Authors: Betty DeRamus
Then Isaac resumed his journey. He later told family members that he followed the
path of the railroad. Soon hunger followed him. One day, he darted into a barn and
milked a cow into his big, floppy slouch hat, swallowing all the milk in one great
gulp. A few days later, he came to a stream, where he washed himself and shaved. That
was when he met bounty hunters and ran them off.
Isaac kept on walking, traveling by night, hiding in trees during the day and following
the routes of old railroad tracks. He later estimated he walked about twenty miles
a day, unless he had to detour around swampland. If he caught rabbits, squirrels or
other game, he cooked them around noon so the smoke and fire wouldn’t stand out in
the glare of sunshine.
He had been shown how to look up at the night sky and find the Big W, the middle star
pointing to the North Star that guided runaways. He also knew that moss grew only
on the north side of trees in the north. Yet following a star or watching for moss
is harder than it sounds on foggy or nearly moonless nights. In densely wooded areas,
Isaac probably notched trees or bent bushes in the direction he was traveling so he
could tell if he began going in circles.
The land he crossed would have been the home of wild asparagus and corn, strawberries
and rhubarb, snap beans and peas, apples and beets, dewberries, raspberries, mulberries,
huckleberries and black haws, pokeweed and peaches. Also, wild currants, grapes, muscadines
and chokeberries, cattail bulbs and roots, wild fern roots and greens. But it was
April, the corn and soybeans had just been planted, the berries wouldn’t ripen until
June, and the apples wouldn’t be ready for harvest until fall. So hunger haunted Isaac,
and thirst kept him company.
If he found spring water, he would have drunk it. If his thirst became desperate,
he might have notched maple and birch trees, let the sap flow into his hands and gulped
it down. Cattail stalks also contained a little sac filled with water. And he might
have known that carrying a clean pebble or hickory nut in his mouth would reduce the
sensation of thirst.
One day, he noticed two wagons rumbling westward. The people in the wagons were throwing
out scraps of food for the dogs following them. After the wagons and dogs passed,
Isaac climbed down from his tree. He fell on his knees, scrambling for food that dogs
had already sniffed, licked or stepped on. “It was survival,” says his granddaughter
Jackson.
Soon he had reached Chicago, a flat muddy town where people warmed themselves before
grate fires. Though Isaac didn’t know it, local newspapers published long lists of
advertisements for slaves, often described as branded on the hand or having fresh
whipping welts on their backs. And there was a five-hundred-dollar reward for him,
dead or alive.
He stopped in the city, pulling down his slouch hat to hide as much of his light brown
face as possible. He was hungry from head to toe, but didn’t want anyone to smell
his desperation. So he waited for darkness and then bought a cigar, which he smoked
like a man with no reason to hurry and nothing but tobacco on his mind. Afterward,
he bought a loaf of bread and some cheese from a little country store.
He was still walking at night and sleeping during the day. The cayenne pepper in his
shoes not only threw off tracking dogs: it blistered his feet, already swollen from
walking. So he stumbled on, his fiddle in his bag and Lucy’s good-bye wedged inside
his head.
In the Midwest, spring is a wind-tossed blend of fallen limbs, scattered rocks, long-buried
autumn leaves and resurrected grass. It is a season that has trouble making up its
mind: some days start off smelling like summer, then surrender to winter’s grip, gray
skies and even snow swallowing newborn sunshine. Isaac, himself a mixture of fears
and hopes, managed to reach the Purdues. The free black couple gave him his first
real meal since leaving Quincy, Illinois. He rested with them for a week, learning
for the first time that he was not safe even in free states because federal laws and
judges could return him to his master.
When Isaac left the Purdues, he headed for Detroit, the last stop on the Underground
Railroad for thousands of fugitives who crossed the Detroit River to Canada. Though
less than 1 percent of Michigan’s population likely belonged to the antislavery movement,
they were a bold band. On July 1, 1859, the
Detroit Free Press
reported that a group of blacks ran aboard a ship returning from Superior City when
it docked in Detroit. A Kentucky lady named Mrs. Moore was returning from her summer
vacation and accompanied by two mulatto slaves. The Detroit blacks whisked the woman’s
slaves off the ship. But despite such spontaneous uprisings, the majority of the state’s
antislavery fighters did no more than hide hungry, harried people in their attics
and barns, basements and false-bottomed wagons or hurry them to their next stop.
