Forbidden Fruit (5 page)

Finally, the steamer reached Pier 3, south, the Philadelphia wharf where Ericsson
ships docked. After crewmen carried the chest off the boat, it was delivered to a
house on Barley Street occupied by friends of William Adams’s mother. The chest and
its occupants then moved to the home of William Still, who would write about Lear’s
escape and hundreds of similar adventures in his book
The Underground Railroad.
Finally, Lear Green and Mrs. Adams journeyed on to Elmira, New York, a place allegedly
named for a young girl whose father loudly called her name every day. Many runaway
slaves called Elmira’s name, too.

Elmira was the place where Lear expected to find William Adams waiting for her with
a preacher and promises of devotion. It also was the last Underground Railroad stop
between Philadelphia and St. Catharine’s, Ontario. One historian has estimated that
one thousand fugitives passed through Elmira between 1840 and 1860.

The geography of the area is the easiest thing to describe. Elmira just happened to
sit smack in the middle of several river valleys. Once the Chemung Canal connecting
the Chemung River and Seneca Lake was completed in 1833 and railroad lines in 1850,
the city had major connections with much of New York and Pennsylvania. The Elmira
route to freedom started in Philadelphia and ran through Harrisburg, Williamsport,
Canton, Alba, Elmira and then to St. Catharine’s. Some fugitives hiding among the
cargo on boats and in railroad baggage cars continued to Canada and others chose to
stay in Elmira. Between 1840 and 1850, the city’s black population jumped from 60
to 215.

Because some of Elmira’s older homes had been built with twelve- and fourteen-inch
boards or slabs, the black neighborhood in the center of town became known as Slabtown.
Bounded on the north by the Lackawanna Railroad, on the east by Lake Street, on the
south by Clinton and on the west by the Chemung Canal, the neighborhood had its own
special small-town flavor and feel. In 1860, 243 free blacks lived there, according
to Wilson’s Elmira Directory, most of them sharing bare single-family homes. However,
an observer emphasized that “in its heyday, it could not in any sense be called a
slum.” Slabtown included a sprinkling of black-owned grocery stores, churches, a meat
market and a tiny candy store. Antislavery lectures and other meetings often took
place in grocery stores and other public buildings. In 1848, famed abolitionist Frederick
Douglass spoke in Elmira, and the Reverend Tabbs Gross, a black minister and the editor
and publisher of the
Arkansas Freeman
newspaper, came to the area in 1855.

In the 1840s and 1850s, Slabtown’s main streets were Dickinson, Benjamin and Baldwin.
According to Wilson’s Elmira Directory for 1860, a “colored” laborer named William
Adams lived in a house on Baldwin at the corner of Third. The 1861–1862 directory
shows a “colored” William Adams boarding at 186 Water Street. After their marriage,
Lear Green and William Adams apparently lived right in the thumping, pulsing, laughing,
story-sharing, neighbor-helping heart of Slabtown, the kind of community that television,
cars, fast food and air-conditioning has all but wiped out. It was a neighborhood
where people entertained each other. A neighborhood where people ate food just plucked
from their gardens and still tangy with the smell of life. A neighborhood where, in
hot weather, a breeze from the river provided the only air-conditioning. A neighborhood
where, in winter, people slept under handmade quilts so heavy they pinned you in place.
After dark, Slabtown residents, including former slaves like Lear Green and William
Adams, sat on their porches, spinning stories from the tangled threads of memories.

Did Lear Green ever tell her neighbors about her escape from Baltimore in a sailor’s
chest? Did William Adams, a man who didn’t always guard his tongue, talk about how
he persuaded Lear to follow him to Elmira and become his wife? Or did they remain
silent for fear someone might show up and try to collect the reward James Noble had
offered for Lear Green’s return? They must have chosen silence: neither Lear nor William
appears in any histories about old Slabtown. Their neighbors do, though. Oh, how they
do.

Mr. and Mrs. Jeremiah George, former slaves, would sit with their neighbors at dusk
and tell stories about the old days, some tales triggering tears and others sparking
laughter.

“More than half of Mister George’s anecdotes were really humorous,” one man reminisced
in the
Chemung Historical Journal,
“and the laughter of Mr. and Mrs. George themselves was loudest and rang out up and
down Dickinson St., a block east or west of Baldwin. His laughs graduated from chuckles
into full fledged belly laughs and we children went to bed listening to these happy
people.”

