Forbidden Fruit (20 page)

In 1843, John “Daddy” Hall and his fifth wife broke the color barrier, too. They arrived
at Sydenham Village near Canada’s Owen Sound, where Hall became the first black settler.
While Hall built a shack and cleared the land, his English wife traveled back and
forth from their former home in Rocky Saugeen near Durham, where she milked the cows:
she had a baby bound to her back. In areas as remote as Sydenham Village color might
have mattered a lot less than having the grit to survive in a rugged frontier.

Hall, born around 1807 near Amherstburg, had been kidnapped when he was about ten
by slave raiders. They took him and eleven other members of his family to a Kentucky
plantation. Eventually, an adult Hall and his first wife, an enslaved woman, ran away
to Toronto. After his first wife died, Hall married three more times. In Sydenham
Village, he became a legendary figure, reportedly living to be 118. People claimed
he had grown a third set of teeth and sprouted hair after he turned one hundred. They
also said he had regained his sight after a spell of blindness. By the time he died
in 1925, he had served as the town crier and bell ringer and a walking newspaper,
leaving his mark on the land and on the women he loved.

On February 21, 1856, an article entitled “Elopement Extraordinary” appeared in the
Louisville press, raising suspicions about another kind of interracial affair, an
apparent love affair between a white man and a black woman. The article claimed a
twenty-two-year-old black female cook named Mary Jane had been captured in New Albany,
Indiana, with a white Easterner named Elisha Hillyer. According to historian Blaine
Hudson’s account, the woman supposedly rendezvoused with the man in Louisville and
then the pair rode a ferry across the Ohio River. However, the ferryman noticed the
woman’s color when her lover lifted her veil to kiss her.

There was more than romance at work, though, when Charles Storum or Storeman, who
was half African and half American Indian, married a French-Canadian woman named Mary
Ann Fowler sometime in the 1800s. In 1751, Storum had been born in Fishkill, New York,
a village which, at the time of the Revolutionary War, contained only about a dozen
houses, a tavern, two churches and a school. After his marriage, he and Fowler had
four sons—Charles Jr., William, Samuel and John—three of whom grew up to be Underground
Railroad conductors.

Charles Storum worked on whale ships so he could receive papers showing he was free.
Catching thrashing whales capable of crushing a man or a boat was dirty and dangerous
work, and in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries many blacks did it. In fact,
Lewis Temple, a black resident of New Bedford, Massachusetts, used his skills as a
blacksmith to design an improved harpoon that kept whales from slipping loose from
hooks.

While Charles Storum sailed the seas catching whales, his wife remained in the Windsor,
Connecticut, area and cared for their children. They obviously knew their heritage
and learned to cherish freedom. Two Storum sons moved to New York state—Charles Jr.
settling in Watertown, William near Jamestown—and Samuel moved to Warren, Pennsylvania.
John eventually moved to Lapeer County, Michigan. The three sons on the East Coast
formed their own slave-helping network, moving fugitives from the home of one brother
to the next. William and Sarah Storum had an even closer connection to the antislavery
movement. In 1840, their daughter, Caroline, married a runaway slave named Jermain
Loguen, and they settled in Syracuse, New York. At the time, Syracuse had about two
hundred blacks in a community of seven thousand. Loguen became an African Methodist
Episcopal Zion Church minister and principal agent of the Syracuse Underground Railroad
station. He actually ran notices in the local press about Underground Railroad activities,
urging people to hire fugitives. He also joined Frederick Douglass on the lecture
circuit. And his daughter, Helen, married Douglass’s son, Lewis, continuing the family
pattern of activism.

There was a pattern to the legend of William Davis, too. In the 1850s, a Scots-Irishman
living near the Pennsylvania-Virginia border fell in love with his black mistress,
scandalizing other whites. The scandal wasn’t the interracial sex; it was the fact
that this white bachelor farmer allegedly allowed his black mistress to run his household.
Soon the Scots-Irishman became ill and began wasting away. Believing that he had been
poisoned, he called the woman and their three children to his bedside and urged them
to leave his farm and flee as far north as possible to avoid getting poisoned, too.

This, according to descendants, was the beginning of their family saga. It’s the story
of a black family who became pioneers in the Michigan wilderness, a place teeming
with land far from the reach of slave owners, bounty hunters and kidnappers who didn’t
distinguish between free and enslaved blacks.

