Across a Border (eBook)

SEPTEMBER 1851

It wasn’t just a desperate wish anymore: Tatum found himself believing that they were going to make it.

After weeks of running and hiding; sleeping fitfully in bug-ridden farm fields during sweltering afternoons while one of them kept watch from beneath a shady tree, and then trying to keep silent while wading along along banks of cold rivers and streams at night, Tatum and his companions had finally reached the mouth of the Beaver River, just a night’s walk inside Pennsylvania’s western border.

We truly gon’ get there! Tatum marveled. Four of us run away from Barker Dawson, and now all four of us come here - almost safe.

Tatum’s wife Zeeb, her sister Bara, and Bara’s husband, Polly, all swore up and down that they owed their good fortune to some face in the clouds that they called Jesus Christ, but Tatum knew better. The members of their party were beneficiaries of cunning and stealth, lots of luck, and nothing more. To him, the whole idea of some white devils’ god looking out for them while they ran away from the very slaver whose own wife tried to make believers out of them was just foolish. The little Haitian runaway had kept his jaw set and his back turned whenever his companions took to whispering their prayers and singsongs, but Tatum could sense that Zeeb was torn.

He was certain that beneath her thin veneer of recently-painted-on Christian faith, Zeeb knew the truth: this white Jesus lived inside a picture frame on Missa Dawson’s wall and cared nothing for fugitive slaves.

Not Polly, though. Polly called himself Man-of-God and he pronounced the title as if it was something that could make the dogs lose their scent and cause buckshot from white mens’ rifles to scatter harmlessly all around them.

“Jesus delivered us here,” Polly uttered hoarsely in his too-loud whisper. “Praise Jesus!”

The women murmured their assent to his statement, but Tatum remained facing away from them. He stood motionless and silent, gazing beyond the mouth of the river they’d been working to reach since first hearing of it over a week earlier. Just to the east of where the Beaver River flowed into the much larger Ohio, Tatum could sense - more than see - the thin band of indigo forming on the horizon.

“We need find some place fo’ bed down,” he murmured.

He would have liked nothing more than to finish their mission now, but Tatum and his companions had been warned: although safety lay just four miles up the Beaver River in the industrial town of New Brighton, access to the Quaker families there who would help them required careful navigation past the communities of Bridgewater (where they now stood) and Fairport (where they’d been instructed to cross over to). Both communities, they were warned, were frequented by bounty hunters. Many residents of both little towns were rumored to be informants eager to catch fugitive slaves and hold them for ransom. Tatum could smell a fire still smoldering just up the promontory from where they stood on the south side of the smaller river. He’d also heard a couple of dogs barking farther inland; even though he was certain that they were too far away to be seen or heard - and, with their feet safely in the cold water, to be tracked - they were also in closer proximity to a larger concentration of white civilization than they had been at any previous time since leaving the hell of Dawson’s ramshackle plantation. This was not the time to become reckless.

Their party had crossed the Ohio River two weeks earlier, making landfall into the mostly slavery-free state of Ohio. They first came ashore at Grape Island, an outcropping of rich river silt swarming with tangled vines thicker than a man’s ankle, just upriver from Marietta. A kindly white farmer and his wife were the sole inhabitants of the two-acre island. The couple put Tatum and his relatives up for two nights, feeding them and plying them with homemade wine, providing them with shelter and rest, and patching up their wounds. Zeeb and Bara both had multiple infected insect bites; one of Polly’s eyes was swollen nearly shut as a result of a collision with a mulberry branch; and all three suffered from issues with their feet. Traveling barefoot, even Tatum had cuts and bruises and two of Bara’s toes were swollen and apparently broken. Aside from his feet, Tatum was the only one among them to make the weeks-long flight from Welch, Virginia, mostly unscathed.

The couple on Grape Island confirmed the existence of what up until then had only been a hopeful rumor: there was, in fact, something that was now being referred to as an Underground Railroad - a network of abolitionists who could assist fugitive slaves in getting all the way to Lake Erie, over four hundred miles to the north from where they had escaped, and then across the water into Canada and true freedom.

