Forbidden Fruit Read Online Free PDF Page B

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     probably questioned every Virginian he met about the wife and children he’d last seen
     in Henrico County, Virginia. He also buried his best friend, his devoted dog. By then,
     black churches with walls and pulpits and preachers existed, the first one being organized
     in 1773 in Aiken County, South Carolina, as the Silver Bluff Baptist Church by the
     Reverend George Lisle. Like James Smith, Lisle began his life as a Virginia slave.
     Finally, after five years in one spot, Smith moved to Huron County, Ohio, in the state’s
     mid-section, a part of what was known as Sufferers Land or Fire Lands. Either name
     fit. After the British destroyed coastal towns in Connecticut during the Revolutionary
     War, the state of Connecticut promised to compensate everyone whose land had been
     burned. All it could offer them were land grants to some five hundred thousand acres
     on the western part of its reserve, land that ultimately became Ohio. Chopped up into
     townships and sections, the Fire Lands drew settlers from Connecticut and other New
     England states.
    Huron County was part flatlands and part winding hills, the natural home of tall prairie
     grass, oak-hickory savannah, elm, ash, beech and maple forests, marsh wetlands dotted
     with wildflowers and farms. People raised corn and soybeans, hay, wheat and oats,
     dairy cows and beef cattle, horses and pigs and, now and then, a little antislavery
     hell. When two men showed up in Savannah, Ohio, looking for a runaway slave, Scottish-born
     William Sutherland blackened his face and hid himself in a wagon loaded with hay;
     he poked his head out of the hay so the two men would spot him and follow the wagon.
     Meanwhile, the real fugitive escaped.
    James Smith bought a small farm in Huron County and toiled on it for about seven years,
     working fertile land wreathed in low, deep animal smells. Ohio had an active rumor
     mill, the “grapevine telegraph,” which circulated information about slaves and slave
     catchers through churches and homes, talk and letters. There is no evidence during
     this period that Smith ever picked up his wife’s trail, but his faith that he would
     see her again must have remained strong—he never remarried. Then, in the fall of 1850,
     a new Fugitive Slave Act was passed, making it a crime for bystanders to refuse to
     help slave catchers and creating a federal system for recapturing runaways anyplace
     and at any time. Through the rumor mill, James Smith learned that he was a man with
     a warrant out for his arrest. That meant that if he did not flee to Canada, where
     slavery officially ended in August 1834, authorities could seize him anywhere in America
     and drag him back to Virginia, the source of all his troubles.
    He sold his property and moved on to Canada as so many thousands before him had done.
     He had plenty of company. Fugitives showed up daily in the so-called Promised Land,
     some traveling alone like Smith and others in groups. Henry Bibb wrote about a group
     that arrived in Canada West (the southern part of the modern-day province of Ontario)
     in December 1851 and included “a mother with six children and three men. The next
     day there came four men, the next day two men arrived and then one came alone.” One
     of the men talked about having had “a warm combat by the way with two slave catchers
     in which he found it necessary to throw a handful of sand in the eyes of one of them,”
     Bibb added.
    However, Canada, as newcomers like Smith soon discovered, was sometimes both antislavery
     and antiblack, swirling with prejudices such as those expressed in two letters appearing
     in the Amherstburg Courier on December 7, 1850. The letter writers ranted about black inferiority and charged
     that blacks didn’t want to work. Still, in nineteenth-century Canada, blacks enjoyed
     legal freedom, fair treatment in courts, an absence of racial violence and the security
     of knowing the government wouldn’t ship them back