Forbidden Fruit (3 page)

That’s when Smith’s old hunting dog demonstrated how deep its loyalty and love went.

Three bloodhounds surrounded Smith, who had armed himself with a heavy club. His dog
seized one of the hounds by the neck and held on, forcing the other dogs into the
fight. Smith battered two of the hounds with his club, and the other one managed to
escape. Then Smith and his dog—two old and fast friends—continued north to the Ohio
border, guided by the North Star, the brightest star near the Big Dipper and a compass
for so many other runaways. He stumbled upon a stream and roamed up and down it, finally
noticing a large steamboat. That’s when he realized he had found the Ohio River. It
was not as broad as it became in modern times when it was widened to create channels
that would accommodate big ships. In the mid-nineteenth century, its banks sometimes
stretched on for miles, untouched by any trace or whisper of human life.

Because it bordered the slave states of Kentucky and that part of old Virginia that
is now West Virginia, the Ohio River became a major highway for escaping slaves, the
amen at the end of a fugitive’s prayer. After Smith found a skiff tied to a tree,
he ferried across the river, leaving his dog behind. But the dog leaped into the stream
and crossed it, too, reaching the Ohio shore before Smith. After landing in Ohio,
Smith stepped into a forest and met an old man chopping poles. He was an abolitionist
who worked for the Underground Railroad. He directed Smith to a friend about thirty
miles away, and that friend hired Smith for about five years.

Yet, for fugitives like Smith, Ohio could be both the best and worst of places: a
free state containing many supporters of the South. The Northwest Ordinance of 1787
had declared that the whole Northwest Territory, including Ohio, would be composed
of free states. However, Ohio, at its first constitutional convention in 1802, missed
becoming a slave state by a single vote. Harriet Beecher Stowe lived in Cincinnati
and her home served as a station on the Underground Railroad, yet mob violence against
blacks erupted again and again in Cincinnati, particularly in August 1829 and September
1841. The first of Ohio’s Black Laws, which were passed in 1804, required that all
blacks register for a certificate of freedom at a cost of twelve and a half cents
for each name. In 1807, blacks settling in Ohio were required to post bonds of five
hundred dollars and could not testify in any court case involving whites. As late
as 1831, Ohio blacks could not serve in the militia or on juries, or attend public
school.

Still, many Ohioans would have reached out to someone like James Smith. Augustus West,
an escaped Virginia slave, had arrived in the state in 1837. To raise money for a
farm, he and a white abolitionist named Alexander Beaty concocted a bold plan: Beaty
sold West three times to Southern slave owners, each time helping him escape and splitting
the profits with him. West then purchased land in Fayette County, Ohio, where he built
his home near a road known as Abolition Lane. Abolitionists and freed slaves lived
along that road. In Albany, John Brown—not the famous one—hid runaways under his general
store. Slavery supporters murdered two sons of Thomas and Jemima Woodson, in the all-black
community of Berlin Cross Roads, because the two men worked for the Underground Railroad.
James and Sophia Clemens, who lived in one of Ohio’s earliest black settlements, Longtown
in Darke County, were conductors on the Railroad. David Adams, a black barber in Findlay,
hid and transported runaways, too. So did John Parker of Ripley, a former slave who
had walked shackled with four hundred other slaves from Richmond to Alabama. Once
free, he became famous for risky ventures, such as returning to snatch the baby of
a slave couple from the arms of the baby girl’s sleeping master after already rescuing
the baby’s parents. He reportedly helped free more than one thousand slaves. The Ripley
home of the Reverend John Rankin also became the doorway to freedom for at least four
thousand fugitives who crossed the Ohio River. Fugitives who arrived in Cleveland
from Ripley often showed up with written messages for a free black man named Bynum
Hunt, who found short-term jobs for them around the docks and then put them on a Detroit-bound
steamboat.