The William Davis who wound up in northern Michigan was one of the Scots-Irishman’s
three mulatto children. In Philadelphia, he married Mildred Brand, a midwife who smoked
a clay pipe after every meal and had hair long enough to sit on. After they had two
children, they left Pennsylvania in a covered wagon and journeyed to Medina County,
Ohio. They lived there for three years and had two more children. Around 1862, the
family finally arrived in what later became Benzie County, Michigan, in the northwest
corner of the Lower Peninsula. This, they decided, was their safe haven, their home.
Davis homesteaded one hundred and sixty acres, and so did his oldest son, Joseph B.,
then about twenty-three. William and Mildred raised their own six children and sixteen
others, including a newborn baby found in a gunny sack by the side of the road.

Remembering how it felt to be outcasts and on the run, they sheltered any child, black,
white or Indian, who needed a home. Twice a year, their son, Joseph, walked to Traverse
City, thirty-five miles away, for supplies, spending a whole week trudging down Indian
trails. On his way to his destination, he would spend the night with families he knew,
repaying them by dropping off supplies on his return. The round-trip for sugar, flour
and other supplies took about a week. At age twenty-five, Joseph married a seventeen-year-old
girl who was one of the children the Davises had taken in. In 1864, the couple had
a son named Horace Burr Davis, the first baby to be born in Joyfield Township after
the place got an official name.

On May 15, 1941, a light-skinned black man named Calvin Clark Davis passed for white
to join the 5th U.S. Army Air Force, 90th Bombardment Group, 400th Squadron. He was
the son of Horace Burr Davis and a white woman named Hattie. At the time, blacks were
considered incapable of handling complicated machinery and maneuvers and barred from
the Air Force. Around the same time, the famed black pilots known as Tuskegee Airmen
began their training: like other black fighting units, the Airmen were considered
experiments to see how blacks would perform in aerial combat.

There always have been people who passed for something or somebody they weren’t. Most
of the time, they were light-skinned blacks, like Davis, who passed for white, sometimes
to escape slavery, sometimes to gain economic or social advantages and sometimes to
live or die for their country. Other light-skinned blacks, like William Webb, spied
on slave catchers. NAACP official Walter White, a light-skinned blue-eyed black man,
infiltrated groups such as the Ku Klux Klan to collect information about lynchings.
He published his research in the 1929 book
Rope and Faggot.

Calvin Clark Davis graduated from army radio school, and after running a radio station
at Rapid City, South Dakota, he was picked for combat duty in a heavy bombardment
group. He arrived in New Guinea on June 30, 1943. Three weeks later, he was a radio
gunner on a B-24 Liberator. He completed fifty missions, or three hundred hours of
flying, in a few months. Wounded on both his first and last missions, he earned two
Purple Hearts. He was among a bomber crew that received the Distinguished Flying Cross
for heroism during an attack on a Japanese-held airfield in Wewak, New Guinea, on
August 29, 1943, and for heroism in a flight over Rabaul, New Guinea, on October 25,
1943.

Though he experienced the same fears as any combat soldier, Davis told his hometown
newspaper that he felt most at home in war-torn skies, his senses whipped to a boil
by the struggle to stay alive. After flying enough missions as a gunner aboard a B-24
to escape further combat, he volunteered to continue flying with the 8th Air Force
in Ipswich, England. He wound up in Europe as a radio operator and gunner with the
8th U.S. Army Air Force, the 390th Bombardment Group, 570th Squadron. Friendly but
reserved, he was older than most of the crew. When they went out on weekend passes,
he never joined them, socializing on his own. He flew on sixteen missions. His last
one came at the end of November 1944, the year Nat “King” Cole released a song called
“Straighten Up and Fly Right” and Allied soldiers walked into a storm of gunfire off
the French province of Normandy.

Bill Pace, the ball-turret gunner on Davis’s plane, had troubling dreams on the night
of November 29, 1944, dreams that made him take his parachute into the turret of the
Asterisk, a B-17 bomber. On November 30, the crew’s target was the oil refineries
of Merseburg, Germany. The B-17 dropped its bombs, and the Germans began firing antiaircraft
guns at the formation, taking down more than fifty bombers. The antiaircraft hit the
radar ship, and its pilot lost control of his plane, landing on top of the B-17 containing
Davis. The plane broke in half. Six of the bomber’s nine crewmen, including Calvin
Clark Davis, were killed. The remains of Technical Sergeant Calvin C. Davis rest in
Ardennes American Cemetery, Neupre, Belgium, plot D, row 10, grave 29. It is surrounded
by white crosses and dark memories, especially for soldiers who fought bigotry at
home and abroad.