The way this man told it, even though they were barely halfway through their journey, they were almost as good as there now that they’d reached Ohio - so long as they remained cautious. There was an even bigger catch, though: the customary route due north from where they now rested had become congested with refugees. Almost all of the Underground Railroad stops along the canals and footpaths of Ohio’s Western Reserve featured birds in cages on their front porches, signaling that the dwellings were already occupied by fugitives.

The man told them of his cousin, a German emigrant who had settled in the village of Fairport, Pennsylvania, and earned his living mining for clay and firing bricks. The cousin had visited Grape Island just a few weeks earlier spreading word of an alternate route on the Freedom Trail that ran to the northeast through Pennsylvania. He said that New Brighton, a town settled by Quaker industrialists, was a welcoming haven for escaped slaves. The whole community there had become part of a network who would smuggle them in canal boats all the way north to the Great Lakes. It was not lost on Polly and the women that these Quakers were devout followers of Christianity.

“Reinhold said iffin’ we ever come across such as youns, we was to send you his way,” said the man. “He says there’s too many pryin’ eyes in his town for him to put anyone up, but iffin’ youns kin find the straw bin at his brickyard, ye’s welcome to lay out a day there before the final leg of your trip.”

Along with that invitation came specific instructions for precisely locating a safe house. They were told that they would cross countless creeks and runs feeding the Ohio River from the north, but the travelers were instructed to gauge their progress by three larger tributaries in Ohio: Sunfish Creek at Clarington on what should transpire to be the fourth night of their trek; Short Creek just beyond Martin’s Ferry on the seventh night, and; Yellow Creek near Wellsville on their ninth. Zeeb had learned to count all the way into four figures, so she was charged with the responsibility of knowing when they reached Little Beaver Creek, which they would cross on the tenth night. That would mark their passage into Pennsylvania.

From there, if they pressed hard, it would be just one more night’s journey to the Beaver River.

“Ye’ll know it when ye sees it,” the man told them. “Reiny says it’s a splendid little river, full of fish and otters and muskrats, but he says don’t dawdle there. Get across to the north bank any way youns can under cover of darkness, and then skedaddle right past town ‘til you get to Fosburg Run. He says ye’ll know it by its waterfall. Climb right up there, walk another quarter mile or so and ye’ll see his brickyard. Right tidy little place from the sound of it.

“Ye can spend a day sleepin’ in his hay crib if ye like, but seems to me ye’ll do better to keep the North Star over yer right shoulder and press on overland. In about a mile, ye’ll come to McKinley Run: more waterfalls and down over the hill - practically to the exact same place where ye crossed the Beaver River in the first place, but just a mile up. Reinhold says it makes all the difference in the world, though; he says that little section of riverbank that you’ll get to bypass by takin’ all this trouble is a godforsaken swamp called Boalsville. Not much more than a few shacks and a boatyard, but there’s also a tavern there what’s always got a bountyman or two put up. The Quakers ye all are seekin’ out ain’t afraid to do whatever they thinks is right, but they only bear their arms in their own town. The shitheels who want to capture you and drag ye back to your Masters stay holed up in Boalsville. Reiny says they’s another tavern just alike ‘cross the river in a place called Sharon - just above Bridgewater - so you don’t dare risk tryin’ to go upriver that way, neither. You’ll be wise to trouble yerselves by takin’ his overland route. It might cost youns an extry few hours, but it won’t cost ye yer freedom, ayuh!”

The grizzled man stopped talking and stared at the four of them. Beside him, his wife removed the pipe from between her pursed lips, spat, and then spoke for the first time.

“What Reiny actually said,’’ she rasped, glaring at her husband, “was, ‘The devil lives in Boalsville, and his brother’s acrosst the river in Sharon.” The stem of her pipe went back between her few remaining teeth, and she resumed her silence as she stared off across her vineyards

“I reckon maybe them was his precise words,” chuckled the man. There was a twinkle in his eye as he fondly regarded the stoic,...