Abolition

by Tim Black

  “Were you ever afraid?”

  Harriet Tubman smiled. “Do you know the thwenty-third psalm, Samuel?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well, I put my faith in the Lord,” she replied. “He was truly my shepherd on that journey, watching over me. You know, before I made my escape, I had visions, and in my visions, I flew over fields and rivers like a bird. Then, I came to a river and it appeared like I wouldn’t have the strength to cross and just as I was starting to drown, there would be ladies all dressed in white on the other side of the river and they would put out their arms and pull me across the river. Do you have visions, Samuel?” Harriet Tubman asked.

  “No, ma’am,” Samuel replied.

  “Do you believe in the Lord?”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “Do you dream?”

  “Yes.”

  “What do you dream about?”

  Into Samuel’s mind came the voice of Martin Luther King Jr. giving his “I Have a Dream” speech. Paraphrasing Dr. King, Samuel said, “I have a dream that one day this nation will live up to the words of the Declaration of Independence and enact a law that states all men and women, white, black and red, are created equal and endowed by our creator with certain inalienable rights and that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. I dream about the day when little black children and little white children will go to school together. I dream about the day that black men…and women will be eligible to vote. And I dream that one day a black man will occupy the White House not as a servant but as its master, President of the United States.”

  Harriet Tubman laughed and smiled. “You are a dreamer, Samuel. But when we are young anything is possible. We believe we can change the world.”

  And then John Lennon crept into Samuel’s mind. “You can say I’m a dreamer, but I am not the only one…”

  “Ain’t so easy to change the world, Samuel.”

  “You have,” Samuel said.

  “Oh, maybe a bit, but nothing like what you are dreaming about. You have bold dreams, but then the young often are bold, even in their dreams, I suppose,” she said wistfully, and her eyes turned to the window to watch the passing landscape. “I am so happy I rescued my parents and took them to Auburn, New York. And my niece. Senator Seward sold me a house real cheap in Auburn. My parents had been living in Canada where it is safe for a fugitive slave, but now they live at my house in Auburn. Some of my other relatives live there, but others are in Canada. Canada got too cold for my old parents. But Canada is safe; it is beyond the reach of the Fugitive Slave nonsense.”

  Samuel wished he could tell Harriet Tubman about the upcoming war and the part she would play in it, leading troops in South Carolina to free slaves. The first woman to lead an army unit! Several hundred slaves brought to freedom by Tubman’s leadership. He wished he could tell her that John Brown’s uprising would go a long way to starting the Civil War and that Abraham Lincoln would be elected and issue an Emancipation Proclamation that freed the slaves in the rebelling states, or that a 13th Amendment would be passed to end slavery in every state in the union. But he couldn’t tell her without risking the “butterfly effect.”

  Then, out of the blue, Harriet Tubman asked Samuel about Mr. Greene. “How long ago did your father adopt you, Samuel?”

  Samuel, thinking of when he first enrolled in Mr. Greene’s United States History A.P. class quickly calculated. “Two years,” he said.

  “And he taught you how to read?”

  “And many other things,” Samuel replied.

  “And he treats you truly like his son?”

  “Yes.”

  “He is a strange man, especially for a white man,” Mrs. Tubman observed. “John Brown is like that. A white man who truly cares about the Negro.”

  “I guess he is,” Samuel agreed. “Mrs. Tubman, may I ask you a personal question since you have asked me personal questions?”

  “Go ahead.”

  “Well, is Margaret really your niece or is she your daughter? She looks just like you.”

  Mrs. Tubman appeared stunned. “Who told you that?” she replied, not answering Samuel’s question.

  “No one, but the resemblance seems obvious,” Samuel said.

  “Samuel, you cannot tell anyone, do you hear me? Margaret does not even know; she thinks I am her aunt. I don’t think she would forgive me if she knew I left her behind when I escaped. A crying baby complicates a slave’s escape attempt. I left her with my family shortly after she was born. I regret that I did that, but I did,” she said.

