bit wild as a three-year-old.”
“What?” Tiny Tesla protested. “I was just having fun, Victor. Teasing Professor Bridenbaugh. I’ll be good. I promise.”
Mr. Greene wasn’t convinced. “Take us back, Victor. Let him stay with the Beecher sisters for a bit,” Mr. Greene said and quickly wrote out the date and the coordinates for Victor. “Samuel, will you restrain Tiny Tesla for me? Everybody buckle up.”
Victor set the portable down in 1852. Samuel was no longer holding a little boy on his lap. Instead, Nikola Tesla was floating about the classroom.
Tesla let forth with some introspection, “I was a brat as a three-year-old, wasn’t I?”
Several heads nodded in the affirmative.
“You made the correct decision, Nathan. I will stay with the Beecher sisters while you go on to Harper’s Ferry. But please don’t leave me stranded to haunt the 1850s.”
“We won’t, Nikola. But we can’t have you running the computer as a three-year-old hellion,” the teacher said.
“I understand. I will await your return,” the Serbian scientist said and floated through the classroom window off to pester the Beecher sisters for a little while.
Mr. Greene turned to Victor. “We will return and pick him up when we are ready to visit 1863 and the John Brown party. Right now, let us get Samuel and Heather and Professor Bridenbaugh back to Philadelphia to meet up with Mrs. Tubman.”
Chapter 12
When they returned to Philadelphia in 1859, Victor, Minerva and Bette remained with the classroom in Fairmount Park, as Mr. Greene escorted Samuel, Heather and the floating Professor Bridenbaugh to Clarkson Hall and a reunion with Harriet Tubman. On the walk through the park, Mr. Greene gave each of the students two twenty-dollar gold pieces.
“This is for emergency,” he advised. “The Pennsylvania Abolition Society will provide everything you will need for the journey, including railroad tickets. You will no
t be able to sit together, however. Segregation rules. Heather will sit in the white railroad car and Samuel and Mrs. Tubman in the Colored car.”
“Like a 19th century Rosa Parks huh?” Samuel said. “The back of the bus?”
“Yes. But in this case, the back car on the train. African Americans could be free in Pennsylvania, but not equal, I’m afraid. They couldn’t vote and were restricted as to where they could live, which created conclaves of blacks in the large cities such as Boston, New York and Philadelphia. And public transportation was also segregated, as railroad cars were designated either White or Colored. Delaware enforced its segregation laws even more harshly than Pennsylvania. African Americans may not have been slaves, but their existence was short of what we would consider freedom in our time.”
“I don’t want to sit by myself,” Heather complained. “I want to sit with Samuel and Mrs. Tubman.”
“You can’t,” Mr. Greene said. “You will get arrested. Professor Bridenbaugh can keep you company.”
“I will start a protest,” Heather continued.
“And change history? I think not, Heather,” Samuel said. “Do as you are told.”
She looked at the determination on Samuel’s face. “Okay, Samuel, I will.”
“Promise?”
“I promise,” Heather agreed. She offered a little finger in a “pinkie swear,” and he smiled and shook his head in response.
“Goofball,” he added.
Heather returned his smile.
As they arrived at Clarkson Hall, a well-dressed man approached, accompanied by a light-skinned African American woman whose arm she took as they left the building. Walking with a club foot and using a cane for balance, the man smiled at Mr. Greene and Samuel and tipped his hat to Heather before passing them.
Mr. Greene recognized him. “That was Congressman Thaddeus Stevens of Lancaster, a rabid abolitionist in Congress who would later play a pivotal role in the passage of the 13th Amendment which outlawed slavery. He was very involved in abolition groups in Pennsylvania.”
“Who was the lady?” Heather asked.
“That was Lydia Smith, who Stevens introduced as his ‘housekeeper.’ She was actually his mistress or his common law wife.”