Stealing Freedom (26 page)

In writing about Ann Maria Weems, I wanted to both tell the story of this brave young girl and paint a vivid picture of life in the mid-1800s.

In order to paint this picture, I had to know as much as possible about everything I put in the story, whether it was farming methods in the 1850s or what Washington, D.C., streets looked like in 1855. I felt that every detail I could gather would help me better create a time travel experience, and so I spent five months doing full-time research and detail gathering before I started writing, and then continued my research during the two years I wrote and edited the book.

Probably the most helpful resources for this book were the thousands of pages of slave narratives I read. These first-person accounts of slavery breathed life and blood into the concept of “slave.” They gave me details about clothing, food, and culture, but more than that, they gave voice to the intense emotions of slavery.

Because every character in the book is a real person, I was able to dig up actual records to uncover some of the facts of their lives. For example, I went to the land records and copied down everything Charles Price, Ann Maria's master, bought or
sold from about 1840 to 1860. That's how I knew he had a roan gelding named Bob and a bay mare named Sally! I went to the District of Columbia archives and found records on Ann's sister Catharine. That's how I discovered that she had asthma and that she had gone to nursing school. Canadian census records showed me that Ann's mother, Arabella, and Aunt Mimi had learned how to read and write.

I also researched details about the land, cities, towns, and artifacts that are included in the story. I interviewed Mrs. Givens, an elderly resident of Unity. She told me about the huckleberries in the woods near where Ann lived. I went to Oakley Cabin, a restored slave cabin in Montgomery County, and lay down on the cornhusk mattress so I could capture the feelings and sounds
(crackle, crackle!)
of rolling over on it. I convinced a very nice maintenance man to let me into historic St. Mary's Catholic Church so that I could climb up into the loft, which used to be reserved for slaves and free blacks, and imagine what it must have been like when Ann worshiped there.

Sometimes the best way for me to find out what Ann herself experienced was to act out the things she actually did. When I wanted to find out why she didn't like to wrap her feet in rags during the winter, I wrapped one of my feet in rags, left the other one bare, and went outside and walked around my yard until I felt I understood. In late November, the same time Ann traveled to Canada, I bought myself a ticket on a train that followed Ann's route to Chatham (although my train ride started in Washington, D.C.). Instead of getting a sleeper car for the twenty-hour trip, I got a seat, the way Ann did, so I'd
see what she saw out the windows and so I'd know what it felt like to travel for that long sitting up. (My research revealed that twenty hours in a train seat makes you bone-weary and gives you a headache!)

Of course, I wasn't only researching details, I was also piecing together Ann's story. It seems that Ann became somewhat of a celebrity in Underground Railroad circles in her day, though she has been all but forgotten today. Her story was available, but quite hidden and obscure. With the help of Anthony Cohen, Alice Newby, Bryan Prince, and Gwen Robinson, I was able to put together the bits and pieces of Ann's story from microfilmed newspaper articles, old letters found in boxes in Philadelphia and Ohio, rare books, census and land records, wills, and graveyards. Little by little, the sequence of events began to take shape.

Stealing Freedom
takes literary license to make Ann's story flow well. The first part of the book, up until Ann's escape, is really a condensed version of events that happened over a period of about five years. It was necessary, for the sake of the narrative, to change some of the specifics of the events, but the essence remains true. In order to make the story full and real, I used a combination of what really happened and what
could have
happened. The latter part of the book, beginning where Ann is made to sleep in Charles and Carol Price's bedroom, actually follows her life quite closely. There are even a few places where the dialogue is taken directly from letters and accounts written a few days after the incidents occurred.

After I was done with the writing, I continued to do research so that I'd know what happened to Ann, her family, and the other people in the book. Here is some of what I found out:

Joseph and Addison were freed in 1857. The Vigilance Committee gave John Weems the money to buy his sons. By then, donations were coming in from England as well as the United States, and the Reverend Henry Highland Garnet was helping to raise funds in Scotland for the Weems family. Legally, John Weems became Joseph and Addison's owner. Then, once the boys were home safe in Washington, D.C., John Weems had manumission papers drawn up for each of them. Manumission papers were legal documents that set a slave free. Addison got a job as a laborer, and Joseph became a foreman at the Treasury Department. In 1870, Addison shared a home in Washington with Joseph, Joseph's wife, Eliza, and their two sons, three-year-old Eugene and baby Ulysses.

Augustus was the last member of the family in slavery, but finally in late 1857 his owner in Alabama agreed to sell him. Arabella wrote in a letter to William Still, “I have just sent for my son Augustus, in Alabama. I have sent eleven hundred dollars which pays for his body and some thirty dollars to pay his fare to Washington.” Augustus was manumitted in 1858.

After all of her own children were free, Arabella Weems continued to work with Jacob Bigelow, William Still, and others to help enslaved people reach freedom. At some point, Uncle William, Aunt Mimi, and Ann must have convinced Ann's parents to give Canada a try, because by 1861 John and Arabella had moved with young John Junior and Mary to a rented farm near Uncle William's homestead. They farmed there for a while, but by 1870, after the end of the Civil War, the Weems family had moved back to Washington. Uncle William and Aunt Mimi stayed in Canada and raised their children there.

