Bound for Canaan (54 page)

From this point on, Bibb's life became an odyssey of epic dimensions. Ignoring the pleading of his friends, he set off for Kentucky wearing false whiskers and a disguise. He succeeded in safely reaching his old home,
where he arranged with Malinda to meet him in Ohio. Bibb then returned to Cincinnati, where he appealed to abolitionists for money to pay his family's traveling expenses to Canada. Betrayed by a pair of black informers, he was dragged bodily through the streets and handed over to the authorities, and by them to his owner. Shortly after his return to Kentucky, Bibb escaped again. After a hurried visit to Malinda, he traveled back to Perrysburgh, where he waited in vain almost nine months for her to arrive. Despite what had already happened to him, and again over the protests of friends, he set off once again for Kentucky. He reached Malinda's cabin safely, but a slave go-between betrayed him for a five-dollar reward.

After this episode, Bibb's disgusted owner sold the entire Bibb family to a slave trader who transported them to New Orleans. There they were purchased by a Methodist minister named Whitfield, who owned a plantation in upcountry Louisiana. After an attempted escape with his wife and daughter, Bibb was stripped, staked spreadeagled to the ground, and savagely flogged, first with a bull whip, and then with a flat wooden paddle. For weeks afterward, he was also made to wear a heavy iron collar with prongs extending above his head, on the end of which dangled a small, humiliating bell. Perhaps most painful of all, he was never again allowed to sleep with his family. After yet another failed escape, Whitfield sold Bibb away from his wife and child to a company of itinerant “sportsmen,” who took him across the Red River into Texas, where they spent time horse racing and gambling. “Although they were wicked black legs of the basest character, it is but due to them to say, that they used me far better than ever the deacon did,” Bibb wrote, paying him a little money almost every day for attending to their horses, and driving the wagon in which they carried their clothing, baggage, and “gambling apparatus.” At a horse race in the Indian Territory, present-day Oklahoma, the gamblers sold Bibb to a wealthy Cherokee for nine hundred dollars in gold. When the Indian died suddenly a few months later, Bibb made a great show of grief, and then fled in the night. He followed the Missouri state boundary line due north to Jefferson City, passing in terror through several tribes of Indians, “afraid to enter any of their houses or wigwams,” and unnerved by the “implements of death”—bows and arrows, tomahawks, guns, butcher knives—that they invariably carried. At Jefferson City, Missouri, Bibb sneaked aboard a steamboat bound for St. Louis by mingling unob
trusively with the deck passengers. In St. Louis, a black steward arranged passage for him aboard a boat headed to Ohio. After working for a time as a bootblack and porter in the river town of Portsmouth, Ohio, in January 1842, Bibb finally arrived in Detroit, where he would establish the first secure home that he had enjoyed for almost a decade. But his odyssey was not quite ended. Through everything, he never forgot Malinda and their daughter. In 1846 he set off once more for the South. Although he never saw his family again, he got close enough to learn, devastatingly, that Malinda had finally abandoned hope of rescue, and had become the acquiescent concubine of her master. “From that time,” he wrote, “I gave her up into the hands of an all-wise Providence.”

In Detroit, Bibb was drawn almost immediately into the work of the Underground Railroad, probably by one of its leading local figures, Reverend William Monroe of the Second Baptist Church, with whom Bibb studied grammar and public speaking. (He had already taught himself to write during his years in slavery, by copying words he noticed onto scraps of discarded paper.) Unique within the underground, by the 1850s and perhaps earlier, the Detroit group practiced elaborate rituals of membership that seem to have been roughly modeled on those of the Masons. Induction into what its members called the “African-American Mysteries” was cloaked in what another underground leader, the erudite radical William Lambert, described in an 1886 interview as a “good deal of frummery” in order to “give the deepest impression of the importance of every step.” There were three degrees of membership. Any man who attained the first degree, known as “Captive,” became eligible to conduct fugitives. Initiations into the “Mysteries” took place in a building near the riverfront, and were filled with grotesque symbols of slavery. First the candidate was told to stand outside a door while certain questions were solemnly put to him.

“What do you seek?”

“Deliverance,” he was to answer.

“How do you expect to get it?”

“By my own efforts.”

“Have you faith?”

“I have hope.”