Erastus Hussey, a Quaker, ran the Battle Creek station. When his daughter, Susan,
was sixteen, she woke up one night and discovered thirty black men and women standing
near the door. She was home alone, but she invited them in, boiled cauldrons of coffee
and managed to supply them with food contributed by neighbors. She then gave them
a note to a man in Marshall and sent them on their way. In Ypsilanti, Michigan, one
Underground Railroad station was the home of Leonard Chase, and it stood on the summit
of the Cross Street hill. Mrs. Eurolas Morton sometimes baked bread at night and carried
it to the Chase home to feed runaways, creeping through backyards so she wouldn’t
be seen.
Isaac Berry’s first stop after leaving the Purdues was Saline in the southeastern
part of the state, an area swirling with bounty hunters, antislavery activists and,
more than likely, spies and counterspies. By the time he got there, he could barely
put one foot in front of the other. Stumbling down a road, he met a free black man
carrying a dinner pail. The man, who often helped runaways, couldn’t stop staring
at Isaac, who looked ready to collapse at his feet.
“The man asked him are you a fugitive slave,” according to Marguerite Jackson. “Grandpa
told him ‘none of your business.’ But the man told him to go [to his house] and ‘tell
my wife I said feed you and put you to bed.’”
He followed the man’s directions to his house, and the man’s wife gave Isaac something
to eat. That night, the house swelled with people who had come to see, hear and touch
a runaway slave who had already worn out two pairs of shoes, including sturdy, club-shaped
brogans built to fit either foot. Isaac had cobbled together a second pair of shoes
by ripping out the sleeves of his coat and putting cardboard soles inside the sleeves.
He then made a knot at one end of the sleeves, tying the cardboard to his feet.
People in Saline took up a collection and bought Isaac some carpet slippers, black
or gray felt shoes in which the dead were sometimes buried. Two people then took him
to Detroit in a wagon with a false bottom. They left him at Finney’s barn, at the
northeast corner of Griswold and State streets, a hiding place for escaping slaves
waiting to cross the Detroit River to Canada. Finney, who came to Detroit from western
New York in 1834, owned a hotel and livery stable. Legend has it that many fugitives
huddled in fear in Finney’s stable while the men who pursued them dined in Finney’s
hotel.
According to Jackson, Isaac was taken to Windsor late at night. There he looked up
Albert Campbell’s aunt, Celia Flenoy, who found him a job. He also returned to playing
his fiddle on weekends.
Other relatives say that after Isaac reached Detroit, he wandered along the shore
of the Detroit River trying to figure out exactly where escaping slaves swam or sailed
across to Canada. Then he noticed a white man walking toward him.
“You’re not a runaway are you?” the man said.
“What business it of your’n?” The Detroit River was just a ribbon of water, no more
than a mile wide where Isaac stood. He could look across it and see freedom glinting
in the sun. And there were no snow houses on its banks and no crows to peck him or
pull out his eyes, as the slave owners claimed in stories meant to frighten slaves.
“You’re gonna get caught out here,” the white man insisted. “You’d better stick with
me.”
He followed the man to Grosse Pointe, a wooded and swampy area on Lake St. Clair,
just east of the Detroit River. They had to travel along a plank toll road, a four-hour
horse-and-buggy trip through the mud. On the way, they would have passed roadhouses
selling frog leg dinners and drinks. The man hid Isaac in a shed, bringing him food
and water. Locked in the shed for three days, Isaac likely became convinced he’d stepped
into a trap.
But the white man did not betray him.