  For the first time, Samuel saw that Harriet Tubman was vulnerable. Even someone who was as tough as “Moses” (as she was nicknamed), had a soft spot in her armor where she wore her heart on her sleeve for her daughter. It was a revelation to Samuel. He had never thought how much his parents truly loved him; he had just taken their affection for granted. But here with this 19th century woman, he learned what it was like to be a parent. He hoped that if he had children he would be as devoted to them as Harriet Tubman was to Margaret.

  They stopped at Dover, Delaware, before proceeding on to Seaford, Delaware. Samuel left the train, bought a newspaper and returned to the Colored railroad car and his seat beside Harriet Tubman. He hoped there was newspaper coverage of the Harper’s Ferry raid. There was. Right on the front page “above the fold” of the newspaper.

  How seldom he read a newspaper, Samuel thought. He received his news online and through social media, but here he was holding a newspaper, which was the Internet of the 19th century. The Delaware State Reporter. Probably out of business in the 21st century, Samuel assumed.

  “Anything we should worry about?” an illiterate Mrs. Tubman asked.

  “John Brown led a raid on Harper’s Ferry and was killed,” Samuel said, reading the incorrect report. It was one of the first reports from Harper’s Ferry. Later dispatches corrected errors of the first news. “They took over the armory until marines stormed the building and reclaimed it.”

  “John Brown was a good man, a brave man. I met him, and I warned him about his plans to free the slaves in the South. Slaves wouldn’t follow a white man leading a slave revolt. They don’t trust white men. John Brown was a most unusual white man, but slaves wouldn’t know that. May God rest his soul,” Harriet Tubman said.

  Samuel wanted to tell her that John Brown had survived the botched raid, that the first news reports were wrong. In the article, the writer claimed there were hundreds of abolitionists involved. There were not. By the second day, Samuel recalled reading that the press coverage was accurate. Samuel saw a similarity to cable news. The newspapers, wanting to beat the competition, published as quickly as they could, not spending the time to do some fact checking. Boy, if that wasn’t like cable news, Samuel thought.

  *

  In the Whites Only railroad car, Heather had a seat to herself until a group of men entered the train at the Dover station. Carl Bridenbaugh still floated above her as a middle-aged corpulent man, smelling of nicotine, plopped his wide fanny into the seat neat next to Heather.

  He smelled so bad that Heather had a gag reflex, wondering how did women in the antebellum years put up with such foul-smelling men? The man reached across Heather to open the window, not asking if Heather minded.

  “I need some air, missy,” he said.

  Heather saw the man looking at her left hand. He’s checking to see if I am married! she thought. What a slob! A real male chauvinist pig.

  “Please close the window, sir,” Heather pleaded.

  The man lit a cigar and puffed away. “Fresh air is good for you, missy,” he said with a smile. “Are you traveling without father or your brother?”

  “So, what of it?”

  “Well, now, missy, it isn’t safe for a young woman to travel by herself.”

  Just as he completed saying that, a hot cinder blew in through the window. It was a common occurrence of the wood burning engines and the person nearest the window was nearly always the victim of a
burning ember.

  Heather bristled. She did not tolerate sexual harassment, but this was 1859. Men wouldn’t have a clue what the term “sexual harassment” meant. Heather whispered, “Professor Bridenbaugh can you help me with this creep?”

  “Certainly,” Bridenbaugh replied. Only Heather could hear him. “I will do a bit of Washington Irving for the fellow.”

  Suddenly, Bridenbaugh animated for the man sitting next to Heather. He stood in the aisle of the train. But he had conjured up the image of the Headless Horseman. Holding his head in one hand, with his other hand he tapped the reprobate’s shoulder and said, calmly from his severed head, “You have my seat.”

  The man was about to reply, “so what,” when he saw the apparition holding its own head, and that head speaking to him.

  A look of terror came over his face and he sprang from his seat and sheepishly moved to the other end of the car, looking behind once more as the spirit took the seat on the train next to Heather. The girl seemed to be communicating with the spirit, he realized. Was she a witch?

