Bound for Canaan Read Free

may turn into a disaster.
    At the two-mile marker the barber screws up his courage and whistles. Another black man slips from the woods, with a gun at the ready. Walk another two miles, he tells the barber, and falls into step behind him. At the next appointed spot, a second armed man appears, and orders him to walk two more miles, with the two gunmen now following behind him. The drill is repeated four times, until the barber is surrounded by eight armed men.
    Sixteen miles beyond Madison, instead of another gunman, there is a wagon waiting. Into it the barber climbs, and for the first time during that long night, perhaps, he begins to breathe normally again. Ahead of him lie the welcoming farms of white Presbyterian and Quaker farmers, of free blacks who do not fear the writs and guns of slave hunters, and his own freedom.
    George DeBaptiste, the man who prompted the barber’s elaborate escape, who executed it, who ensured that even if the fugitive’s party was discovered it was carrying enough firepower to defend itself, was also, as it happened, a barber. He was also the secret head of the local Underground Railroad. In some respects, DeBaptiste was a very ordinary man, about thirty years old at the time, well known to everyone in Madison as a respectable member of the town’s small free-black middle class. Unknown to them, almost every day of his life, he tested the limits to which a black man would be allowed to go in the deeply racist America of the 1840s.
    It was dangerous enough for radical white abolitionists to risk helping fugitive strangers, breaking federal law every time they did it. For a black man, who could never count on the law to be on his side, it was brave beyond imagining. For the underground, both opportunity and death were as close as the Kentucky shore. Madison stood on the invisible line thatran along the Ohio River, dividing the slave states from the free as absolutely as if they had been cut apart by a cleaver. During his eight years in Madison, DeBaptiste estimated that he personally assisted 108 fugitives to freedom, and several times that number indirectly. Failure at any point could easily have cost him his life.
    The name of the barber who escaped that night more than a century and a half ago has long been forgotten. His story still exists only because it survived in the memory of George DeBaptiste, who recounted it to a reporter for a Detroit newspaper in 1870, a few years before he died. But the events of that night were epochal, in their way. Another chip had silently been knocked out of the edifice of slavery, and another victory gained for the clandestine army that was changing America.
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    A t the start of the twenty-first century, Americans are in the midst of a contentious, often painful, national debate about slavery and its role in American history. At a time when earlier remedies for inequality have been discarded as politically and practically unacceptable, as the historian of American slavery Ira Berlin has put it, “slavery has become a language, a way to talk about race, in a society in which it seems that blacks and whites hardly talk to each other at all.” Modern-day racism’s roots lie in the slavery era, and any attempt to seriously address race today must also take into account not only the slavery of the past, but also the commitment and sacrifices of other Americans, both black and white, to bring slavery to an end. A better understanding of the Underground Railroad, and of men and women like George DeBaptiste, deserves to be part of that conversation.
    The Underground Railroad occupies a romantic place in the American imagination that is shared by only a few episodes in the nation’s history: the Lewis and Clark expedition, for instance, the California Gold Rush, the Indian wars, and a handful of others. It is a term that is so instantly recognizable that it is today automatically applied to clandestine routes of travel, whether of downed