A mist shrouded Lake St. Clair one morning, allowing the white man to ferry Isaac
to Canada without being seen. He dropped him off and told him to head south. That
was how he wound up tracking down Albert Campbell’s aunt, Celia Flenoy, and landing
a job farming for John Martindale in the village of Puce on the Puce River, near Windsor,
Ontario. It was a place thick with maple, elm and spruce trees and memories of black
men and women who’d knelt down to kiss free soil when they first arrived. Isaac and
two other black men lived on Martindale’s land. Isaac also worked for a whiskey distiller
named John Bryant who forced him to take part of his pay in pails of liquor. Bryant
also made Isaac hide nondistilled whiskey for him in straw sacks.
Isaac still had no idea what had become of Lucy and whether or not she could keep
her end of their dangerous bargain. Yet somewhere between the gaping mouth of the
Mississippi and the narrow gash of the Detroit River—between Palmyra, Missouri, the
source of Isaac’s fear, and Palmyra, New York, the source of Lucy’s Mormon faith—Isaac
Berry had tasted something with the tang of true freedom. It was like new honey on
hot bread, and he gulped it down.
Lucy Millard’s ears stuck out as though they longed to escape her face and go their
separate ways, and her lips were a blade-thin slash of serious business. As a child,
she’d cried because she didn’t have her sister’s curly hair. She also wept when one
of her uncles gave the two sisters wine-colored velvet bonnets but only Clarissa’s
bonnet had a feather. However, as an adult Lucy wore her straight coppery hair in
buns so tight her scalp looked ready to bleed. All the same, she had a huge hunger
for all of life’s sights and smells and her every move set off sparks.
People who knew Lucy in her later years paint a vivid picture of her puffing on her
corncob pipe stuffed with corn cake tobacco or putting on her old gray bonnet and
shawl and taking her children and grandchildren into the woods to search for healing
herbs and teas. They also remember her stitching quilts in her favorite Flying Geese
pattern, her fingers as nimble as snakes; chugging the homemade wine she loved and
could make from just about anything, including pin cherries, mulberries and black
cherries; and using a needle and thread to reinforce the magazine that came with the
weekly newspaper
Grit
: that way, she could help preserve its recipes, serialized fiction stories, Bible
stories for children, sewing patterns, thrift tips and other features.
Mostly, though, they remember how she never backed away from a fight.
“She got caught in a storm one day, wandered home and was put to bed,” said her great-grandson
Raymond Pointer. “They had a doctor out there who gave her three months to live. Two
days later, she was out on the lake.”
Lucy once pretended to be a witch to silence her noisy next-door neighbor. She dressed
all in black, put on a peaked hat and walked around and around the man’s house with
a pail of ashes, sprinkling them on the ground.
“She circled the house three times and sprinkled ashes and said, ‘Dust thou art and
to dust thou shalt return,’” said Pointer. “The guy moved. People were superstitious
in those days.”
She was a woman used to expressing her feelings, so the day came when Lucy could no
longer keep her love for Isaac Berry squeezed inside a locked box.
“She went to her father and told him she wanted to marry, and he said can’t you find
somebody else besides that…” said Marguerite Jackson.
Then Isaac ran off in the spring, and that fall Lucy was sent away to a finishing
school in Springfield, Illinois. She boarded a train in Hannibal, Missouri, ten miles
from Palmyra. She had pretended she was going to obey her father’s orders, stay in
school and learn how to smooth away her rough edges so she would have the shine to
attract a rich suitor.
However, when her train reached Springfield, Illinois, she got off, strode into the
depot and bought a ticket to Detroit, just as she had told Isaac she would. She paid
for that second ticket with the money she was supposed to use for her finishing school
tuition. Then she boarded an eastbound train with a whistle that was like the wail
of a lost child. As she passed one seat, she saw a
WANTED
poster offering a reward for the return of Isaac Berry, according to Katy Pointer.
For all she knew, he could have been caught and dragged to the far South or even lynched.
All the same, she stayed on the train.
She traveled from Springfield to Chicago and on to Michigan. She was used to traveling
and tracking down dreams. According to family history, Lucy Millard’s father, Solomon
Nelson Millard, was part of that army of true believers who moved westward, struggling
to plant seeds of their new Mormon faith in stony ground and resisting hearts. Lucy’s
marriage records identified both her and Isaac as church members. She was about twelve
when her family left New York to head west in search of their green kingdom of God.