In 2002, one of Davis’s cousins, Calvin Murphy of Bear Lake, Michigan, revealed that
Davis had passed for white to fight in World War II and urged Congress to find out
if he’d received all the medals he’d earned. In a February 18, 2002, ceremony at Davis’s
old school, Bear Lake High School, the airman posthumously received the Distinguished
Flying Cross with two bronze oak leaf clusters, the Air Medal with one bronze oak
leaf cluster, the Purple Heart with one bronze oak leaf cluster, the World War II
Victory Medal, the European-African-Middle Eastern Campaign Medal, the Good Conduct
Medal and the American Defense Service Medal.

“The story of Calvin Clark Davis deserves to be heard,” said Congressman John Conyers.
“If ever there was a soldier worthy of recognition, it is Mr. Davis. He should be
honored not only for his heroic efforts as a soldier, but for his willingness to serve
a country that did not necessarily want his service.”

“There were many great sacrifices made by our troops in World War II, but I have never
heard of someone going to the length Calvin Davis did to serve his country,” said
Congressman Pete Hoekstra. “…Mr. Davis’ dedication to his country, in spite of the
prejudice of his time, is a testament to his personal strength and the strength of
the American character.”

H
e could have been shot to shreds at any moment, his mission a failure, his name as
forgotten as a song played just once at a whooping, stomping, all-night slave dance.
Yet in the spring of 1862, nothing could stop Samuel Ballton from roaming through
death-drenched Virginia alone. During perhaps the most dangerous time in American
history, this runaway slave and Union army cook returned to Confederate territory,
a perfect target for rifle muskets that could hit targets six hundred yards away.

One simple, irresistible desire drove him.

He wanted to see his wife.

All across America, Union and Confederate soldiers with Bibles in their pockets blew
up railroad bridges; rode horses until the animals fell dead; slogged through downpours
and droughts; died from cholera, lung disease, measles, typhoid, mumps, syphilis,
tuberculosis and infected wounds; and killed one another in unmatched numbers. Still,
Ballton never doubted he could make his way back to Ann Rebecca Ballton in Westmoreland
County, Virginia, even if it meant sneaking past Confederate lines. He was, after
all, a man who had escaped from slavery with food under his shirt and who had escaped
capture and dodged death while cooking for the Yankees.

But even luck can take a vacation. Without so much as a whispered good-bye or wave,
it suddenly abandoned Ballton on a spring day in 1862.

He stumbled upon a Confederate camp and, suddenly, rebels with guns surrounded him.
In dealing with blacks who strayed or ran off from their plantations or farms, rebel
soldiers did not follow the conventions or rules of war. Blacks could not expect to
be held in prison camps or treated for their ailments and injuries. They could expect
to die at the hands of men who considered them traitors to their way of life and an
insult to Southern white fighting men.

Yet Ballton didn’t die the day the rebels caught him. He could never explain how he’d
figured out what would save him: the right words just fell from his lips and landed
at his captors’ feet. The Yankees had dragged him off, he told them, but he had escaped.
Now, bless God, he was just trying to get back home to his good old master.

“Many, many ‘good niggers’ were bestowed on him when he told that story,” according
to a story about Ballton that later appeared in a Brooklyn newspaper. Then he passed
through their lines, heading home to a brown-skinned wife with smiling eyes.

The year of his escape, Samuel Ballton was twenty-three years old, but he had been
put to work at the age of seven. He could neither read nor write nor count, but he
had scooped up bits of knowledge from everything that swirled around him. He stood
only five-six or five-seven; yet he had always had a large idea of himself. On January
1, 1838, he had been born a slave in Westmoreland County, north of the capital of
Richmond and sandwiched between the Rappahannock and Potomac rivers. Maybe it was
those ever-flowing rivers that had stretched his imagination and made him dream of
sailing off and moving on, his energy as constant, as ceaseless as the sway and splash
of waters. Yet there was no way he could have guessed that one day he would live within
sight of a sea that embraced the Atlantic Ocean. He certainly could not have guessed
that he would develop and sell houses or that he would learn to write well enough
to compose snappish letters to newspaper editors.

