Railroad of Courage Read online

  People ran in all directions. The door to our carriage was flung open, and my pa and Moses were lifted onto a seat. They were free! Then all the wagons drove off in different directions. There were not enough federal marshals to follow all the wagons and they had to guess which one was carrying Moses and my pa. Luckily, they guessed wrong, and no one followed us.

  My pa and Moses hugged my ma and me. Moses laughed, “Well, we are bound for freedom again! Those fine people in Poughkeepsie sure did surprise the federal marshals.”

  My pa said, “They surprised me, too! At first I was scared when I saw all those people coming to the courthouse. I was afraid they were a mob, but when I looked out, I saw many black faces and people dressed like Quakers. I looked at Moses and she was grinning from ear to ear. I knew then that those people were going to save us.”

  Moses decided that we should drive straight north towards Canada. Mister Coffin drove day and night, stopping at the homes of Friends and other abolitionists to harness fresh horses. Snow fell and the horses struggled to run through the deepening drifts. Would we be forced to stop?

  After several days, Mister Coffin drove to a farmhouse. He was tired, his face lined with weariness. A Friend welcomed us and offered us a wooden sleigh with metal runners. Mister Coffin harnessed the horses to the traces on the sleigh and we were off. The sleigh flew down narrow roads, across fields, and through thick forests. The snow kept falling, hiding us in its swirling whiteness. We were invisible and I felt safe again.

  Moses pointed to a tree. “Look, see that sign up ahead? I can’t read it but I know when we pass by it, we will be free! We will be in Canada!” We were silent as we crossed that border, a border marked only by a faded wooden sign. We looked at one another, hardly believing that we were truly beyond the reach of slavery. I felt a deep joy and my eyes filled with tears. Our worry and fear lifted from our shoulders. I remembered a passage from the Bible that talked about rebirth. At that moment, I felt I had been reborn. We were no longer slaves or runaways. We were free people, starting new lives in a new land.

  The sleigh went on through the snow-covered forest until we reached a log house on the edge of a small town. A young couple, Bernard and Maria, welcomed us and said we must celebrate our freedom together. Maria fed us thick soup and fresh bread while Bernard made beds for us on the floor near a stone fireplace. They spoke French to one another but English to us. I struggled to understand their words, but it was not hard to understand the warmth of their welcome.

  After resting for a few days, Mister Coffin said it was time for him to return to Poughkeepsie. I asked him to thank Missus Mott, and I promised to write and tell her about our life in Canada. Mister Coffin told us that Bernard and Maria would help us whether we stayed in Lower Canada or continued on to Upper Canada. My pa said we wanted to go to Buxton in Upper Canada, to the settlement Reverend King had founded. Mister Coffin nodded. “I think you will have a good life there and you will be welcomed by neighbours who have also travelled from slavery to freedom. I wish you every blessing. It has been an honour to help you.”

  Moses walked Mister Coffin to the door and sniffed the clear, cold air. “I’m glad to be in Canada, the only place where I feel truly safe, safe from the harsh laws of America. I’ll stay here a while before I go back to the South, but not too long. There are other slaves waiting to ride the Underground Railroad.”

  We waved goodbye to Mister Coffin and wished him Godspeed on his return journey. I had reached freedom with the help of freed slaves, Quakers, Unitarians, Presbyterians, Methodists and other abolitionists, all of them committed to the belief that slavery should end. Now my parents and I—we were free. The good people on the Underground Railroad had helped me to freedom, but they had laid a weight on my shoulders, too, and I knew that, all my life, I would fight for justice for all people, black and white.

  That night, Maria gently shook me awake. She led me to the window and we looked out at a sky ablaze with colour. “C’est l’aurore boréale … it is the northern lights,” she said. Veils of light danced in the sky, swirling above the horizon. Green, blue, orange, yellow. In Canada, there was light even before the dawn.

  LATER EVENTS IN

  THE FIGHT FOR EQUALITY

  Moses (Harriet Tubman) was never caught. She rescued hundreds of slaves. During the Civil War, she worked as a scout for the Union Army of the North. After the Civil War, she stayed in America and settled in Auburn, New York. She was married, for the second time, to a kind and gentle man. When slavery ended, she fought for the rights of women. She died in 1913 at the age of ninety-one.

  In 1861, the Civil War began in the United States. The war was fought between the North and the South. The North wanted to end slavery; the South wanted to preserve it. Brother fought brother, just as Mister Carpenter foretold.

  When the Emancipation Proclamation was passed by the United States Congress on the 1st of January, 1863, slaves were freed in all Confederate states. The Confederate Army surrendered on the 9th of April, 1865, and the Civil War officially ended.

  Former members of the Knights of the Golden Circle joined new secret armies such as the Klu Klux Klan and the Red Shirts. Their goal was to preserve a society based on the subjugation of black people.

  On the 14th of April, 1865, John Wilkes Booth assassinated President Abraham Lincoln at Ford’s Theatre in Washington, D.C. John Wilkes Booth was alleged to be a Knight of the Golden Circle.