  He found another seat and was too frightened to look back at Heather.

  “Brilliant, professor, brilliant,” Heather commented in a whisper.

  “It was, wasn’t it? I have always been a fan of Washington Irving’s Sleepy Hollow stories, Heather,” Bridenbaugh said.

  “Can you float back to the Colored car and check on Samuel and Mrs. Tubman, professor?” Heather asked.

  “Your wish is my command,” he replied, bowing.

  Samuel saw Professor Bridenbaugh as he floated into their car. He wondered if something had happened to Heather and a chill went up through his body and he felt his heart rate rise.

  Bridenbaugh, sensing the young man’s anxiety, said. “Nothing to be concerned about, Samuel. Heather just wanted me to check on you.”

  “That’s nice,” Samuel said aloud, interrupting Mrs. Tubman who had been talking to him having just said, “Slavery is the next thing to hell.”

  “’That’s nice?’” Mrs. Tubman said, a bit of shock on her face. “I said slavery is the next thing to hell and you say, ‘that’s nice’?”

  “I’m sorry I was daydreaming, Mrs. Tubman,” Samuel apologized.

  Harriet Tubman smiled in recognition. “Were you thinking about the little white girl, Samuel?” she asked.

  Samuel was not about to say that he was talking with a ghost, even though he sensed that Mrs. Tubman might also talk with spirits. It was more convenient for him to lie, and so he replied to her with a sheepish bob of his head.

  Mrs. Tubman returned to her comments on slavery and on her escape to freedom, explaining her decision to become a fugitive. “I had reasoned this out in my mind; there was one of two things I had a right to, liberty, or death; if I could not have one, I would have the other; for no man should take me alive; I should fight for my liberty as long as my strength lasted, and when the time came for me to go, the Lord would let them take me,” Harriet said.

  “So, you were willing to risk your life for liberty then?” Samuel asked.

  “Yes, there was no one to welcome me to the land of freedom in Philadelphia. I was a stranger in a strange land; and my home, after all, was down in Maryland, because my father, my mother, my brothers, and sisters, and friends were there. But I was free, and they should be free. I decided that after I adjusted to the North I would return to liberate my family. You see, they deserved freedom as well.”

  “And so that is how you became a conductor on the Underground Railroad?” Samuel asked.

  “Yes, I wanted to save my family and my friends. My sister Rachel and her two little children are the last of my relatives in slavery,” she said, adding, “This is my last mission…I hope.”

  “You ever think of rescuing slaves in Virginia or North Carolina?”

  “Never. I go back to the area I know, the people I know. To do otherwise, would risk capture. “I pray to God to make me strong and able to fight, and that's what I've always prayed for ever since I first escaped."

  “I see,” said Samuel.

  “You know, Samuel, we have had to use paregorics on the little ones, so they won’t cry out in the night. One baby crying can threaten a whole group. Even in this rescue, we will be chased by slave catchers and will not be able to use the train to Philadelphia. We will have to travel across country from station depot to depot on the Underground Railroad. We will travel at night and hide during the day. Delaware has a well-developed series of stations on the railroad and we will go from one to the next. Those good people have already been notified by coded letter. We will be expected and welcomed. Most of the station masters are white people. Quakers like you many of them. Some are free black men and women, but it is much more dangerous for them…”

  A white man in a railroad cap, opened the door briefly to shout, “Seaford next. Seaford, Delaware,” before shutting the door and returning to the Whites Only railcar.

  “That’s our stop,” Mrs. Tubman said, gathering up her satchel and other things and patting her dress to make sure that her pistol was still in place.

  *

  Heather stood on the train platform waiting for Samuel and Mrs. Tubman as well as the floating ghost of the dead historian Carl Bridenbaugh. When she looked at Harriet, she thought back to the girl she had met named Margaret; she was so light skinned. Was Margaret biracial? The result of an affair or possibly a rape by a white master? It wouldn’t surprise Heather, considering how many illegitimate children Thomas Jefferson had sired with Sally Hemings. Was Margaret really Harriet’s child and was that the reason her husband John didn’t follow her to the North? John Tubman was a free man. He could have joined his wife. Instead, he chose another woman. Men! thought Heather, until she saw Samuel, and her enmity for the opposite sex vanished in the glance. Samuel was different.

