The Invisible Line (7 page)

The children might ride in an oxcart, but the adults walked in chains. If their new owner was looking for more slaves to buy, they would take an indirect route, from town to town. He might sell or trade some of his quarry during the journey. Flatboats and steamers may have carried them part of the way—their own Middle Passage, perhaps the only boats they had been on besides ferries across the Pee Dee. Lashed with the cold, they were likely to encounter other shivering gangs: most slaves were marched inland during the winter months.
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Exhausted, freezing, and hungry, the slaves reached their destination. Given that Gunter was buying women and children, his piece of wilderness had probably already been logged, burned, grubbed out, cleared, and fenced—that was work for strong men alone. But women and even young children could pick cotton. Instead of tents, they might have rough cabins to sleep in, built by earlier arrivals. If they survived the usual fevers that plagued and often killed new arrivals, they would be plowing and planting cottonseed by early April. All summer they thinned the crop, and by August they were picking the cotton. The harvest could last four or five months.
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Unlike men and women sold from tobacco country in Virginia and Maryland, Stephen Wall's slaves had experience tending a cotton crop. They knew how to cope with the work's unrelenting tedium, and the razorsharp edges of the cotton bolls had already seasoned and calloused their hands into more scar than skin. Unlike North Carolina slaves, though, Alabama cotton hands worked seven days a week, often until they could barely move. After hot days picking, drying, ginning, and baling the crop, they spent nights carding, spinning, and reeling it. While back home a slave might be promoted to foreman, in Alabama they were much more likely to toil under hired overseers, who slaves and masters alike complained were too liberal with the lash and more likely to attack the women. When the slaves were not working, they were crushed with memories of the people and places they would never see again.
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Back in North Carolina, the men, women, and children who remained were haunted by memories of the ones who had disappeared—friends and parents, husbands and wives, sons and daughters. Some who went south and west were able to remain in contact with their families, usually in situations in which they were not sold but rather moved with their owners. More often, the lives awaiting slaves in Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana were a sickening mystery to the ones left behind. It was all the more sickening because they knew that they could be next.
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On Stephen Wall's plantation, the person who knew the most about what the slaves could expect in Alabama was Colonel Wall himself. He had a brother and a sister and nieces and nephews who had moved to northern Mississippi, an area that was preparing to produce more cotton, with more slaves, than just about anywhere else in the world. Wall's kin kept him apprised of their lives on the frontier. They, in turn, followed their family's fortunes back east, whispering among themselves about scandalous goings-on in Stephen Wall's house. Wall was willing to sell twelve of his slaves south even though he knew that he was sentencing them to hardship and misery. Perhaps Wall's enslaved sons and daughters understood what he was capable of doing too.
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THE JOURNEY BEGAN like many others. More than two years after his sale of a dozen slaves to Mr. Gunter of Alabama, Stephen Wall watched five more leave the plantation—his own children. He signed the requisite papers, and three boys and their two sisters were put on a wagon heading west with a Mississippi planter named Richmond Love. The children might have taken comfort in the fact that they were traveling out of season—Indian summer instead of winter's depths. Perhaps the older boys—Napoleon, Orindatus—knew their new master, a kinsman and trusted friend of their father who had been visiting his family in Richmond County. Most important, their father probably assured the children that once west, they would turn north to freedom.
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Still, much of the way the Wall children followed the ominous route of slaves headed deep into cotton country. They rode through mountain passes and floated downriver to the Ohio. The children, ages two to sixteen, had one another for company, but they had never before left North Carolina, or their mothers. Richmond Love had promised to take care of the children, but no one could stop him from changing direction with the small fortune in slaves that he now owned. Even if he intended to keep his word, the market for slaves was so strong that kidnapping was a constant danger. There were still months of work to do on cotton plantations in Mississippi.
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Past Cincinnati, Love and the Wall children finally set foot on free soil. By October, the corn harvest was over. The pale clay fields lay bare, and first frost approached. As they neared their destination, the country roads grew crowded with travelers, including other dark faces. Over the previous fifteen years, the journey from North Carolina to this part of Indiana had become an established route to freedom for people of color. Thousands of Quakers were meeting over several days in a town called Whitewater. It was humble country in the rolling hills just a few miles west of the Ohio line. A visitor would never guess that it was Indiana's highest spot; no hill rose more than thirty feet above its surroundings.
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The Quakers received Richmond Love quietly but not coldly. To all appearances, the stranger was a “man of talent, courteous and affable in his manners,” yet all the same he was a Mississippi planter traveling with his slaves—children, no less. This made him evil personified, an “unrepenting and obdurate oppressor,” a man who bought and sold human beings. Even more than other gatherings of the Society of Friends, the Indiana Yearly Meeting abhorred slavery, declaring that “a just and dreadful retribution” awaited slaveowners in eternity “at that awful tribunal, where sophistry will not prevail to exculpate.”