Another runaway slave who adopted Elmira as his home was a man known as “Uncle John”
Smith, who had escaped from a Maryland plantation with five other men and found work
with prominent families in the city. He died in 1898 at around one hundred years of
age after being attacked and bitten by a vicious dog. Meanwhile, many parents frightened
their youngsters to bed by hinting that “Wild Bill” Jackson was on the loose. His
claim to fame was a habit of earning drinks on Saturday night by eating ground glass,
an activity some people apparently found amusing.

“Eventually, he died of his habits,” according to an article in the
Chemung Historical Journal,
“and about everyone in Slabtown attended his funeral. He had never harmed anyone
but himself.”

However, Lear Green and William Adams’s chosen hometown was no untainted Eden free
of snakes and sinful urges: like other Northern communities, it had racial discrimination
and harassment and limited educational opportunities for blacks. Yet its residents
included powerful abolitionists like Jervis Langdon, a wealthy businessman who made
his fortune in lumber and coal and spent some of it helping escaped slaves. In December
1858, a year after Lear Green’s arrival, a near riot broke out in Elmira as residents
tried to prevent an old slave from voluntarily returning to his former master. The
man, who had escaped through the Underground, had written asking his owner, John W.
Mills, to come to Canada and get him and take him back home. When the man and his
master stopped in Elmira on their way back to Calvert County, Maryland, an armed crowd
surrounded the pair and tried to rescue the old slave, but the sheriff drove them
back. The slave and his master got away only by running for and boarding a train that
took them south.

Yet the main reason Lear Green and William Adams would have felt at home in Elmira
was because of a black gravedigger named John Walter Jones. He became such a towering
figure in the town’s history that a museum bearing his name was taking shape in 2003.
In 1844, John W. Jones and four other slaves escaped together from a plantation in
Leesburg, Virginia. They stuffed their pockets with all the food they could, and one
of them carried a pistol and a knife. They walked nearly three hundred miles, with
Jones and his four companions fighting off slave hunters in Maryland. In Elmira, Jones
first worked as a gardener and laborer and later became sexton of the First Baptist
Church. He moved into the yellow house near the church, a house that would shelter
hundreds of fugitive slaves in the decade before the Civil War. As the Underground
Railroad agent at the Elmira station, he helped more than eight hundred other slaves
escape. His allies included a bank president, a college founder, several lumber dealers
and a hardware merchant. In 1864–1865, John Jones became a legend for burying and
recording personal information about nearly three thousand Confederate soldiers who
died in the Elmira Prison Camp, known as the death camp of the North. It was ironic
that those dead who had enlisted in the Confederate army to preserve slavery should
have been buried by a man who had escaped from slavery and become a symbol of what
a free black man could do.

As they had planned, Lear Green and William Adams married in Elmira, but they never
moved on to Canada. Something about Elmira—Slabtown’s warmth or the presence of William’s
mother—kept them there. Unfortunately, the happiness Lear purchased with eighteen
hours inside a sailor’s chest lasted for only a few green summers before death stole
it. After only three years in Elmira, surrounded by story-telling neighbors with rich
memories and welcoming front porches, Lear Green Adams died. At around the same time,
her mother-in-law passed away, too. The causes of their deaths aren’t known, but they
passed away at a time when people died from everything from cholera to colds. Lear
and William never had time to move from the flash of first love to the steady flame
of a middle-aged fire. Yet some people can pack a lifetime worth of passion and pleasure
into a few years or even days. They can love so much that their memories become like
one of those heavy homemade patchwork quilts so popular in Elmira, something they
can reach for on chilly days and wrap around their souls. Maybe William Adams took
such a quilt of memories with him when he left Elmira. After 1863, his name disappeared
from Elmira street directories and he more than likely started over somewhere else.

Yet he is not likely to have forgotten the two women who loved him enough to board
a ship together one spring day and sail through dangerous waters. He never saw the
box that became his wife’s prison for eighteen hours. She left it in Philadelphia,
discarding it the way larvae shed worn-out skins so they can sprout wings. However,
Lear and William’s story is not just another Underground Railroad adventure or another
example of those who, wrote William Still, “purchased their liberty by downright bravery,
through perils the most hazardous.” The story is a warning, familiar yet always urgent,
to anyone who hesitates before plucking a handful of happiness and gulping it down.
Don’t just seize the day, Lear and William’s romance reminds us, seize the stormy
or sunlit moment: one steamy day in May might be all the summer you’ll see.

