Authors: Betty DeRamus
Neither James nor Fanny Smith ever used that tunnel.
Or ran again.
T
he box was a temporary tomb, a chamber of strange tortures, a hole leading to hell,
but Lear Green climbed inside it just the same. For eighteen hours, it became her
world.
Actually, it was an old sailor’s chest designed for voyages that might last for hundreds
of salt-coated, wind-slapped days. It was meant to hold trousers and shirts, razors
and combs, hairbrushes and quilts, paper and pens, tacks and thread, needles and thimbles,
woolen stockings and shoes. It was for Bibles and hymnbooks, shaving soap and painkillers,
not for a runaway slave girl with an average-sized body and larger-than-average hopes.
It was too short for Lear Green’s legs, too narrow for her arms, too smothering for
her spirits. She had to curl up inside it like an unborn child waiting to crawl out
of sticky darkness and yell at her first glimpse of light. She could doze inside the
box but not stretch out, yawn but not cough or sneeze, twitch but not fight off muscle
cramps. She could daydream about becoming a free woman and wife but never gulp down
enough food or water to silence a complaining stomach. She would have time to worry
that someone might kick, shove or knock her box upside down, sending blood and fear
rushing to her head. She also would have time to wonder if the love awaiting her was
worth such torture.
It was 1857, a year in which the U.S. Supreme Court decided, in the
Dred Scott v. Sandford
case, that blacks weren’t citizens, couldn’t sue in courts and had no rights anyone
couldn’t step on or smash. That year, a prime field hand in the South sold for thirteen
hundred dollars, but a white North Carolinian named Hinton Helper warned in his book
The Impending Crisis of the South: How to Meet It
that slavery was morally and economically ruining many Southern whites. Meanwhile,
the Farmers’ Almanac predicted two eclipses of the sun, and the United States moved
ever closer to another kind of darkness, one in which men from the North and the South
with Bibles in their pockets would kill each other over an idea already coughing and
wheezing on its deathbed. In January 1857, at the Worcester, Massachusetts, State
Disunion Convention, which favored the peaceful separation of North and South, Boston
abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison stood up and declared, “No union with slaveholders.”
However, attorney and editor George Fitzhugh’s book
Cannibals All! or, Slaves Without Masters
challenged the idea that freedom was necessarily better than slavery.
In Baltimore, where men sold their abundant slaves cheaply to men who resold them
for more cash in the Deep South, a young house slave named Lear Green settled all
these questions for herself. She didn’t wait for court rulings, state conventions
or the boom of battle cannons. She squeezed herself into a wooden chest, which two
men carried down cobblestone streets to the nearby Patapsco River. Luck must have
ridden in that chest with Lear because the steamer that would carry her and her box
to Philadelphia left Baltimore at 1:00
P.M
. in 1854 and 3:00
P.M
. in 1861. Instead of slipping off in the shadows, Lear had to escape in the wide,
unblinking glare of daylight, possibly meeting her rescuers in the hallway of her
dwelling.
The names of the men who helped her carry out this plan aren’t known, but Baltimore
did have an antislavery movement. Rabbi David Einhorn became so identified with it
that he was driven out of the state at the start of the Civil War. The home of black
activist William Watkins and his family was an important Underground Railroad station
as well. Watkins’s niece, Frances Ellen Harper, gained considerable fame by the late
1850s as an antislavery poet, novelist and speaker. According to local legend, Orchard
Street Church in Baltimore’s Druid Hill section also sheltered slaves traveling to
freedom. Famed conductor Harriet Tubman’s routes of escape from the Eastern Shore
usually led from Cambridge, Maryland, over the big Choptank River bridge to the Delaware
towns of Camden, Dover, Smyrna, Odessa and Wilmington.
But Lear Green wasn’t escaping from a secluded farm or a sprawling plantation surrounded
by woods, streams or swamps. She lived in a row house at 153 South Broadway in the
heart of the section of Baltimore known as Fells Point, and her owner, James Noble,
ran a butter depot at that address. Married to a woman named Mary and the father of
four children, Noble was in his early forties and a man of some wealth: by 1860, he
owned three thousand dollars in real estate and five hundred dollars in personal property,
owned a male slave and had a female German servant. Noble’s butter depot probably
sat on the first floor of the house, and Lear Green, most likely, lived in the attic,
as children, house slaves and servants usually did in Fells Point. Houses in the area
usually stood two and a half stories high with two rooftop dormers.
