Forbidden Fruit (7 page)

After two weeks of harassment, Knight and Hughes scurried out of town. By then, neither
man was laughing.

There was not a speck of humor in Hughes’s November 21 letter to the
Federal Union,
only outrage and self-pity. He wrote:

Ellen’s owner, Dr. Robert Collins, complained directly to President Fillmore about
his agents’ treatment and local officials’ failure to go after the Crafts. He was
assured that, if necessary, the federal government would fulfill the law by placing
troops at the disposal of state and local authorities. W. S. Derrick, acting secretary
of state, answered, saying “…[President Fillmore] directs me to assure you that, if,
unfortunately…the painful necessity should arise, he is resolved to perform his duty….”

William Craft wanted to stand his ground, too, but he and Ellen finally heeded the
advice of their friends and prepared to leave for England. The Boston Vigilance Committee
gave them two hundred fifty dollars for their trip. On November 7, 1850, their minister,
Theodore Parker, legally married them and “presented William with a revolver and a
dirk-knife, counseling him to use them manfully…if ever an attempt should be made
by his owners or anyone else to re-enslave them,” according to William Still. The
next day, the Reverend Samuel J. May, an Underground Railroad conductor, escorted
the couple to Portland, Maine, the first leg of their journey.

Anything that could go wrong did. After ramming another boat, the steamer to Portland,
Maine, had to be repaired. They were delayed again in New Brunswick. The stagecoach
carrying them to Halifax tipped over. For seven miles, they trudged through icy rain.
When they finally reached Halifax, they discovered they had missed their steamship
by two hours. Once they crossed the Canadian border, they were safe, but far from
secure. Ellen had to pose as white to get a room in Halifax. After seeing William’s
mahogany face, their landlady asked the Crafts to move out and stay with a black family.
By the time the S.S.
Cambria
arrived in late November and carried the Crafts to Liverpool, Ellen was wrestling
with what could have been pneumonia.

They survived their trip, though, and lived in England from 1851 to 1869. Now their
lives were as different from a slave’s as flour sacks are from silk. They met people
from all over the country, including Queen Victoria, Prince Albert and Lady Noel Byron,
widow of the famed poet Lord Byron. William Wells Brown took them on the antislavery
speaking circuit, where, as usual, Ellen’s white appearance struck a special chord
with white audiences forced to imagine themselves in her place. An observer in Edinburgh
called her “a gentle, refined-looking creature of twenty-four years, as fair as most
of her British sisters, and in mental qualifications their equal too.”

But Ellen and William Craft were no longer the same slavery-shaped couple who had
fled Georgia in 1848. After traveling thousands of miles to freedom, they began a
series of inner journeys, changing all the while. They finally had children, five
of them, and spent two years at the Ockham School near Ripley, Surrey, a trade school
for rural youth founded by Lady Byron. At Ockham, they learned to read and write and
taught manual skills to fellow students. They also helped raise money to set up a
girls’ school in Sierra Leone, and their home in Hammersmith became a headquarters
for abolitionist activity. Ellen, in particular, began finding her own voice and raising
it. In 1852, reports circulated in the press that Ellen had grown tired of living
free in a strange and distant land and had asked an American gentleman in London to
take her back to her slave family. Ellen, long either silent or saying only a few
words at antislavery meetings, wrote a letter to the newspapers explaining that she
would “rather starve in England, a free woman, than be a slave for the best man that
ever breathed upon the American continent.” She also peppered some of the most powerful
men in England with questions about their racial beliefs. Once, seated at a dinner
next to the famed humorist Artemus Ward, Ellen asked him why he belittled Negroes
in his books. Clearly, this woman so often praised for her gentility and refinement
had another, rawer side: she had become an iron fist wrapped in velvet. That fist
would show itself in 1851, when the Crafts attended the Great Exhibition in the hundred-foot-high
Crystal Palace built for the occasion in London. Sponsored by Prince Albert, the exhibition
was a display of inventions, fine arts and raw materials from around the world. Ellen,
William and other abolitionists showed up when Queen Victoria and members of Parliament
were present and turned the exhibit into an antislavery protest. Each black visitor
walked around on the arm of a white companion.

