I will not tell you my full name, or the name of the farm, or the name of the county, because there are people still living in Maryland and people still living in Philadelphia who helped me, and the law still calls what I did theft — theft of myself from my owner — and what they did a crime, and I will not trade their safety for the completeness of this account.
What I will tell you is this: I was twenty-three years old. I had been on the same farm in Maryland my entire life. My mother was there, and my brother Jonas, and a woman named Clara who had taught me to read in the evenings using a Bible that the mistress of the house had discarded. The reading was the first danger. A woman who could read was a woman who could read a pass, or a map, or a letter that told her where to go.
The Deciding
I had been deciding for two years. This is important to understand: not a sudden impulse, not a moment of anger that I acted on without thinking. Two years of watching, counting, planning. How many miles to the Pennsylvania line. How long it would take to discover I was gone. What a person needed to carry and what a person could not afford to carry.
The reason I left when I did was this: the master had sold Jonas the previous autumn. Jonas was twenty-six. He was sold to a trader who was going south, which meant cotton country, which meant I would not see him again. After Jonas was gone, the number of reasons to stay and the number of reasons to leave rearranged themselves into a different proportion.
I left on a Sunday night in February of 1854. Sunday was deliberate: no one would look for me until Tuesday at the earliest, because Sunday was the day I had leave to visit, and a missing Negro on a Sunday might be assumed to be visiting and not yet returned. Tuesday gave me two days on the road before they would send anyone after me.
I took a piece of bread. I took a name — a name and a street, given to me by a woman who had come through the previous year and who I never expected to see again and have not seen since. I took my reading, which weighed nothing.
The Walking
I walked at night and hid in daylight. This is the simple fact of it, but the simple fact does not contain what it was like: the cold in February, which was a wet cold that came through everything; the sounds of the road at night, which included sounds that were only the night but that the fear turned into something else; the specific kind of tired that accumulates after three or four nights without real sleep, when the body continues to move by some mechanism that is not quite will and not quite anything else.
I navigated by the North Star and by the moss on trees, which grows on the north side, which I had been told about by the woman who gave me the name and the street. In daylight I found hiding places: thickets, the spaces under bridges, once a barn where I lay in the hay for twelve hours not moving while people went about their business in the yard outside.
Two men saw me on the road on the fourth night. I do not know who they were. They looked at me and looked away and kept walking. I do not know what they chose to believe about what they saw. I kept walking.
The Stations
On the sixth night I reached a farm near the Maryland line. The house I was looking for had a lantern in a particular window; this had been described to me. I found it. A white man answered the door and looked at me for a long moment. I said the word I had been told to say — I will not write it here because others may still need it. He let me in, and a woman came out of the back of the house, and they gave me soup and bread and a dry place to sleep.
There were three more stations between there and Philadelphia. I did not know, going in, whether each station would be what it was supposed to be or whether the network had been compromised, whether someone along the chain had spoken, whether the Fugitive Slave catchers had found a way into the line. Each door I knocked on was a possibility I could not evaluate from the outside. You knocked and you waited and you said your word and either the door opened or it didn't.
Every door opened.
Philadelphia
I arrived in Philadelphia on a Tuesday evening, eleven days after I left Maryland. The street I had been given the name of was in the Black neighborhood of South Philadelphia. I found the house. A man came to the door and I said what I had to say, and he looked at me and said: "You made it."
I had been cold for eleven days and I had not cried during any of them because crying was something I could not afford. Standing in that doorway on that street in Philadelphia, I cried. I have no further description for this. It was a response to something that the body had been holding for eleven days, or for twenty-three years — I am not sure the two things are entirely separate.
The man who said "you made it" was a free Black man, a member of the Vigilance Committee that was organized in Philadelphia to help freedom seekers. He took me inside and fed me and helped me find work, and within six weeks I was living in my own room, and within a year I had sent a letter back to Maryland through channels I will not describe, and the letter reached my mother, and she sent one back, and I knew she was well.
Jonas, I have not found. I am still looking.
I have been a free woman in Philadelphia for five years. I am a free woman the way a person who nearly drowned is a swimmer: with the full knowledge of what the water is capable of. But I am free. I would make the same walk again.
Narrator's note: Eliza is a fictional composite. The details of navigation, station protocols, the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, and the Vigilance Committee are drawn from Eric Foner's Gateway to Freedom: The Hidden History of the Underground Railroad (2015) and Kate Clifford Larson's Bound for the Promised Land (2004).