Still, even while living in that shadow land called slavery—a place where some black
people were treated like pets and others might be beaten to death for looking a white
person in the eye—he’d shown flashes of inner fire. His master was a man named Vincent
Marmaduke, who had inherited slaves, cows and beds from his grandfather. Samuel Ballton
had listened carefully to the Marmadukes as they read newspapers aloud and talked
about Yankees and freedom and a brewing war. In his later years, Ballton never claimed
that his owners had starved or beaten him, corrupted by their own power. However,
he fell in love with the idea of freedom as soon as he heard about it. It was like
a molasses-soaked biscuit that a field-worker hid inside a rag and stole bites from
throughout the day. It was an idea that he bought at once without even bothering to
find out what it might cost or how long it would last.

When the war started, Ballton and all the other able-bodied slaves on the Marmaduke
plantation had been hired out to work as section hands on the Virginia Central Railroad
in the Blue Ridge Mountains, which would have been coming alive just then with red-buds
and songbirds. Romantic stories later came to surround men like these, the so-called
gandy dancers, who sang as they worked: they moved like circling dancers as they dragged
or lined up the thirty-nine-foot rails or nailed spikes to the thick wooden planks
supporting the tracks. However, in the Civil War, railroad repair gangs became vital
parts of the war machine; they repaired track and bridges destroyed by the enemy so
troops, ammunition and other supplies could keep rumbling to their destinations.

Suddenly, Samuel Ballton, who had never been more than twenty miles from the Marmaduke
plantation, found himself two hundred miles away. In April 1862, General William Rosecrans,
a ruddy-faced man known to his men as Old Rosy, cut in behind the headquarters where
Ballton was laboring. The slaves were transferred to Frederick Hall station, fifty
miles from Richmond. The idea of escaping, already a seed, ripened in the spring air,
and Sam Ballton wasn’t the only one who felt it growing. Already, other slaves had
run to Yankee boats in the Potomac and Rappahannock rivers. In the first year of the
war, most fugitive slaves ran alone, not sure what kind of reception they’d receive
from Northern troops and not yet having the means to support their families. Ballton’s
chance came during the Whitsunday holiday, celebrated the seventh Sunday after Easter;
it was a festival commemorating the descent of the Holy Spirit on the day of Pentecost.
During the celebration, which ran from Saturday until Tuesday, Ballton and five fellow
slaves felt their own spirits rise and decided to make their break for freedom.

They stuck a little flour and bacon under their shirts and took off. They traveled
seventeen miles that Saturday, running into the roadmaster of the railroad. The encounter
rattled the slaves, but the roadmaster suspected nothing. Sunday night, they continued
toward the North and freedom, each day staying in the woods out of sight. On Monday
night, they got lost and felt sure they would be missed and recaptured. However, heavy
rains pounded them, giving them added pools of time: no one would expect them to slosh
or wade their way through such a storm. Wednesday morning, about four miles from the
Spotsylvania Court House, they ran into Yankee pickets, a group of soldiers placed
in front of a line to warn of the enemy’s advance. The pickets took them in.

That was how Sam Ballton became a cook for the Yankees in the 6th Wisconsin Regiment
in Fredericksburg in the northeastern corner of Virginia, an inspection and shipping
point for tobacco, agricultural exports and slaves. However, he couldn’t stop worrying
about Ann Rebecca Richardson, whom he had married in April 1861 in a ceremony conducted
by John Bates, the overseer for Rebecca’s owner, John Kricher. In some cases, the
families of fugitives were jailed, resold or forced to do the work of those they’d
left behind.

After fooling the rebels, Sam spent three days with Rebecca, but didn’t take her with
him, wanting to save more money before moving her to Fredericksburg. However, he took
three other slaves with him. They stole four mules at a nearby farm and managed to
reach Fredericksburg safely. After piling up more earnings, Ballton returned to Ann
Rebecca, this time ready to carry her over the threshold of freedom. Later, he would
tell a reporter for the
Brooklyn Eagle
that it was the proudest day of his life.

“Rebecca, I’m going to take you to freedom,” he told her.

Besides Rebecca, he also guided her mother and another pair of slaves to Fredericksburg.
He was their personal conductor on his own impromptu road to liberty, and he knew
every twist, rise and dip of the way.

The group left on a Sunday, creeping away in the shadows. Their journey of more than
fifty miles lasted fourteen hours. It wore out everyone in the group, stripping them
down to tingly nerves, sore feet and sweat, but Samuel and Rebecca later claimed they
felt not even a whiff of fatigue. Ballton settled his wife in Alexandria, north of
Fredericksburg. The river port, which sat directly across the Potomac from Washington,
D.C., had been occupied by the North in May 1861 and turned into a Federal supply
base and hospital depot.

