Forbidden Fruit Read Online Free PDF

other runaways. He stumbled upon a stream and roamed up and down it, finally
     noticing a large steamboat. That’s when he realized he had found the Ohio River. It
     was not as broad as it became in modern times when it was widened to create channels
     that would accommodate big ships. In the mid-nineteenth century, its banks sometimes
     stretched on for miles, untouched by any trace or whisper of human life.
    Because it bordered the slave states of Kentucky and that part of old Virginia that
     is now West Virginia, the Ohio River became a major highway for escaping slaves, the
     amen at the end of a fugitive’s prayer. After Smith found a skiff tied to a tree,
     he ferried across the river, leaving his dog behind. But the dog leaped into the stream
     and crossed it, too, reaching the Ohio shore before Smith. After landing in Ohio,
     Smith stepped into a forest and met an old man chopping poles. He was an abolitionist
     who worked for the Underground Railroad. He directed Smith to a friend about thirty
     miles away, and that friend hired Smith for about five years.
    Yet, for fugitives like Smith, Ohio could be both the best and worst of places: a
     free state containing many supporters of the South. The Northwest Ordinance of 1787
     had declared that the whole Northwest Territory, including Ohio, would be composed
     of free states. However, Ohio, at its first constitutional convention in 1802, missed
     becoming a slave state by a single vote. Harriet Beecher Stowe lived in Cincinnati
     and her home served as a station on the Underground Railroad, yet mob violence against
     blacks erupted again and again in Cincinnati, particularly in August 1829 and September
     1841. The first of Ohio’s Black Laws, which were passed in 1804, required that all
     blacks register for a certificate of freedom at a cost of twelve and a half cents
     for each name. In 1807, blacks settling in Ohio were required to post bonds of five
     hundred dollars and could not testify in any court case involving whites. As late
     as 1831, Ohio blacks could not serve in the militia or on juries, or attend public
     school.
    Still, many Ohioans would have reached out to someone like James Smith. Augustus West,
     an escaped Virginia slave, had arrived in the state in 1837. To raise money for a
     farm, he and a white abolitionist named Alexander Beaty concocted a bold plan: Beaty
     sold West three times to Southern slave owners, each time helping him escape and splitting
     the profits with him. West then purchased land in Fayette County, Ohio, where he built
     his home near a road known as Abolition Lane. Abolitionists and freed slaves lived
     along that road. In Albany, John Brown—not the famous one—hid runaways under his general
     store. Slavery supporters murdered two sons of Thomas and Jemima Woodson, in the all-black
     community of Berlin Cross Roads, because the two men worked for the Underground Railroad.
     James and Sophia Clemens, who lived in one of Ohio’s earliest black settlements, Longtown
     in Darke County, were conductors on the Railroad. David Adams, a black barber in Findlay,
     hid and transported runaways, too. So did John Parker of Ripley, a former slave who
     had walked shackled with four hundred other slaves from Richmond to Alabama. Once
     free, he became famous for risky ventures, such as returning to snatch the baby of
     a slave couple from the arms of the baby girl’s sleeping master after already rescuing
     the baby’s parents. He reportedly helped free more than one thousand slaves. The Ripley
     home of the Reverend John Rankin also became the doorway to freedom for at least four
     thousand fugitives who crossed the Ohio River. Fugitives who arrived in Cleveland
     from Ripley often showed up with written messages for a free black man named Bynum
     Hunt, who found short-term jobs for them around the docks and then put them on a Detroit-bound
     steamboat.
    During five years of farming in Ohio, Smith preached among blacks in the