Baltimore contains no plaques or statues commemorating Lear Green’s courage, and the
butter depot from which she escaped closed its doors long ago. The space the old depot
once occupied has become 504 South Broadway between Eastern Avenue and Fleet Street.
In the spring of 2003, it housed a three-story nightclub with green shutters and a
Federal roof, a club flanked by shops selling edible underwear, homeopathic medicine,
video rentals, tarot cards and neon G-strings. The prostitutes so abundant in old
Fells Point might have felt at home. Yet in a neighborhood haunted by the ghosts of
famed orator Frederick Douglass, private shipowners authorized to plunder British
ships during the War of 1812 and speedy slave ships like the Baltimore clipper, the
Federal-roofed building on Broadway only adds more history, more romance. It is easy
to visualize Lear Green peering from her attic window at cobblestone streets or descending
narrow stairs to run an errand or being shipped from the same port where blacks left
the area going to Liberia. There are no monuments to her in Baltimore, or in Elmira,
either, but she lives and breathes in the pages of William Still’s
The Underground Railroad,
which contains a sketch of the girl he sheltered and aided on her journey. It shows
a pretty brown girl peering over the rim of a sailor’s chest, and the look on her
face tells her whole story, past, present and future: she seems to be asking if, after
the longest, steamiest and most uncomfortable day and night of her life, she now can
rise up from her box and grab some light and love.

D
anger was everywhere: it lurked inside the slave cabins shrouded by cedar trees, it
crept along wagon-rutted, red-clay Georgia roads and it lazed on the porches of plantations,
puffing cigars and gulping bourbon. Yet that did not stop two slaves named Ellen and
William Craft from slipping off, one by one, to the Macon train station on a December
morning in 1848. Ellen, according to an acquaintance, had “hardly a tinge of African
blood in her veins,” and the couple believed her creamy color would purchase their
tickets to freedom: Ellen would pass for an ailing white male planter traveling to
Philadelphia for medical treatment, and William would pose as the slave who cut up
her meat and warmed her flannels. However, when they reached the train station in
the predawn magnolia-perfumed darkness, they found danger waiting there, too.

Before the couple’s train could even pull out of the station, William’s employer—the
cabinetmaker who had hired him from his master—showed up. Suspicious about William’s
request for a pass to leave home during the Christmas holiday, he stomped through
the train searching for his apprentice. Fortunately, the cabinetmaker failed to see
past Ellen’s dignified cape and distinguished top hat and, just as fortunately, the
train left before the man spotted William, curled up in a corner in the black section.

A few minutes later, Ellen faced her first solo test of nerves. An old friend of her
master’s named Mr. Cray, a man she had known since childhood, sat down next to her.
He had just had dinner at her master’s house the night before. He kept hammering Ellen
with questions, and she kept pretending she couldn’t hear him. According to Ellen’s
memoirs, the man was so determined to be heard that he finally yelled, “It is a very
fine morning, sir!”

“Yes,” Ellen replied, refusing to say more.

She spent the rest of her journey to Savannah staring through the window, ignoring
the man and steeling herself for the other stops and challenges ahead, all of them
the price of keeping love.

Ellen had learned what losing love was like while she was enslaved by her first owner,
Major James Smith of Clinton, Georgia. There was always trouble at Smith’s dinner
parties. It was the sort of trouble that clung to the clothes of a whiskey-swilling
Georgia planter with two families, one slave, one free, living so close together they
could smell each other’s troubles and secrets. The trouble would start when one of
Smith’s guests mistook eleven-year-old Ellen for one of Smith’s white children. She
actually was his child by a house slave, Maria, a fact that had burned night and day
in the head of Smith’s wife, never letting her anger lose its head of steam. Every
time someone mistook Ellen for a white girl, Mrs. Smith would pound the child with
insults and then slap or punch her. However, in the spring of 1837, Mrs. Smith decided
it was time to do more than lash out at the face that made her fury bubble. She would
rid herself of this young slave who reminded everyone of her husband’s backroom betrayals.

She gave Ellen to her daughter, Eliza, as a present—a brown-eyed, silky-haired package—for
her April marriage to Dr. Robert Collins of Macon. Macon, with its Japanese cherry
trees and green fields of watermelons, was only some fifteen miles from Ellen’s birthplace,
Clinton, Georgia; however, at a time when traveling a few miles could take hours and
slaves couldn’t leave plantations without passes, fifteen miles might as well have
been one hundred and fifty. Dr. Collins thought he knew a great deal about managing
slaves. He even wrote an essay on the subject, advising that slave owners feed their
slaves good bacon and strong coffee, give them some space in which to spread out and
dress them neatly enough to instill pride. However, he showed the limits of his understanding
by insisting that most slaves are happier when punished for breaking rules and “look
upon their obligation to each other very lightly.”