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Slavery was the reason many of the meeting's attendees had moved to Indiana in the first place, forgoing rich inheritances of land and people in Virginia and the Carolinas in favor of a life of “righteousness and benevolence” and “steady perseverance” in the struggle for universal liberty. Their ranks included people like Levi Coffin, later described as the “President of the Underground Railroad,” who was already busy helping hundreds of Kentucky runaways flee north through Indiana. Quakers elsewhere might talk of gradual emancipation and of sending freedpeople to Liberia and Haiti, but the Indiana Yearly Meeting rejected colonization and demanded immediate emancipation. They boycotted Southern cotton, sugar, rice, and other “slave wrought produce.” They hated slavery so much that they wondered if their feelings were sinful. They had to counsel themselves to cultivate feelings of sympathy for slaveowners and “pray for these enemies of humanity.”
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Richmond Love waited for the meeting to reach consensus on its rules and discipline. He waited for the Indian Committee to report that it was having “little success ... civilizing these sons of the forest.” Then the Committee on the Concerns of the People of Colour convened, and Love introduced himself and revealed his business with the Society of Friends. Love informed the committee that he did not see himself as the children's owner but rather as their guardian. He had traveled so far, and at such considerable expense, because, as one Quaker reported, “his conscience would not permit him to hold them any longer as slaves.” All he wanted for them was “that which is just and equal”—the opportunity to be educated, to study agriculture, or to learn a trade. He was hoping the Quakers would help him find places for the children in good schools and a welcoming community. With money supplied by Stephen Wall, Love offered to cover any expense.
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If Love's words made it seem as if the Quakers' prayers were coming true, in truth he had experienced no epiphany about bondage and freedom. He had followed Wall's instructions and freed the children, but it was an isolated transaction, bound by honor. After he left Indiana, he would return home to Mississippi, where he owned, and showed no intention of emancipating, many slaves. The Quakers assigned two men the task of finding new homes and new lives for the children.
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MAIN STREET in Harveysburg, Ohio, ran several blocks east to west, curving north just before Caesar's Creek. The street was lined with trees, many of them still saplings, and the buildings—wagon maker, blacksmith, tannery, shoemaker—were whitewashed every spring. It was a farming town, about forty-five miles northeast of Cincinnati. The road winding up the hill north of town opened onto a patchwork of green and gold, fields of corn and wheat that stretched for miles to the horizon along the Miami River Valley.
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Just before the hill was a plain white-brick building on a quiet street, a single-room schoolhouse. On hard benches the Wall children studied literature, arithmetic, and abolitionism. Not ten years old, the school was the state's first for colored children, founded by Elizabeth and Jesse Harvey. Harvey was a physician and an educator who delivered public lectures on history and science twice a week. But most of all, he was an abolitionist. The town had been named for his family, Quakers who had left North Carolina in protest against slavery. Antislavery ideas flowered and ripened in Harveysburg like the wild plums that local boys and girls feasted on every summer and the blackberries that spread like weeds.
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It was one thing to hate slavery; the Wall children could hate slavery in North Carolina. In Harveysburg, however, they were being raised by people who were striving to destroy the institution. Runaways from Kentucky repeatedly made their way north through the town. They had been routed to Harveysburg by people who had harbored them farther south and knew it was “a good anti-slavery neighborhood.” It was their second or third stop on free soil. Among Quakers and free blacks, they could begin to shed their fears of capture and imagine life after bondage.
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Although Stephen Wall knew that his children were being educated to undo his own way of life, he continued to support them. He gave them enough money to make them some of the richest people in the town and ensured their acceptance in the community. Wall came to regard Jesse Harvey as “my Friend” and became one of the colored school's principal benefactors. When Wall died of a sudden attack of typhus in 1845, he left tens of thousands of dollars and thousands of acres of Ohio land “for the purpose of . . . adeing, defending and securing the just rights of those mulatoe children . . . in a special manner.” He left Dr. Harvey another five hundred.
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Perhaps Wall acted out of genuine feeling. From Richmond County, his younger brother Mial paid out the bequests faithfully and wrote doting letters to his niece Caroline, offering advice about love, marriage, and life. At the same time, moving the children out of North Carolina allowed Stephen Wall to continue living the way he had always lived. If his slave family had given the neighbors cause for alarm, the children's absence defused it. By being generous with his “mulatoe children,” he was proving himself noble enough to continue to own slaves. In gratitude for Richmond Love's honorable behavior in guiding the children to freedom, Wall willed him two men and three boys. Wall gave his children liberty and comfortable lives. At the same time, their mothers stayed in slavery. The course of the river had changed, but the boundary line remained the same.
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T
HE MEN SET the spring pole in a muddy clearing along Goose Creek. Projecting diagonally from the earth, the pole—a twenty-foot sapling—looked like a giant fishing rod. Its far end was anchored down, the middle propped by a fulcrum of forked wood. From the near end, high overhead, a taut rope fell straight into a hole in the ground. Instead of a hook, a drill bit was tied to the rope, maybe a hundred, two hundred, or even five hundred feet below the surface. By pulling down on the pole and letting it spring up, a crew of men could generate enough force to bore inch by inch through Kentucky rock.
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The drilling never stopped. Night and day a succession of crews operated the spring pole. They sank copper tubing into the well and siphoned sand out. They kept a blacksmith's fire burning in case the bit cracked or grew dull. Some drillers pulled with both hands, and when the pole sprang upward, they looked like they were bound to a whipping post. Other crews tied the ropes to their feet like stirrups, working with an elastic high step, a monotonous, grueling dance.