During five years of farming in Ohio, Smith preached among blacks in the area and
probably questioned every Virginian he met about the wife and children he’d last seen
in Henrico County, Virginia. He also buried his best friend, his devoted dog. By then,
black churches with walls and pulpits and preachers existed, the first one being organized
in 1773 in Aiken County, South Carolina, as the Silver Bluff Baptist Church by the
Reverend George Lisle. Like James Smith, Lisle began his life as a Virginia slave.
Finally, after five years in one spot, Smith moved to Huron County, Ohio, in the state’s
mid-section, a part of what was known as Sufferers Land or Fire Lands. Either name
fit. After the British destroyed coastal towns in Connecticut during the Revolutionary
War, the state of Connecticut promised to compensate everyone whose land had been
burned. All it could offer them were land grants to some five hundred thousand acres
on the western part of its reserve, land that ultimately became Ohio. Chopped up into
townships and sections, the Fire Lands drew settlers from Connecticut and other New
England states.

Huron County was part flatlands and part winding hills, the natural home of tall prairie
grass, oak-hickory savannah, elm, ash, beech and maple forests, marsh wetlands dotted
with wildflowers and farms. People raised corn and soybeans, hay, wheat and oats,
dairy cows and beef cattle, horses and pigs and, now and then, a little antislavery
hell. When two men showed up in Savannah, Ohio, looking for a runaway slave, Scottish-born
William Sutherland blackened his face and hid himself in a wagon loaded with hay;
he poked his head out of the hay so the two men would spot him and follow the wagon.
Meanwhile, the real fugitive escaped.

James Smith bought a small farm in Huron County and toiled on it for about seven years,
working fertile land wreathed in low, deep animal smells. Ohio had an active rumor
mill, the “grapevine telegraph,” which circulated information about slaves and slave
catchers through churches and homes, talk and letters. There is no evidence during
this period that Smith ever picked up his wife’s trail, but his faith that he would
see her again must have remained strong—he never remarried. Then, in the fall of 1850,
a new Fugitive Slave Act was passed, making it a crime for bystanders to refuse to
help slave catchers and creating a federal system for recapturing runaways anyplace
and at any time. Through the rumor mill, James Smith learned that he was a man with
a warrant out for his arrest. That meant that if he did not flee to Canada, where
slavery officially ended in August 1834, authorities could seize him anywhere in America
and drag him back to Virginia, the source of all his troubles.

He sold his property and moved on to Canada as so many thousands before him had done.
He had plenty of company. Fugitives showed up daily in the so-called Promised Land,
some traveling alone like Smith and others in groups. Henry Bibb wrote about a group
that arrived in Canada West (the southern part of the modern-day province of Ontario)
in December 1851 and included “a mother with six children and three men. The next
day there came four men, the next day two men arrived and then one came alone.” One
of the men talked about having had “a warm combat by the way with two slave catchers
in which he found it necessary to throw a handful of sand in the eyes of one of them,”
Bibb added.

However, Canada, as newcomers like Smith soon discovered, was sometimes both antislavery
and antiblack, swirling with prejudices such as those expressed in two letters appearing
in the
Amherstburg Courier
on December 7, 1850. The letter writers ranted about black inferiority and charged
that blacks didn’t want to work. Still, in nineteenth-century Canada, blacks enjoyed
legal freedom, fair treatment in courts, an absence of racial violence and the security
of knowing the government wouldn’t ship them back to the United States. As a result,
by the middle of the nineteenth century, small black settlements and black enclaves
inside larger cities dotted the Canadian landscape, giving James Smith a range of
places to put down roots or search for Fanny.

The most famous black enclave was the nine-thousand-acre Elgin Settlement in Kent
County, which includes the present-day village of North Buxton. It was organized in
1849 by the Reverend William King of Louisiana and fifteen of his former slaves. King
raised the money to purchase land in what was then Raleigh Township and sold the settlers
fifty-acre lots for $125—payable over a ten-year period at 6 percent interest. They
became the nucleus of a colony of self-sufficient black American fugitives who swore
off liquor, soaked up Greek and Latin, planted flower gardens, provided their own
tools and raised corn, wheat, tobacco, hemp, maple sugar, cows, sheep and hogs. They
also put up picket fences and built homes set back at least thirty-three feet from
the road and containing at least four rooms. Tiger lilies were among their favorite
plants, perhaps because they, like these black settlers, loved the full sun and could
flourish in almost any soil.