William was changing, too. His idea of who he could become grew with each book he
read and each titled or substantial person he met. His celebrity status suggested
he should do something special, something more than making cabinets or even speaking
out against slavery, but who was he, really, and how could he make his mark? Against
the advice of friends, he tried to set up a boardinghouse: it failed. He dictated
to a British friend the story of his and Ellen’s escape from slavery. In 1860, the
narrative was published as
Running a Thousand Miles for Freedom.
He also sold boots, raincoats and other items made from newly invented vulcanized
rubber. His riskiest venture was traveling to the West African nation of Dahomey,
one of the more powerful kingdoms in nineteenth-century West Africa, on behalf of
a London business house. He tried to convince the king of Dahomey to give up participating
in the slave trade—and provide England with a steady source of affordable cotton at
a time when America’s Civil War disrupted the flow of cotton overseas. While he may
have gained the king’s confidence, he lost the financial support of his backers and
had little to show for his efforts.

Finally, in the late 1860s, the Crafts found a cause big enough to fulfill them: they
decided to help educate and uplift newly freed American blacks. In 1869, now speaking
“with a clipped British accent,” according to one author, they returned to Boston
with three of their children. They then moved to the scarred and still-bleeding South.
William became the partner of a black man who had leased a plantation in Hickory Hill,
across the Georgia state line in South Carolina. In 1870, Ellen opened a school there.
A man named B. McBride, who had owned the plantation in the 1830s, assured a later
owner that he would succeed by following his instructions about planting cotton, corn,
potatoes and possibly rice, and making sure his young horses were stabled and salted
twice a week. But in a region where old hatreds fed on war defeats, the Crafts’ efforts
only fueled new fires. One autumn night, masked Ku Klux Klan riders tossed kerosene-coated
torches into the Crafts’ barns and dwellings. Ellen awakened to the crackle of flames
and the smell of their neighbors’ resentments. She and her children rushed outside
in their nightclothes. One-fourth of their investment flared up in flames.

The Crafts, though, still had some steam left. In January 1874 they tried again. With
a loan of twelve thousand dollars, they bought Woodville, a cotton and rice plantation
at Ways Station in Bryan County, Georgia, about fifty or so miles from Savannah. They
hoped to establish a community modeled after the Ockham School they had attended in
Surrey, England, teaching blacks practical skills such as carpentry, elementary housekeeping,
mechanics and rudimentary reading and writing. At the school, Ellen banned beatings
and taught former female field-workers to sew and keep house and use forks and plates.
She also prayed with them, brought them medicine and loaned them money for wedding
licenses. She even took in an ailing one-hundred-year-old woman and nursed her until
she died. By July 1875, sixteen black families were tilling land at Woodville, and
seventy-five boys and girls attended the farm school free of charge.

Meanwhile, William took crops to market in Savannah, ran for the state senate in 1874
and raised money in New York and Boston for the school. But soon the Klan’s white-robed
envy and rage showed up wearing different clothes. Some of the Crafts’ neighbors,
white and black, began grumbling against them. They sent letters and spread stories
to people in the North that William Craft was a charlatan, that the school didn’t
exist and that Craft was pocketing the money he raised for it. Hearing the stories,
Barthold Schlesinger, the German consul in Boston, inserted a notice in a Boston newspaper
calling William a swindler.

The notice, which appeared in the
Boston Daily Advertiser
and other Boston papers on September 26, 1876, said:

William sued for libel, asking for ten thousand dollars in damages. In 1878, Ellen
went to Boston to testify in her husband’s libel case. A June 18, 1878, editorial
in
The Macon Telegraph and Messenger
predicted that William “will whip the fight against his Northern persecutors. He
is said to have undergone the ordeal of a cross-examination without flinching and
successfully.”

However, it cost $150 to depose a witness, and the Crafts could afford only one witness
at their trial. The couple lost the case and surrendered Woodville, but Ellen kept
on working with tenant farmers.

After losing Woodville, Ellen and William Craft left public life, draping their dreams
for the future around their children’s shoulders. Young Ellen and Alfred attended
school in the North, William Jr. lived in England, and Charles and Brougham worked
for the U.S. Post Office. Around 1890, Ellen and William moved to Charleston to live
with their daughter, Ellen Craft Crum, and her husband, Dr. William Demosthenes Crum.
They were everything William and Ellen had hoped to become. Ellen Crum, a society
woman, founded the National Federation of Afro-American Women. In 1910, Dr. Crum became
U.S. Minister to Liberia, a post William Craft once craved. A graduate of the Howard
University Medical School, Dr. Crum had been a delegate to every Republican National
Conference from 1884 to 1904. In 1902, President Theodore Roosevelt made him customs
collector of the port of Charlestown (later Charleston) as a signal of hope to Southern
blacks. Ellen Craft died about 1897 and was buried under her favorite pine tree on
Woodville. William Craft died in Charleston in 1900. Yet the seeds they planted in
Georgia, South Carolina, Philadelphia, Boston and England flowered in their descendants,
creating a legacy of love and long, green journeys to new shores.

