Underground Airlines‘ alternate history (see First‘s review above) calls to mind Sydney Nathans’ actual history, To Free a Family: The Journey of Mary Walker (2012). That journey began when Mary Walker ran away from bondage, leaving three children behind (along with her mother) after her master announced he planned to send his “impudent” slave to a plantation in Alabama, far removed from her family in North Carolina. Once Mary Walker got settled in the North, she spent years trying to free her family and Nathan provides a gripping chronicle of her efforts. (Struck by the drama of the book and its cast of characters, more than one reader has invoked Dickens.) Mary Walker’s life would’ve justified Nathans’ fine attentiveness even if her story had failed to shed light on a larger African-American structure of feeling. But her journey was exemplary on that score too. Nathans has explained how he got “hooked” on Mary Walker when he read an extraordinary letter written on her behalf to the slave master who owned her family. He came across that letter in Herbert Gutman’s The Black Family in Slavery and Freedom (1976)—a text which aimed to disprove the common notion slavery had destroyed family ties among African Americans. (Gutman’s case went pop when Roots became a bestseller.) To Free a Family is in the tradition of Gutman’s testament to black folks’ culture of resistance.
To Free a Family also implicitly talks back to historians and commentators who have caricatured abolitionists as righteous fanatics. In the course of her struggle to reunite her family, Mary Walker met up with well-known abolitionists and, as Nathans noted in an interview, they tended not to be fantasts. Most of them acted, instead, as citizens wrestling with a devilish problem of dailiness. Since abolitionists had no idea when emancipation would come, many focused in a very human way on helping individuals, one by one.
Courage became their foundational virtue as Nathans’ compaction of his book (below) underscores. In the course of her meetings with remarkable abolitionists, though, Mary Walker didn’t always avoid running into the sort of icy prigs who will always be with us. One of the most striking sequences in To Free a Family recounts Mary Walker’s back-and-forths with a rich, righteous abolitionist couple who refused to help her buy back her children. To these purists it was a matter of principle; they wouldn’t give a dollar to a slave-owner even if it meant damning Walker’s family. (To quote a reader who would know, that stiff couple evoked “New England at its worst.”) The invented quote from a fictional text that serves as an epigram for Underground Airlines is on point: “It’s a strange kind of fire, the fire of self-righteousness which gives us such pleasure by its warmth, but does so little to banish the darkness.”
Back to the light. Here is Nathans’ own “distillation” of To Free a Family:
Eighteen-fifty proved to be a year of reversals for escaped slave Mary Walker, for Philadelphia’s people of color, and for abolitionists everywhere. The dispute over the fate of slavery in the territories acquired in the Mexican War had simmered in Congress since 1846, when a Pennsylvania congressman first introduced a proviso to bar bondage from the conquered lands, while Southerners demanded the right to bring their slaves into the surrendered territory. The festering controversy magnified other issues for the South, foremost of which was the refusal of Northerners and Northern legislatures to help with the recapture of fugitive slaves. To some Southerners, the only true safety was in secession. Others, for the moment less extreme, called for a decisive remedy.
That sweeping remedy was proposed in mid-January 1850. It provided that a fugitive slave could be arrested by a master or his agent anywhere in the country. The person could be taken before any official—a judge, a federal marshal, a local commissioner, or even one of the country’s forty thousand postmasters. If the owner could show that the arrested person had escaped from a slave-state, the official was obliged immediately to authorize the owner or agent to take his property back to bondage. Anyone who interfered—harassing the owner or his agent, obstructing the officials, aiding an escape—would be fined a thousand dollars for the benefit of the slave-owner and imprisoned for a term of twelve months. In no hearing “shall the testimony of such fugitive be admitted as evidence.” The bill passed and was signed into law in September 1850.
In mid-September, arrests of fugitive slaves began in New York and on October 9, the “Man-Hunt” reached Philadelphia. Mary Walker believed she was in imminent danger and urgently had to find “a more secure home.” But security where, and with whom?
Philadelphia friends dispatched Mary Walker to Boston and to the household of a man who had learned some things about self-emancipation. For clergyman Peter Lesley, as for many Northerners who opposed slavery but avoided abolitionist involvement, the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850 forced choices. His first response to the law was dismay—it was a “horror to many here, indeed I trust to all good people everywhere.” Nonetheless he seemed uncertain whether there was anything he should or could do personally. “The only mitigation of the horror comes from the hope, as Satan always overreaches his own ends, the very enormity of the thing will produce a speedy repeal.”
Then he got a letter from a cousin in Philadelphia: Would he and his wife take in a fugitive slave?
When the minister rose to address his flock on October 30, 1850, he began his sermon with a passage from Deuteronomy. “Thou shalt not deliver unto his master the servant that is escaped from his master unto thee. He shall dwell with thee, whenever he shall choose; thou shalt not oppress him.”
Stopping short of revealing their decision to give refuge to Mary Walker, the minister posed the choice that all Northerners of conscience now faced. “Would Christ return fugitive slaves?”
Imagine the Savior saying, in reply—I cannot help you friend; it is a hard case; I pity you from my heart; but I dare not conceal you, or help you conceal yourself, for I shall be fined thousands of dollars, and probably be put in jail if I do. We can only wait and try to repeal the law next winter. “Next winter! Lord! The hunter is at my heels—there is no judge to appeal to, no jury to listen to my case… Lord, protect me, Lord…” Imagine the Savior still replying—I cannot, friend, it is against the law!
Peter Lesley broke free from the parable. “Give this law of Congress to the winds. Harbor and protect the oppressed wherever you behold him.” Mary Walker had found her sanctuary.
Addendum: Sydney Nathans will publish his next book in the spring of 2017. He writes: “If Mary Walker had returned to the South, and her owner had carried through on his threat to send her to his plantation in Alabama, the new book would have been her story, too.” Here is the catalog copy for Nathans’ forthcoming work…
A Mind to Stay
White Plantation, Black Homeland
The exodus of millions of African Americans from the rural South is a central theme of black life and liberation in the twentieth century. A Mind to Stay offers a counterpoint to the narrative of the Great Migration. Sydney Nathans tells the rare story of people who moved from being enslaved to becoming owners of the very land they had worked in bondage, and who have held on to it from emancipation through the Civil Rights era.
The story began in 1844, when absentee owner and wealthy North Carolina planter Paul Cameron bought 1600 acres near Greensboro, Alabama, and sent out 114 enslaved people to cultivate cotton and enlarge his fortune. His plantation became their home place in the 1870s, when he sold it to emancipated black families. Drawing on thousands of letters from the planter and on interviews with descendants of those who bought the land, Nathans unravels how and why the planter’s former workers purchased the site of their enslavement, kept its name as Cameron Place, and defended their homeland against challengers from the Jim Crow era to the present day.
Through the prism of a single plantation and the destiny of black families that dwelt on it for over a century and a half, A Mind to Stay brings to life a vivid cast of characters and illuminates the changing meaning of land and landowning to successive generations of rural African Americans. Those who remained fought to make the land and their lives fully free—for themselves, for their neighbors, and for those who might someday return.