Sadly, by 1861 there is no longer any trace of Ann Maria herself. We can only guess that she either moved, changed her name, or died. Alfred's life as a free man is also a mystery. He and Ann had lived near each other in Rockville and Alfred passed though William Still's house a few months after Ann did on his way to Canada. One book published in Canada has led us to believe that the two were reunited and married, but I have not been able to find them in the census records of either the Canadian settlements or Washington, D.C. It is hoped that further research will solve the mystery of what happened to Ann and Alfred.

Catharine completed nursing school and worked as a nurse in Washington for many years. She became a home-owner when the parents of a former patient expressed their gratitude to her by giving her a frame house in the city. She never married, but shared the house with her youngest sister, Mary, and Mary's husband, James A. Savoy.

John Junior became a carpenter and by 1870 owned his own carpentry business in Washington.

Jacob Bigelow continued to help slaves reach freedom, either by legally purchasing and manumitting them or by helping them to escape. Several times, authorities sent blacks as decoys to ask Mr. Bigelow to help them escape, with the intention of trapping him in this illegal activity and throwing him in jail. But Mr. Bigelow was, somehow, never fooled, and he pursued his work with the Underground Railroad without being caught.

Since
Stealing Freedom
was first published in 1998, one very exciting piece of information has been revealed: the identity
of the mysterious Dr. H.! A reader from Arizona happened upon a book published in 1897 that confirmed that Dr. H. was Dr. Elwood Harvey, dean of the Female Medical College of Pennsylvania. It was also fascinating to learn about one of the doctor's motivations for helping Ann Maria escape: The Medical College had no dissection manikin, and there was no money in the treasury for the purchase of a manikin. Because the journey was so dangerous, Dr. Harvey was paid three hundred dollars for transporting Ann Maria to the north—
a lot
of money in those days. He used that money to buy the first dissection manikin for the Female Medical College of Pennsylvania.

Richard Price attended the University of Maryland medical school, became a doctor, married a woman named Elizabeth, and had several children.

A few years after Ann left Rockville, Charles Price purchased a building on Duke Street in Alexandria, Virginia. In this building and an adjoining jail, he and several other men, including his wife's brother, ran a flourishing slave-trading business, Price, Birch, & Co., until it was closed down by Union troops during the Civil War. The three-story brick house is now owned by the Urban League of Northern Virginia, and contains a small museum dedicated to the slaves who passed through its doors.

Unity, Maryland, is a smaller town now than it was in 1853. It has only a few houses and no businesses, not even a post office. The home of William Price, which was the tavern and the inn, is now a private home.

St. Mary's Catholic Church is still standing in Rockville,
although the graveyard has many more headstones than it did when Ann lived there, and instead of a few carriages rolling by each day, heavy traffic zips by on busy streets. Rockville has grown into a city. Michael and Cecilia Fitzgerald (the couple who looked at their grave sites with Father Dougherty) are both buried at St. Mary's, along with their son, Edward, and his wife, Molly, and Edward and Molly's son F. Scott Fitzgerald, the author of
The Great Gatsby
and other well-known American novels. You can visit their graves at St. Mary's Church in Rockville.

In Washington, D.C., cattle and sheep don't wander down the streets anymore. The boggy areas have been filled in, houses and offices have been built on the empty lots, and Washington has grown into a major U.S. city. The buildings Ann saw—the White House, the Capitol, and the Treasury Building—are still there, but the Capitol now has a marble dome rather than the wooden one it had when Ann drove past it.

William Still's house in Philadelphia was torn down in 1992. A blue plaque marks the place where it stood on Twelfth Street.

The willow tree in the backyard where Ann lived near Dresden is still standing.

I would like to thank Anthony Cohen, whose book
The Underground Railroad in Montgomery County
introduced me to Ann Maria Weems, and who gave enthusiastic support throughout the researching and writing of this book. I would also like to thank my editor, Tracy Gates, for her invaluable guidance.

My gratitude goes out to the librarians and research assistants at the following historic sites and facilities: the Montgomery County Historical Society; the Maryland State Archives; St. Mary's Catholic Church in Rockville, Maryland; the Rockville Office of Land Records; the Agricultural Museum of Montgomery County; Mount Olivet Cemetery of Washington, D.C.; Martin Luther King, Jr., Public Library, Washing-toniana Division, in Washington, D.C.; the District of Columbia Archives; the Library of Congress; Loudon Park Cemetery, in Baltimore; the Northern Virginia Urban League, of Alexandria, Virginia; the Alexandria Office of Land Records; the Historical Society of Pennsylvania; the City Archives of Philadelphia; the New-York Historical Society; and in Ontario, Canada: the Ontario Historical Society; the Raleigh Township Centennial Museum; and the Chatham Office of Land Records.

Special thanks go to Alice and Duane Newby, Bryan and
Shannon Prince, and Gwen and John Robinson, all of Buxton, Ontario, who fed me, gave me a place to sleep, drove me all over Chatham, Dresden, and Buxton, and greatly contributed to my research into Ann's life in Canada. I was honored to meet with and learn from two descendants of Reverend A. N. Freeman: Madeline Wheeler Murphy, his great-granddaughter, and Christopher M. Rabb, his great-great-great-grandson. Several people also helped with oral histories and questions about farming, crops, livestock, and hundreds of other matters. They were: Mrs. Givens, Charlie Lake, Mike Heyser, Mike and Lisa Corbitt, Sally Davies, Mary Ella Randal, Uma Krishnaswami, and Monica Mundstuk.

And finally, I would like to thank my family: Rachel, always a first reader; Daniel, always supportive and enthusiastic; and Jim, who not only helped with the editing but convinced me I could do it.