Like many other African-American men, Ballton had wanted to fight in the war from
the start, sensing in it the potential for unleashing freedom. Yet, while the South
early on used blacks as military laborers, forced conscripts and, in some cases, voluntary
fighters, the North was slow to unveil its secret weapon. Slavery was the match that
had set the country on fire in 1861, but it was not the cause that inflamed Northern
white men riding off to battle. All their speeches and slogans called it a war to
save the Union, and that was how they saw it. However, as the Union army advanced
into the heartland of the Confederacy, enslaved people like Samuel Ballton, who had
dreamed of running to the North, realized they no longer had to travel thousands of
miles to find havens. They could travel hundreds—or, perhaps, only five or six.

In the beginning of the war, Northern troops usually sent fugitive slaves back to
their masters. However, by the summer of 1862, Union troops began to get smarter.
They didn’t see themselves as avenging angels come to liberate slaves, but they began
to see the common sense in bringing slaves to their lines and putting them to work.
Soon, runaway slaves began fleeing in groups, black men, women and children showing
up by the hundreds at refugee camps, all of them “contrabands of war.” Samuel Ballton
himself was a contraband for the 6th Wisconsin before joining the 5th Massachusetts
Cavalry. In most camps, conditions were dreary, but the camp at Corinth, Mississippi,
actually became a village with compounds, streets, numbers, schools, a commissary,
hospital and a cooperative farm that produced cotton and produce that the army bought.

In January 1863, with the Union army stumbling and losing steam, President Lincoln
finally rolled out his big guns and loaded them. He issued the Emancipation Proclamation,
freeing the slaves in rebelling states. This, in turn, opened the door to using officially
organized black troops who would serve under white commanding officers. Oh, the sneers,
laughter and skepticism this set off.

“He [the Negro] has not the mental vigor and energy, he cannot stand up against adversity,”
wrote Colonel Charles Francis Adams Jr., commander of the cavalry unit that Samuel
Ballton would join. “A sick nigger, for instance, at once gives up and lies down to
die, the personification of humanity reduced to a wet rag….” Adams added in a November
2, 1864, letter to his father.

Colonel Adams Jr. began a September 18, 1864, letter to his brother, Henry, by joking
that the Negroes ate and slept too much, had oversized feet, “sugar loaf craniums”
and spirits that would snap under the slightest pressure. The great-grandson of President
John Adams and the grandson of President John Quincy Adams, Colonel Adams believed
Negro infantry would be as effective as any if well led. However, he was doubtful
that individual blacks, their initiative whittled away by slavery, could function
as scouts and advance guards in cavalry units where “single men in every exposed position
have only themselves and their own nerve, intelligence and quickness to rely on….”

Other skeptics doubted that black soldiers would have the presence of mind to load
rifle muskets, get into prime positions, half-cock their rifle muskets and fire while
artillery boomed around them and men lost arms and legs or fell into meshes of trip
wires. They felt, like Adams, that blacks would either wilt or wander off.

They didn’t expect hordes of prospective black soldiers to show up at recruiting stations
with the scars from whippings on their backs and dog bites on their legs. They hadn’t
counted on people like Alfred White, a black man from Michigan, who enlisted just
five days before the birth of his son and fought at Honey Hill, South Carolina. They
didn’t realize that Joshua Dunbar, the forty-year-old father of poet Paul Laurence
Dunbar, would enlist in the 55th Massachusetts Infantry Regiment and the 5th Massachusetts
Cavalry.

They didn’t anticipate that Lucy Higgs Nichols, a fugitive slave, would dash into
the camp of the 23rd Regiment of Indiana Volunteers near Bolivar, Tennessee, in 1862,
stay with that regiment for the whole war and become a legend. The
Arcata Union
newspaper claimed that “She was a slave & escaped with her husband & little girl
from a cruel master. They joined the regiment at Bolivar, Tennessee & when her husband
was killed she took up his rifle & marched in his stead.” The
Sandusky Star
told a similar tale, claiming the soldiers had protected her when her master tried
to reclaim her and that she had participated in twenty-eight battles, burying a daughter
at Vicksburg. Her government pension file, however, only documents that she served
as the regiment’s unofficial nurse, cook and laundress and later became an honorary
member of the Grand Army of the Republic. In 1899, a special act of Congress granted
her a pension of twelve dollars a month.