This was certainly not true of Ellen. Separated from her mother, Ellen made a promise
that would one day spur mobs to roam the streets of Boston yelling, “Bloodhounds,”
and make Ellen so famous people would pay to see her. It was a promise that would
touch the lives of a U.S. president, the Queen of England, the widow of a famous English
poet and two frustrated Georgia bounty hunters. Yet it was a simple promise—she would
have no children while she was a slave. Ellen’s previous owner and alleged father,
Major Smith, later moved to Macon and became one of its first lawyers and one of the
five commissioners who laid out the town. This reunited Ellen with her mother, but
didn’t spur her to break her vow. She still wanted no babies who might wind up watering
cotton fields and auction blocks with their tears or grow up clinging to dwindling
memories of lost siblings and parents.

Sleeping on a pallet outside her mistress’s door, she tried to sink into the life
of a skilled seamstress and lady’s maid. By the 1840s, she was allowed to have her
own one-room cabin for storing sewing supplies. Compared to the lives of slaves who
labored on cotton, hemp or coastal rice plantations and who might be lashed until
they bled and then have brick dust or salt rubbed on their sores, Ellen’s life wasn’t
harsh. But a bubble of silent anger bounced around inside of her, ready to burst.
Then she met a slave cabinetmaker named William Craft, a tall, broad-backed, bass-voiced
man who would later defend himself against slave hunters with firearms and fury.

William enjoyed more independence than most slaves because his owner hired him out
to other employers in exchange for an annual fixed sum of two hundred dollars: he
could keep the rest of his earnings. However, he would later write that he had never
recovered from the anguish of watching members of his family standing on auction blocks,
sold off one by one along with kegs of brandy, bales of cotton and chairs. His fourteen-year-old
sister, he said, had “large, silent tears trickling down her cheeks” as she was carried
away. He also could not forget standing on a block himself at age sixteen and being
sold to Ira H. Taylor, a bank cashier who worked for Ellen’s owner.

William and Ellen fell in love but postponed marriage because of Ellen’s refusal to
bear enslaved children. Finally, in 1846, they asked their owners’ permission for
a slave “marriage” and settled into what, on the surface, looked like the routine
life of an enslaved couple. The Reverend Theodore Parker, a Boston abolitionist, would
later claim that Ellen had a baby who died while she was forced to leave the ailing
child alone and serve dinner to her owners; however, no historians support Parker’s
story. According to Ellen and William’s own account of their story, Ellen did not
become pregnant after her marriage, possibly because she used crude birth control
devices such as sponges or grapefruit halves. Some slave women induced miscarriages
with cotton root or cotton seed, though there is no evidence that Ellen did this.
Yet there is plenty of evidence that the Crafts spent much of their time hatching
escape plots and planning for the day they could raise a free family. William even
built a chest of drawers with a lock and hid his extra earnings so he could afford
train tickets and hotels. Finally, in 1848, as workers all over Europe rebelled against
their kings and Americans began streaming to California in search of gold, William
latched onto an idea he believed would open his own door to freedom. His wife, so
often mistaken for white, would pass for white.

Since no Southern white female would travel alone with a male slave, Ellen would have
to disguise herself as a white man. She would wear dark glasses to help hide her expressive
eyes and a muffler or wrappings to conceal her beardless chin and make her seem to
have a toothache. Illiterate and unable to sign hotel registers, Ellen decided she
should wear her right arm in a sling. The Crafts also agreed that Ellen should pretend
she was hard of hearing to avoid prolonged conversations with Southern planters. William
bought pieces of Ellen’s disguise in different places and at different times, including
a top hat and the handkerchiefs that would swaddle her chin. Ellen sewed a pair of
men’s trousers and hid them in her little cabin. Then Ellen got a pre-Christmas pass
from her mistress, allowing her to be away from the plantation for a few days. William
got a similar pass, a necessary thing because slave owners protected each other’s
property by asking for the passes or freedom papers of black people they saw walking
or wandering about.