D
addy Grace drove his cart into the woods with a runaway slave crouched beside him,
chains dangling from the fugitive’s arms and legs, and a pistol in his hands. One
of the rioters held a sword to Grace’s head, urging him to hurry to the river. He
pushed his horse harder and harder, outrunning the shouts and screams of a rock-flinging,
curse-tossing, anger-spewing, blood-seeking mob. His horse was blind as a wall, as
sightless as shoes, but it knew the way to freedom.

Americans have rioted about all sorts of things, including horse stealing, the military
draft, taxes, trade policies, racial tensions, umpires’ decisions, sports victories,
sports losses and the assassinations of heroes. When Presbyterian minister Sylvester
Graham urged Americans to shun meat and alcohol and eat only home-baked whole-wheat
bread, his advice so angered bakers, butchers and saloon keepers that riots erupted
wherever Graham spoke. In New York in 1817, an entertainer’s refusal to sing a requested
song triggered a riot. In October 1834, forty homes were torched in Philadelphia’s
black community during riots in support of slavery. In October 1835, famed abolitionist
William Lloyd Garrison had to be rescued from a Boston mob angered by his insistence
that all men were created equal.

But the four or five hundred blacks who milled around the small Detroit jail on two
June days in 1833 didn’t bash heads, disable stagecoaches and swing swords because
they feared competition from home bakers. They didn’t switch identities like the characters
in Shakespeare’s romantic comedies so they could string up horse thieves or support
slavery, either. Nor was it taxes that made them arm themselves with clubs, sticks,
pistols and rocks, assault Sheriff John M. Wilson and drain all the courage from his
deputy.

The drama that led black Detroiters and Canadians to set fires, go to jail, flee temporarily
to Canada and start building the foundations for their own antislavery church began
with a love affair between two extraordinary escaped slaves. Their names were Thornton
and Rutha Blackburn.

After running away together from Louisville, Kentucky, and marrying along the way,
the Blackburns arrived in Detroit in 1831. Neither city was ever quite the same again.
Thornton had lived an uncertain life, passing from one pair of hands and one set of
possibilities to the next. He had been born in Maysville, Kentucky, around 1813, but
became the property of Dr. Gideon Brown in Hardinsburg, Kentucky. When Dr. Brown died
in 1829, Thornton became the property of the doctor’s wife, Susan Brown, who moved
to a farm outside Louisville. In the spring of 1831, Brown hired out Thornton as a
porter at Wurts and Reinhard’s dry goods store in Louisville, a city where slaves
about to be shipped south waited in iron-barred coops and men and women in chains
marched up Main Street to board boats. It was common practice to hire out slaves not
needed at home in order to produce extra income. Thornton might have carried crates
and boxes and helped deliver merchandise to people’s homes. However, hiring out slaves
fostered independence: away from their masters, slaves’ vision of the world widened,
along with their knowledge of geography, rivers and escape routes.

As both Thornton and Rutha would have been aware, Kentucky slaves didn’t only work
in fields and homes. They built bridges and canals, cooked, cleaned and waited tables
in restaurants and hotels, delivered products to market, rode and groomed racehorses,
occasionally delivered mail and were guides at some tourist attractions, including
an artesian well in Louisville. Marion Lucas, author of
A History of Blacks in Kentucky,
even tells the incredible story of a slave in Louisville who worked as a paralegal
for his master. When his owner put him up for auction in 1849, the owner advertised
him as a “good rough lawyer” who could take depositions, decipher legal writings and
interview witnesses.

It is likely that during this time Thornton met Rutha, a light-skinned Creole West
Indian slave woman who was nine years older than him and had plenty of sass and style.
She had worked as a nurse for George and Charlotte Backus of Backus and Bell Dry Goods
Company in Louisville. Both owners had died, and Rutha, like Thornton, had no idea
what shape her future might take. After the sale of the Backus estate, Rutha became
the property of Virgil McKnight, future president of the Bank of Kentucky.

