Ask
Janus
Dear
Ms. Adams:
I
enjoy your pieces in the Stamford Advocate and learn something
almost every time I read one.
I
do have a question for you.... I am about half-way through "Cloudsplitter,"
by Russell Banks. At this point, John Brown is helping move slaves
from the South to Canada by getting them to Lake George where
a Quaker boatman takes them to Ontario.
Do
you know what happened to those people after they got to Canada?
I don't think of Ontario as having a large black population, so
where did they go? What happened to them? Were they tolerated,
supported, given jobs and homes? Perhaps if I kept reading, I'd
find out, but I think this part of John Brown's life is ending
and he will head toward Harper's Ferry.
Yours
very sincerely,
Mary McKay Maynard
Janus
Adams responds:
Dear
Ms. Maynard:
Thanks
for reading the column and for taking the time to write.
It's
a great question - one I researched for my book, Glory
Days, and for our BackPax children's book-and-audio, Underground
Railroad: Escape to Freedom.
The
border between Canada and the U.S. has two natural touchstones
edging Lake Erie. At the west, Detroit, Michigan abuts Windsor,
Ontario; at the east are the U.S. and Canadian shores of Niagara
Falls and St. Catherine's, Ontario. The arc of land rimming Lake
Erie to the north is dotted with former Underground Railroad settlements.
Arriving
in St. Catherine's for the first time, Harriet Tubman is quoted
to have said, "I looked at my hands, they looked new. I looked
at my feet, they did too. I thought I was in heaven." Tubman rescued
her parents from slavery and settled them in St. Catherine's.
Said
Frederick Douglass of the Spirituals - "A keen observer might
have detected in our repeated singing of 'O Canaan, sweet Canaan,
I am bound to the land of Canaan' something more than a hope of
reaching heaven."
For
many a slave refugee, "heaven" was Canada. Among the most famous
"heavenly rests," Josiah Henson, his wife, Charlotte, and their
children, escapees aboard the UGRR, founded the Dawn Settlement
in Amherstberg; now a Canadian historic site. You'll find more
on the Hensons in Glory Days and,
for children, the story of their escape appears in the Underground
Railroad book.
To
the settlement in Chatham came Dr. Martin Delany, Harvard's first
Black medical student. True to the fictionalized account of John
Brown's 1858 foray, Dr. Delany was Brown's real-life liaison that
year leading up to Brown's historic raid on Harper's Ferry.
How
people were supported is answered in a handbill reprinted in Sister
Days and, for children, in the Underground
Railroad book. The Canadian settlement movement was well-organized
and highly-supportive. So strong were these Afri-Canadian communities
that, from Toronto, North America's first woman publisher, Mary
Ann Shadd (a free-born Black Philadelphia émigré and abolitionist)
published a newspaper, "The Provincial Freeman."
Researching
the UGRR for BackPax offered my daughters and me one of the most
extraordinary trips of our lives. Following Underground Railroad
routes from the Virginias into Canada took us through Auburn,
New York. There, we spent a day at Harriet Tubman's home and interviewed
her great grandniece in nearby Skaneateles. We then followed the
trail into Canada.
From
these communities, many men who'd escaped aboard the UGRR returned
to the U.S., risking hard-won freedoms, to fight their "War for
Liberation" - the Civil War - to free loved ones left behind enslaved.
It's really quite a story.
Thanks
for asking!
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