From her window, Lear could have seen many things that reminded her of how slavery
really looked beneath its sometimes loose-fitting city clothes. She could have seen
the auctions in which men, women and children were sold along with desks and china.
She might have seen prospective buyers pinching and squeezing slaves, fingering their
skin in search of broken bones or other flaws. Like young Frederick Douglass, who
had escaped from the same neighborhood ten years earlier, she also might have seen
a young female slave fighting with pigs for offal—tossed-out animal snouts, shanks,
kidneys, spleens, oxhearts, oxtails, bone marrow, pork bellies, intestines, gizzards,
cocks’ combs, pigs’ feet, pigs’ brains, bulls’ testicles and other meat scraps that
poverty and necessity transformed into edible food. All of this would have encouraged
her to walk, run, sail, swim or even climb into a wooden box to break from the past.
The men who carried Lear Green to the river would have walked down streets ripe with
the mingled smells of whiskey, roasted peanuts, coffee, catfish and perch, and ringing
with the shouts of sailors, prostitutes and slave traders. In Baltimore, men bought
and sold slaves on ships, in yards, in inns and even on the steps of the penitentiary
and courthouse. People also could board slaves in a slave jail for twenty-five cents
a day. It was not a neighborhood for anyone who spooked easily. An Irish mob had rioted
there after someone stuffed straw into some old clothes to represent St. Patrick and
hung it from the mast of an idle schooner. A ship’s captain had been tarred and feathered
there for lowering a flag, and a man had built his own coffin and kept it in his house
for years. It is generally believed that prostitutes were first called hookers when
they followed the encampments of hard-drinking Civil War general Joe Hooker, but at
least one author suspects the word
hooker
originated in Fells Point. In the middle of the eighteenth century, the area curved
into a hook shape and had scores of prostitutes.
Lear Green, however, wasn’t fleeing riots or rowdiness. She was running off to meet
the man she planned to marry—if she didn’t suffocate or swoon inside an old sea chest
first. According to a May 26, 1857,
Baltimore Sun
ad offering $150 for her return, she was an attractive young woman with an impressive
wardrobe, possibly her own and possibly her mistress’s. The ad said she had “a black
complexion,” was “round-featured, good-looking and ordinary size; she had on and with
her when she left, a tan-colored silk bonnet, a dark plaid silk dress, a light mouslin
delaine, also one watered silk cape and one tan colored cape.” “Mouslin delaine,”
or, more correctly, mousseline de laine, was a soft, lightweight, high-quality wool
dress fabric, usually covered with a pattern. James Noble had inherited Lear from
his wife’s mother, Mrs. Rachel Howard, when she was just a child. Lear didn’t know
much about her old mistress, but the young one left a lasting impression, pushing
and prodding her and never giving her any space in which to find herself. Yet she
bore it until a young man named William Adams stepped into her life and challenged
her to change it.
Adams was a barber, but worked mostly in taverns, opening oysters and performing other
tasks. Many blacks cut hair, but a black barber with a white clientele needed special
qualities, including the ability to keep his own feelings out of the discussions swirling
around him and to tell white men what they wanted to hear. When George DeBaptiste,
a barber and caterer, worked as an Underground Railroad conductor in Madison, Indiana,
slave owners often teased DeBaptiste about being a secret agent for the Underground
Railroad. DeBaptiste would just laugh and say he wasn’t smart enough for that. However,
William Adams, Lear Green’s love, apparently wasn’t that skilled at disguising his
intentions. He stood about five feet ten inches tall, had a four-inch scar running
by the corner of his mouth and was described as fast talking. Loose talking might
have been a more accurate description. The slave ad for Lear Green noted that people
had overheard William Adams saying he was going to marry Lear and move to New York,
where his mother, a free black woman, lived. According to James Noble’s ad, Adams
had been missing for about a week when Lear Green—just like that—disappeared, too.