  The Thirteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution was adopted on the 18th of December, 1865. With its passage, slavery was abolished in the United States of America forever. The Fourteenth Amendment, adopted in 1868, included the Citizenship Clause that provided an inclusive definition of citizenship, overruling the Dred Scott decision of 1857 which said that descendants of African slaves could not be citizens of the United States. The North hired teachers and built schools in the South during the Reconstruction Era. These schools educated the poor, but there were separate schools for blacks and whites.

  In 1917, women in Ontario (formerly called Upper Canada) were granted the right to vote by provincial legislation, and in 1918, the federal government granted women over the age of 21 the right to vote. For Indigenous peoples, and for some ethnic minorities, the right to vote remained out of reach for decades to come.

  In 1920, the Nineteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution granted American women the right to vote, a right known as suffrage. As was the case in Canada, restrictions and procedures based on race prevented some U.S. citizens from voting until later in the century.

  In 1925, the Historic Sites and Monuments Board of Canada recognized the importance of the Underground Railroad. From the 1830s through the 1860s, thousands of runaways settled in Canada and established new communities dedicated to the ideals of tolerance and equality under the law. Despite incidents of prejudice, the newcomers became loyal and active citizens in communities across southwestern Ontario, as well as other areas. In 1999, a series of initiatives were carried out to further commemorate the sites and people of the Underground Railroad in Canada. In October of 2001, Parks Canada installed the Tower of Freedom monument in Windsor, Ontario.

  On the 2nd of July, 1964, American President Lyndon Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act of 1964 to outlaw discrimination based on race, colour, religion, sex or national origin. Among other provisions, the Act ended unequal voter registration procedures and racial segregation in schools.

  In Canada, the Constitution Act was passed in 1982 and guaranteed rights and freedoms under the law. Section 15, Equality Rights, provides for equality “before and under the law and equal protection and benefit of law … without discrimination based on race, national or ethnic origin, colour, religion, sex, age or mental or physical disability.”

  Around the world, the fight for equality and civil rights continues to this day.

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  We are deeply indebted to Ron and Veronica Hatch and the staff at Ronsdale Press for their editorial guidance. Wit
hout their insight, support and patience, this book would never have reached the public. We wish to thank our eight grandchildren—Zoe, Sacha, Eli, Anaïs, Yemaya, Alder, Ronan and Bronwen—for their abiding interest in bedtime stories. They were the first audience for Railroad of Courage and insisted that the story of Rebecca, a girl born into slavery, be told in the context of hope and courage against the evil of slavery.

  We want to acknowledge the courage and conviction of every link in the Underground Railroad, a movement that united people of conscience in the 1800s. This book was written as a testament to the actual conductors and abolitionists who sustained the Underground Railroad: Harriet Tubman (Moses), Alexander Milton Ross (the Birdman), James P. Thomas, William Still, Priscilla Baltimore, Elijah Parish Lovejoy, David Hull, Seth Concklin, the Reverend Deacon Cushing, Philo and Ann Carpenter, and Lucretia Mott. It is unknown whether these historical figures ever met and the events in this story are fiction, as are all other characters. All references to laws of the day in Canada and America are based on historical fact.

  We are indebted to Eric Foner for articulating the workings of the Underground Railroad in Gateway to Freedom: The Hidden History of the Underground Railroad. We acknowledge the extensive work that Historica Canada and Black History Canada have done to document the central role of Canada in the Underground Railroad. We are also indebted to many historical societies across North America, such as the Alton Historical Society, which have kept the history of the Underground Railroad alive and accessible for current generations.

  During the decades when the Underground Railroad was active, Canada provided hope and a destination for thousands of runaway slaves. Without Canada, where would runaways have found freedom? We fervently hope that Canada, among other nations, will shelter those who seek freedom in our time.

  ABOUT THE AUTHORS

  Dan’s interest in slavery began when he went to the Poughkeepsie Day School in New York State. The school was in an old three-storey house that had been a stop on the Underground Railroad. The Underground Railroad was a chain of freed blacks, runaway slaves and abolitionists who helped runaways to reach freedom in Canada. The Railroad was a great work of moral imagination driven by the courage of slaves and people of conscience.

  Dan and his classmates spent many hours searching for a secret passage and a room where runaway slaves were hidden. They never found the secret passage but, at night, as Dan lay in bed, he thought about the Underground Railroad and wondered, “If I had been born a slave, would I have had the courage to run away?”

  Nancy grew up in a small town in Illinois where she saw the residue of slavery, fear and distrust among the people around her. In 1970, the United States was again a nation divided, and people of conscience felt compelled to practise civil disobedience. Dan and Nancy moved to Canada, a more open and united country, and they decided to settle there permanently.

  When their three children were little, Dan and Nancy enjoyed telling them bedtime stories. Those children grew up, as children do, and had children of their own. Now Dan and Nancy tell stories to their eight grandchildren and hope they do not grow up too soon.

  For educational resources and information about their work, please visit their website at: www.rubenstein-dyson.com.