On July 3, 1831, Thornton Blackburn ran away from Susan Brown, his owner. He took
Rutha with him. It’s not known why they decided to run at that particular time, but
as city slaves they would have heard stories about the free North and about Canada,
where, in 1793, the government had stopped allowing slaves to be brought into the
country. Perhaps Rutha was upset at being sold away from family and friends. Perhaps
Thornton, having sipped a small glass of freedom in downtown Louisville, longed for
a full bottle. Or perhaps one or both of them had reason to fear being “sold down
the river” to the slave markets of Natchez or New Orleans and ending up on a cotton
or cane plantation, where their lives would be toil filled and probably short. Whatever
the reason, on the day before Independence Day, Thornton and Rutha declared themselves
both free and independent: they left Louisville together. You couldn’t really call
it running away. They had too much confidence in themselves to skulk in the woods
or sneak across rivers in skiffs. On July 3, 1831, they took a ferry across the Ohio
River to Jeffersonville, Indiana, a river town famous for steamboats and shipyards
and the place where Methodist preacher Calvin Fairbank would be arrested twenty years
later for taking a slave named Tamar across the Ohio. In Jeffersonville, Thornton
and Rutha flagged down the
Versailles,
a steamboat built in Cincinnati in 1831; it was just leaving Louisville for Cincinnati.
Though they were fugitive slaves and though Kentucky law forbade taking slaves from
the shores of the Ohio River opposite Kentucky, they had no trouble boarding the ship.
They also had no trouble dazzling the captain and crew.

They were, by all accounts, two of a kind. They both had perfect manners and a sheen
of elegance, and Rutha, a head-turning beauty, swished around in a black silk dress.
Thornton also carried himself like a man with a sense of importance. This was noted
in the runaway slave ad his owner ran for him. The July 7, 1831, fugitive slave notice
published in the
Louisville Public Defender
offered a twenty-five-dollar reward for “a colored man, named Thornton,” who stood
about five feet nine or ten inches, was stout, had a yellow complexion and light eyes.
He had left wearing a blue cloth coat, boots, pantaloons and a black hat and was said
to be of “good address,” meaning he carried himself well and knew how to impress people.

The officers of the
Versailles
took the pair for free blacks and let them aboard while the boat was floating in
the Ohio, a short distance above Jeffersonville. Years later, they would pay for that
slip: for helping the Blackburns escape, the steamboat company owners and the ship’s
master were forced to pay Virgil McKnight and Susan Brown four hundred dollars each.
The owners of the ferry boat that took them to Jeffersonville were found to have violated
an 1824 statute; a witness swore that he saw the slaves on the boat before it left
the Kentucky shore and another witness swore that he had since seen the slaves in
Canada. However, when the Blackburns escaped in 1831, Susan Brown’s nephew, William
Oldham, immediately began tracking them, catching the next steamboat for Cincinnati.
He found the Blackburns’ names on a logbook for the stagecoach to Sandusky, but gave
up the chase, figuring they would beat him to their likely destination, Canada. Ohio
members of the Underground Railroad likely advised them about which coaches to take
on the road to freedom, according to historian Karolyn Smardz. After reaching Sandusky,
they boarded another coach for Detroit, then capital of the Michigan Territory. As
a Michigan city, it was part of the Northwest Territory, which, under the ordinance
of 1787, prohibited slavery.

The couple arrived in Detroit on July 18, and Thornton soon found work with the local
stonemason, Thomas Coquillard. They fit right into a black community that was still
very small. In 1830, a year before their arrival, there were only 261 free blacks
in the entire Michigan Territory and 32 slaves, holdovers from the days when the area
was British ruled. An estimated 50 black families or 250 black individuals lived in
the city of Detroit. The Blackburns moved within this small, tight circle, attending
church and creating friends. No doubt they learned that they were not the only fugitive
slaves to pass through or remain in Detroit, a city that would become the end of the
line for thousands of runaways and become known on the Underground Railroad by the
code name Midnight. However, in the fall of 1831 the Blackburns’ free life became
endangered. Thomas J. Rogers, a friend of Susan Brown’s, visited Detroit and ran into
Thornton Blackburn. He talked with the fugitive and learned that his wife was with
him. For unknown reasons, Rogers waited two years before reporting his discovery to
authorities in Kentucky. Once the Blackburns’ whereabouts were revealed, though, Susan
Brown and Virgil McKnight hired Benjamin G. Weir and Talbot Oldham as agents to recover
the pair and return them to Kentucky.