In Underground Railroad conductor William Still’s account of Lear’s escape, the young
woman decided she needed to be free to “fill the station of a wife and mother.” In
author Sylvia Dannett’s version of this story, Lear was at first afraid to run off
with William, but after he left Baltimore, “the ugliness and emptiness” of Lear’s
life oppressed her. Her mistress kept demanding more and more tasks from her, and
the day finally came when Lear felt she could take no more. After learning that William
had reached Elmira, she decided to join him. According to Dannett, Lear managed to
get word to Baltimore Quakers active in the Underground Railroad, and they concocted
the plan to carry her to freedom in a sea chest—probably marching right past slave
dealers and slave catchers.
She was, of course, not the only slave who had been stuffed inside a box and shipped
to the north as freight or luggage. In 1845, an unnamed “negro servant girl” had been
boxed up and mailed to York, Pennsylvania. This was four years before Henry “Box”
Brown became famous for being shipped in a box for a twenty-five-hour journey from
Richmond, Virginia, to Philadelphia, traveling upside down most of the time. A relative
stuck a Baltimore man named William Peel Jones into a box and sent him to Philadelphia
on an Ericsson steamer; Jones nearly gave himself away by coughing inside his container.
In the winter of 1857, a young pregnant seamstress clambered into a box lined with
straw in Baltimore and spent nearly all of one night in the depot, upside down more
than once. When finally freed in Philadelphia, she spent three days struggling to
regain her ability to talk with ease. However, escaping in such a dangerous way required
considerable courage and meant the eighteen-year-old Lear Green would have to mature
overnight. After searching her soul, she apparently decided she had what it took to
endure eighteen hours coiled up in a chest, an act that Still compared to “cutting
off the right arm or plucking out the right eye.”
It only took the men carrying Lear’s chest a few minutes to reach Light and Pratt
streets on the edge of the river, some three or four blocks from Lear’s residence.
In the 1850s, this was the spot where the Philadelphia-bound Ericsson Line steamships
docked in the Patapsco River, an arm of the Chesapeake Bay. Ericsson steamers were
driven by underwater propellers instead of the wider paddle wheels, which steadied
ships and made it possible for large steamers to pass through the narrow gated chambers
or locks that raised and lowered ships moving through the Chesapeake & Delaware Canal.
Strong ropes fastened the chest, which was stowed with the freight on the steamboat.
Lear, of course, had none of the conveniences available to contemporary researchers
who retrace the escape routes of fugitive slaves. She had no cell phone for emergencies,
no backpack crammed with extra rations, no sports drinks, no protein bars. She brought
nothing with her but a quilt, a pillow, a few pieces of clothes, a small amount of
food, a bottle of water and a pound or two of courage. Like other slaves who escaped
as freight or luggage, she would have abstained from eating and drunk only an occasional
sip of water to lessen her need to eliminate waste. To recreate the experiences of
fugitives like Lear Green, researcher Anthony Cohen climbed inside a wooden crate
in May 2002 and had himself shipped on a train from Philadelphia to New York. During
his two-hour ordeal, he sweated so furiously that he stripped down to his boxer shorts,
but it didn’t help. Moisture condensed on the box’s screw plates and dripped from
the ceiling. By the time he stepped out of his box, the heat had wrung him dry and
he had drained his water bottle. Imagine what might have happened if, like Lear Green,
he had stayed in his box for another sixteen hours.
Fortunately, Lear Green’s fiancé’s mother, a free black woman, came along as a passenger
on the boat ferrying Lear to freedom. Like other black passengers, she was assigned
to the deck, which put her near the sailor’s chest. Once or twice during the night,
she untied the ropes circling the chest and lifted the lid, allowing Lear a chance
to snatch a lungful of air. The two women later told William Still they had shared
a silent prayer that their time of peril would soon end. However, sometime that night,
some disturbing thoughts must have stomped around in Lear Green’s head. She must have
sniffed at least a whiff of raw fear. There must have been at least a moment when
she longed to leap out of a chest that looked way too much like a coffin.