The Warmth of Other Suns (66 page)

The world of Mississippi and the world of Chicago were intertwined and interdependent, and what happened in one did not easily escape the notice of the other from afar. Word of his capture made it to Chicago. Ida Mae, a faithful reader of the
Chicago Defender
even in the days when it was well past its prime, would take note of people like Arrington High back in her home state and wish them safety.

A colored physician that Ida Mae and most everyone from Mississippi knew through word of mouth, a man named T. R. M. Howard, also made note of what happened to Arrington High. Dr. Howard had founded the Mississippi Regional Council of Negro Leadership, a local precursor to the civil rights groups that would become household names in the 1960s. He organized protests from his base in the all-black town of Mound Bayou in the Delta. But his activities forced him to escape Mississippi a few years before Arrington High was committed to the asylum. From Chicago, Dr. Howard tried to figure out a way to help his friend.

The asylum put patients to work in the dairy and truck farms and the orchards run by the state. Some of the patients had to be up at dawn to work the farms. Arrington High got up at 5
A.M
. on February 7, 1958, a Friday, to milk the cows, which was one of his chores.

It was still dark outside, and instead of heading to pasture, he scurried down a deserted path on the hospital grounds and came upon a row of five cars that were parked at the side of a quiet stretch of road.

A door in the second car opened, and he got inside the only car with a colored driver. That car and the four other cars, driven by white men, inched their way to the exit so as not to kick up any more dust or engine noise. There, the white man driving the lead car in the caravan motioned to the hospital guard at the front gate. The guard waved the processional through with a tilt of his flashlight.

Arrington High was out of the asylum but not out of danger. The motorcade took the highway, careful not to drive too fast or too slow as to attract attention. They drove 105 miles through Pelahatchie, Hickory, Meridian, and Toomsuba, Mississippi, to the Alabama line. It would take them more than two hours to get there, and they had to watch for cars tailing them and sheriffs hunting them, as surely by now the asylum officials knew that High had gone missing.

At the Alabama line, the drivers took no chances. They did not cross the state border themselves with their Mississippi license plates. Instead they took Arrington High to the state line and instructed him to get out of the car and walk over into Alabama. There a caravan of five other cars, all with Alabama license plates, were waiting for him. As before, there were four white drivers and one colored driver. The caravan would attract less attention if two colored men were driving together than it would if Arrington High were riding with a white man.

He was in Alabama but still not safe. He was still in the South and within siren call of any Mississippi sheriff. The cars took him to a predetermined location. There waiting for him was a pine coffin. He was told to get inside. The coffin had breathing holes in it for him to get air. The men sealed him in the coffin and loaded it onto a hearse. On top of the coffin, the men placed a load of flowers so that it would appear that the coffin had just been driven from a funeral.

The hearse drove to a railroad station, where the coffin was loaded on a train bound for Chicago. He lay still and quiet, unable to turn over or adjust himself for the fifteen-hour ride to the North.

The moment the train pulled out of the station in Alabama bearing
Arrington High’s coffin, Dr. Howard, awaiting word in Chicago, got a long-distance telephone call.

“The Eagle has flown the coop,” the voice on the line said.

High made his escape in a ritual of last resort that, in some way or another, had been used to deliver black people out of the South from the time of the Underground Railroad, the slaves using whatever means they had at their disposal. Men disguised themselves as women, women dressed as men to elude detection.

A century before High was nailed into his coffin, a man named Henry Brown, a slave on a tobacco plantation near Richmond, Virginia, began plotting his escape the moment he saw his wife and three young children carted away in chains to some unknown part of North Carolina.
¹⁵⁷
His master had sold them off. Brown did not know they were being sold, did not get to hold them one last time, did not know where they were being taken, and would have been flogged or worse if he tried to search for them in North Carolina. He chose to leave the South and the “whips and thumbscrews” altogether. He prayed over it, and it came to him that he should pack himself into a box and get himself “conveyed as dry goods to a free state.”