The Crafts, of course, were not the first slaves or slave couple to run away in disguise.
Harriet Tubman plopped a bonnet on the head of a fleeing black man and led him to
freedom. The Reverend Calvin Fairbank dressed a girl as a boy, put her on a large
log, straddled the log behind her and paddled them both to safety with a piece of
board. Frederick Douglass told the story of a slave couple who escaped across the
Ohio River, the short, dark man wearing female clothing and posing as the slave of
his wife, who, like Ellen Craft, passed for white. The man was the slave of William
R. King, president pro tempore of the U.S. Senate and Democratic vice president-elect,
and the wife was the mulatto daughter of King’s brother. When Underground Railroad
conductor John Fairfield decided to help a band of mulattos escape from slavery in
Kentucky, he powdered their faces, plopped horsehair wigs on their heads and passed
them off as white. William Webb, a free black man from Virginia, was James Bond before
Agent 007 had even been imagined. He wore disguises and snooped and spied on slave
catchers, eavesdropping on them in taverns where they traded bourbon-soaked secrets.
In this way he managed to find out what they knew about slave escape routes and hiding
places. In countless other stories, fugitive males don horsehair wigs or widow’s veils
and fugitive women snip off their hair and slip into trousers.

Yet the Crafts’ story is different, in part because the couple traveled so far and
in part because people were entranced by the story of how Ellen Craft used her creativity
and intelligence as well as men’s clothes to transform herself. It is a psychological
drama in which an enslaved couple grows up before our eyes, bluffing, bargaining,
pleading, playacting and changing with each leg of their journey. It also is the story
of a couple who flee not only for freedom but for each other, clinging to love in
a system designed to crush it, and confronting constant danger.

Eight days before Christmas, the Crafts began the journey that would change both them
and their country. First, William cut Ellen’s hair in a square bob. Ellen then donned
a black coat, trousers, a cape, a top hat, high-heeled boots and green tinted glasses.
She wore her arm in a sling and carried a cane. As a final sign of class, she wore
a tassel and plaid tartan cape, a coat of arms for a refined gentleman. William’s
only disguise was a secondhand white beaver hat.

Once dressed, Ellen cried, collapsing onto William’s chest, but she recovered quickly.
They took separate routes to the railroad station, William arriving first and Ellen
showing up later to buy tickets to Savannah for Mr. William Johnson and his slave.
They were beginning a journey full of unknown terrors. They were fleeing from the
Deep South rather than from a border state such as Missouri or Kentucky, where slaves
could look across rivers and see freedom shining on the other side. Moreover, like
most slaves, they probably had been fed a steady diet of horror stories about the
North, a place where people reportedly lived in houses made of snow and among Yankees
who would, quite literally, eat them. Nineteenth-century historian Wilbur H. Siebert
even talked about a slave who didn’t want to go to Canada because he’d heard farmers
there could raise nothing but black-eyed peas. Still, they caught a train in Macon
and rode it to Savannah.

In Savannah, a horse-drawn bus carried the other passengers to a hotel for early-morning
tea. William and Ellen stayed on the bus, William bringing a tray to his “master.”
In another eleven years, free blacks and former slaves would complete Savannah’s First
African Baptist Church, putting nickel-sized holes in the pine floors to ventilate
the hiding space below; that space would hide runaway slaves escaping through a tunnel
to the Savannah River. But Ellen and William knew nothing about such things as Southern
hiding places for slaves. So they boarded a steamer headed for Charleston, South Carolina.
Not wanting close contact with the other passengers on the boat, Ellen immediately
went to bed. William explained to the other passengers that his master had rheumatism.
He took out Ellen’s flannels, warmed them at a stove, and carried them to her berth.

In Charleston, which emerged as the center of the slave trade in the eighteenth century,
they stayed in what they would describe as the city’s “best hotel.” However, in Petersburg,
Virginia, danger showed up in a different disguise—this time it wore dresses and oozed
concern. While a gentleman quizzed William about his master’s prospects, the man’s
two daughters flirted with and fussed over the mysterious “Mr. Johnson.” They insisted
that Mr. Johnson, who was, of course, Ellen, use their shawls as pillows and accept
their father’s rheumatism recipe. Ellen couldn’t read the recipe and was afraid to
look at it for fear she would hold it upside down, so she immediately put it away.

The chaos and close calls continued. A woman who got on the train at Richmond even
mistook William for her runaway slave, Ned. Not until she looked William squarely
in the face did she realize she was calling the wrong man.

“I never in my life saw two black pigs more alike than your boy and my Ned,” she told
Ellen.