The Dawn Settlement near Dresden straddled the Sydenham River and included about 623
acres of rich fertile land, heavy timber and unbroken forests. In the early 1840s,
the Reverend Josiah Henson—a fugitive slave and the model for novelist Harriet BeecherStowe’s
Uncle Tom—purchased land there with the help of abolitionists. In 1842, Henson and
white abolitionist Hiram Wilson established Dawn. It included a school, a sawmill,
a brickyard, a rope factory, black walnut orchards and a gristmill. Black communities
also sprang up in Sandwich, which organized a Union Sabbath School by February 1851;
Windsor, Amherstburg, London, the Queen’s Bush, Brantford, Wilberforce (now Lucan),
founded in 1829–1830 by blacks from Cincinnati as a New Jerusalem; along the Niagara
Peninsula at St. Catharine’s, Niagara Falls, Newark (Niagara-on-the-Lake) and Fort
Erie; Hamilton and Toronto; and the northern perimeter of Simcoe and Grey Counties,
especially in Oro, Collingwood and Owen Sound.

While traveling around the country, James Smith met many fugitive slaves. He told
them where he came from and how he had been separated from his wife for praying. One
day, he met a man who changed his life. He told Smith about a woman living in Sandwich,
now a part of Windsor. This woman, Smith learned, had come from his home near Richmond
and had belonged once to a man with the same name as Smith’s former owner.

The next day, Smith journeyed to the house in Sandwich where he had been told the
woman lived. By 1855, Sandwich had twenty-two black refugee families, according to
historian Benjamin Drew. Henry Bibb’s wife, Mary, taught twenty-five students in her
home. However, James Smith wasn’t worried about the size of Sandwich’s black population,
the extent of its services or even how often slave catchers slipped across the Detroit
River to the river-bordering community. His eyes were on the woman at the house, the
woman whose face looked like his wife’s. He offered her his hand and called her by
her old Virginia name.

“Oh, is this my beloved husband whom I never again expected to see?” she answered.

According to Bibb, “her eyes sparkled and flashed like strokes of lightning upon his
furrowed cheeks and wrinkled brow.”

They embraced, no doubt remembering the last time they’d seen each other—the day Fanny
had tried to console him but had collapsed in tears, the day James had been led off
to Georgia in chains for the crime of praying too much. Not only had they spent most
of their adult lives apart; their children had been scattered, sold here and there,
lost. Oh, they had plenty of reasons to weep. But in 1847, Fanny had managed to escape
from Kentucky and had lived in Canada some three years. Once again, James Smith’s
prayers had been answered.

Starting in the eighteenth century, black churches sprang up all over the country,
and both freedmen and slave ministers built reputations as powerful preachers. New
York’s Abyssinian Baptist Church was founded in 1808 after four sailors from Abyssinia,
Ethiopia’s former name, walked out of a Baptist church that seated them in a slave
loft. After a preacher from Boston joined them, they pooled their resources and set
up a church. Black churches took shape in every state, including Virginia, Georgia,
Kentucky, Massachusetts, New York, Philadelphia and Michigan. In Philadelphia, Richard
Allen founded the African Methodist Episcopal Church in what had been a mason’s stable.
In Richmond, Virginia, the Reverend John Jasper was baptized in 1830 and preached
a funeral that same day that made him famous. He had taught himself to read and write,
preached in Southern slave dialect and conducted all-day camp meetings, baptizing
as many as three hundred people in four hours. After the Civil War, the United States
Freedman’s Bureau also authorized Mr. Jasper to legalize slave marriages.

In 1851, runaway slaves built Sandwich First Baptist Church, a redbrick church, in
Ontario, Canada. According to stories accepted by some historians and disputed by
others, a sentry stood outside the door during services, watching out for slave catchers
who could easily cross the river to Sandwich. When slave catchers showed up, the minister
would stop the singing on a signal from the sentry and begin a solo: “There is a stranger
in this house.” Then the runaways in the congregation would stand up and run to the
stairs leading to the pulpit, moving aside a carpet square covering a trapdoor and
descending into a tunnel leading to the river.