  Heather wanted to hug Samuel, so glad was she to see him again after the long train ride, but as she neared him, Samuel, as if anticipating her gesture, shook his head, whispering, “Don’t hug me, Heather.”

  Harriet Tubman’s face was puzzled. She sensed that there was something between the white girl and the black boy and that could be dangerous for the mission. Mrs. Tubman leaned over and said to both time travelers, “You must not show affection to each other. It could be the end of us. Now, Heather, you lead the way down the road. But first, we need to go to the general store over there and buy winter coats for the journey,” she said. “Heather, that is one of the things the money is for. It will get cold at night. We are going the rest of the way to Cambridge, Maryland, by foot.”

  When they were outside of Seaford, Delaware, walking on the road to Cambridge, Harriet Tubman felt comfortable enough to talk to the 21st century time travelers in a normal voice.

  “If anyone comes down the road, Heather, you immediately walk in front of us. I will follow, and Samuel will follow me. I am playing the part of your maid, after all. We are going to stop at a small house where a freeman lives. His house is a few miles from the plantation, and he will take our message to my sister,” Harriet Tubman said. “I won’t tell you the man’s name because if we are caught my friend may suffer the severest punishment. Freedmen who help runaway slaves are burned to death,” she said. “He is taking a tremendous risk, but he works part-time on the plantation as do some other freedmen. One of the station masters has informed him that we are coming.”

  *

  The trio walked for several miles and it was late in the evening when they arrived at the property of the free black man. A silhouette sat on the front porch and Samuel watched as the outline of a man lit a corncob pipe with a match, which momentarily revealed the wizened face of an old black man.

  Softly, Mrs. Tubman began to sing a Negro spiritual, Go Down Moses. “Go down Moses, way down in Egypt land. Tell all Pharaohs to let my People go.”

  There was no response. A blanket of silence covered the night.

  “Now what?” Samuel asked.

  “We wait.”

  Wait
for what? Samuel wondered.

  Suddenly the silhouette on the porch put down its corncob pipe and a rich, beautiful baritone voice replied, “When Israel was in Egypt land. Let my people go. Opposed so hard they couldn’t stand. Let my people go!”

  Samuel remembered reading that Harriet Tubman used Go Down Moses as a signal while on a rescue mission. He watched silently as Harriet Tubman walked ahead and embraced the silhouette on the front porch. She seemed so tiny next to the large man. Then she turned around and called to her two companions to join her.

  As Professor Bridenbaugh floated above their heads, Samuel and Heather joined their mentor and the entire group entered the one-room cabin and sat at the four chairs that surrounded a small dining table. The man, who was nearly as tall as Samuel, but far ahead of the boy in muscularity, lit an oil lamp on the table. Mrs. Tubman introduced the man as Mr. Smith, which Samuel assumed was a code name. In turn she introduced him to Samuel and Heather, adding, “they are Quakers. Samuel is a free man. And I met Heather in Philadelphia. They are here to help me. How is my sister?”

  A look of sorrow overcame the old man’s face, as if his visage was a harbinger of what he was about to say. Samuel saw concern cross Mrs. Tubman’s face.

  “Rachel passed, Minty,” the man said, using Harriet Tubman’s childhood nickname. “They say it was typhus.”

  Harriet Tubman shook her head sorrowfully. A lone tear ran down the side of her face, but she regrouped. “She is in a better place,” the abolitionist said with conviction. “What about her two children?”

  “Sold,” the man replied.

  That news caused Harriet Tubman’s icy veneer to crack. Tears ran down both sides of her face. “How long ago?”

  “A few days. There was no time to write to you. I am so sorry, Minty.”

  “Have we come this far for nothing?”