On June 14 and 15, 1833, Weir and Oldham appeared before Henry Chipman, justice of
the peace for Wayne County, Michigan, with proof that the Blackburns were fugitive
slaves. Chipman issued warrants for their arrests, and Sheriff John M. Wilson placed
them in the county jail, then on Gratiot Street for safekeeping. They sat in separate
cells, waiting for their free lives and, most likely, their lives together to end.
Under the Fugitive Slave Act of 1793 and the Territorial Act of 1827, Michigan had
to send any proven runaways back to their Southern owners. Also, Wilson and his deputy
allegedly were promised fifty dollars each for bringing the Blackburns to the dock.

However, Detroit’s black community had different plans for the couple.

They did not see Weir and Oldham as respected representatives of authority. They saw
them as slave catchers, their sworn enemies and their worst fears brought to life.
Whether fugitives or freeborn blacks, they identified with the Blackburns on a level
almost too deep for words, realizing they, too, could easily wind up in jail or on
a South-bound ship. Detroit was free territory, but the number of advertisements for
fugitive slaves in the
Detroit Gazette
had climbed during the early 1820s, a constant reminder of the fate that might await
fugitives. Also, in April 1827, a law to regulate blacks and mulattos and to punish
persons who kidnapped them had been enacted. Under this law, every black or mulatto
who came into the territory after January 1, 1828, was supposed to post a bond with
the clerk of the county court for five hundred dollars. Few, if any, blacks posted
this bond, but the law made it possible to force out of the territory any black person
considered undesirable. No wonder a steady and angry hum of protests rose from the
section of the courtroom occupied by blacks during the Blackburn hearings.

On the evening of June 15, 1833, several black Detroiters decided to take matters
into their own hands. They met at the home of Benjamin Willoughby, a real estate speculator,
financier and owner of a lumber business, who probably came to Detroit from Kentucky
between 1817 and 1830. He had worked as a laborer and acquired some money, often lending
it to others. At his home, participants hatched a plot to free the Blackburns; the
plan put Willoughby’s own property and even life at risk.

Sheriff Wilson allowed Mrs. Caroline French and Mrs. Tabitha Lightfoot into the jail
to visit Rutha Blackburn. The trio remained together until near dusk. Caroline French
was the wife of George French, and Tabitha Lightfoot was married to Madison Lightfoot:
both men were either porters or waiters at Detroit’s Steamboat Hotel at the corner
of Randolph and Woodbridge streets near the Detroit River. The men held positions
that gave them access to the city’s power brokers. Madison Lightfoot had married Tabitha
Smith at St. Paul’s Protestant Episcopal Church in 1831, the same year that the Blackburns
arrived in Detroit. Caroline French had powerful connections as well. Her father was
Cornelius Leonard Lenox, who had come to Detroit from Newton, Massachusetts, with
Governor William Hull and bought a farm from the family of John Askin, an English
loyalist who made a fortune that he partly abandoned when he moved to Canada and began
living on the banks of the Detroit River. According to historian Arthur LaBrew, Caroline
French also was the cousin of Boston activist Charles Lenox Remond, the first African-American
to appear as a regular lecturer for the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society and the
man who, in 1842, appeared before the legislative committee of the Massachusetts House
of Representatives to support people protesting segregation in travel accommodations.
By the following year, the segregation had stopped. With all this history sitting
on her shoulders, Caroline French was prepared to become the city’s first black heroine.
She changed clothes with Rutha Blackburn, who walked out of the jail with Tabitha
Lightfoot. The three women wept as they parted. Friends then whisked the disguised
Rutha Blackburn across the Detroit River to Canada.

While taking breakfast to the prisoners, the deputy sheriff discovered the switch.
He rushed over to the Steamboat Hotel to inform George French and Madison Lightfoot
of the trick their wives had played. They were “a parcel of hell cats,” the deputy
sheriff said. The two men denied knowing anything about it. When Sheriff Wilson heard
about Rutha Blackburn’s escape, he threatened to send Caroline French to Kentucky
as a substitute. It was no empty threat.