He had a carpenter build a crate of a size commonly sent on the railcars. The box was three feet, one inch wide by two feet, six inches high and had three little gimlet holes for air. Brown then went to a white man he thought he could trust. The man asked if the box was for Brown’s clothes. Brown said, no, he was going to get into it himself. The five-foot, six-inch Brown would have to fold himself into the fetal position and remain that way for the twenty-odd hours it would take to reach the North. His white friend did not think it safe and did not want to seal Brown inside the box.

“I insisted upon his placing me in it, nailing me up,” Brown wrote in his autobiography, “and he finally consented.”

The friend had promised to accompany the box to protect it on the journey, but at the last minute decided against it. Brown would have to go it alone. The friend sent a telegram to an acquaintance in Philadelphia “that such a box was on its way to his care.”

The morning of March 29, 1849, the friend carried the box, with Brown folded inside with a few small biscuits, to the express office. There, it was later placed upside down, which left Brown sitting on his head, even though the box explicitly said,
THIS SIDE UP WITH CARE
. From
the express office, the box went to the train depot and “tumbled roughly into the baggage car” where it happened to fall right side up, only to be put on a steamboat upside down again and left that way for close to two hours.

Brown was in agony but dared not moan.
¹⁵⁸
He waited for death and prayed. Then he heard the men say, “We have been here two hours and have traveled twenty miles. Let us sit down and rest ourselves.” In so doing, the men happened to turn the box over.

The box then arrived at the depot in Washington. There he heard a voice say, “There is no room for this box. It will have to remain behind.”

Brown, stiff and contorted and now fearful, had to keep silent. He felt a man’s hands reach for the box and squeeze it onto the railcar, his head pointing down again, until someone righted it at the next stop. He arrived in Philadelphia at three in the morning. He had been doubled up in the box for twenty-six hours.

Before daylight, a wagon drove up and a white man got out and inquired about the box. He carried the box to an office on North Fifth Street. Several abolitionists had gathered to witness the opening of the parcel.

They locked the door behind them.
¹⁵⁹
But once the box was placed before them, the men seemed afraid to open it. Finally one of them said, “Let us rap upon the box and see if he is alive.”

Someone then tapped on the sides of it.

“
Is all right within?
” the voice asked, trembling.

“
All right
,” Brown replied.

The people were joyful. And Brown was free. He would go on to Boston, which was judged to be safer, and for the rest of his life he would go by the name of Henry
Box
Brown, in light of how he had gained his freedom.

Some one hundred years after Henry Brown shipped himself north, the train bearing Arrington High’s coffin arrived at the Twelfth Street station in Chicago. Dr. Howard, the friend who had helped organize the escape, met the train at the station that had come to symbolize the Great Migration itself. The coffin would now have to be transported by hearse to a funeral home. There, a group of men opened the lid and welcomed Arrington High to the receiving city of Chicago. The people were joyful.

How many people fled the South this way during the Great Migration
is impossible to know, due to the very nature of the mission. For the operation to work, it required the highest level of secrecy, coordination and planning worthy of the Secret Service, the active and willing participation of sympathetic white southerners, the cooperation of funeral homes in both the departure and receiving states, the complete trust of the person being ferried out by friends and loved ones willing to put themselves in danger to save a single soul, and a good measure of courage and faith on everyone’s part.

It would appear from the precision of the Arrington High escape that this was not the first time the people involved in its execution had carried out an operation such as this. To this day, many funeral directors refuse to discuss the matter, admit their involvement, or bring unwanted attention to it—in case, it would seem, it might need to be used again.
¹⁶⁰

“That underground is as effective today in the South,” Arrington High told the
Chicago Defender
after his arrival, “as it was during the days of slavery.”
¹⁶¹

It was Dr. Howard who, with the help of more than a dozen others, arranged for his colleague’s escape and greeted him upon arrival. He knew what it meant to flee for your life. He did not have to imagine what Arrington High had been through during that dark, cramped ride to Chicago. He himself had to be spirited from Mississippi only a few years before.