Next, the candidate was shackled at the wrists, “clad in rough and rugged garments, his head was bowed, his eyes blindfolded, and an iron
chain placed about his neck.” He was led through the door. Then, kneeling at an altar, he took a vow of secrecy and faith. The blindfold was removed, and he found himself surrounded by all the members of the lodge. He was required to wear the shackles to each meeting thereafter, until he qualified for the second degree, known as “Redeemed,” when he was required to submit—symbolically, one presumes—to the whip, the most loathed symbol of slavery, after which the shackles were finally struck off. For men who had worn shackles on Southern plantations, this must have been an incredibly intense, perhaps retraumatizing, experience, as they ritually relived the helpless, claustrophobic darkness of bondage, and were then released by, and into, a brotherhood of men of their own slavery-hardened kind. The highest degree, the “Chosen,” was subdivided into five phases: “Rulers,” “Judges and Princes,” “Chevaliers of Ethiopia,” “Sterling Black Knight,” and “Knight of St. Domingo.” To achieve this last stage, which was probably devised by the intellectual Lambert, the candidate had to memorize a lengthy text “dealing with the principles of freedom and the authorities on revolution, revolt, rebellion, government.” Bibb left no record of his own participation in such rituals, although he is known to have escorted many fugitives across the Detroit River to Canada.

However, there is no doubt that in Detroit Bibb underwent another profound experience that changed his life. He discovered his voice, and that with words he could forge the grief and rage that he felt over the loss of Malinda and his daughter into a weapon with which he could strike back publicly at the monolith of slavery. He first began to tell his life story to antislavery audiences in Detroit, then elsewhere in Michigan, and finally as far east as New England. Words were his salvation. He declared, “If I had a thousand tongues, I could find useful employment for them all.”

The passage of the Fugitive Slave Act drove Bibb and his new wife, Mary, a well-educated black Quaker, across the Detroit River for greater safety in Canada. Although he physically moved only a few miles to the town of Sandwich, Bibb both emotionally and politically turned his back on the United States, and thereafter became the most eloquent of all fugitive advocates for emigration to Canada. His protest against slavery also took a bold new form. With financing from Gerrit Smith, he established Canada's first black newspaper. Its name trumpeted Bibb's intent: the
Voice of the Fugitive
. In its maiden issue, on January 1, 1851, he declared: “We
need a press, that we may be independent of those who have always oppressed us. We need a press that we may hang our banners on the wall, that all who pass by may read why we struggle, and what we struggle for.” The
Voice
served as an unofficial organ of the Underground Railroad, and Bibb's handsome, slender figure often could be seen at the Windsor wharf, where the ferry from Detroit docked, interviewing refugees as they stepped ashore. His articles were detailed and explicit. “Four able bodied men have just arrived in the promised land,” he announced in a typical notice, on March 26, 1851. “They look well, are in good spirits, rejoicing at the prospect of being rewarded hereafter for their honest labor, in a free country. Two of them are off this morning to chopping cord wood, the others are looking for employment.” Other articles announced the arrival of shipments of donated foodstuffs and clothing, advice on where to find work, and news of conditions in the black settlements, informing recent arrivals, for example, that they would find a good school at Colchester, and at Sandwich a temperance society as well as schools, churches, and a black-owned grocery store. The paper also offered fugitives advice on more general subjects, like education, crop prices, free trade, and ladies' fashions.

In 1851, Bibb organized and chaired the landmark North American Convention of Colored People, which brought together in Toronto fifty-three leading black abolitionists, and a few whites, from Canada and the United States. In his keynote address, Bibb posed the central question to which all the labors of the Underground Railroad inexorably led: “What is the future of the black race on the North American continent?” What was ultimately to become of the twenty thousand (or thirty thousand) refugees whom the underground had delivered into the queen's dominions? Was Canada to become the black homeland in North America? Or was it but a way station, where they would mark time until slavery was overthrown in the United States? “[T]he eye of the civilized world is looking down upon us to see whether we can take care of ourselves or not,” Bibb told the assembly. “If it should be seen, that under a free Government, where we have all our political and social rights, without regard to our color…we should prove ourselves to be incapable of self-government, it would bring down reproach and disgrace upon the whole race with which we are connected, and would be used as an argument against emancipation.”

For Bibb, part of the solution was the development of an archipelago of agricultural colonies in Canada and Jamaica, where large numbers of former slaves could learn self-sufficiency and independence, and which, he added, would also “give a new impulse to the Under-ground Railroad.” His own contribution, oratory apart, was the founding of the Refugee Home Society, in partnership with white abolitionists, to develop thirty thousand acres of farmland around Sandwich, exclusively for fugitives, to whom the land would be sold at cost. Bibb editorialized in the
Voice of the Fugitive
, “If we would be men and command respect among men, we must strike for something higher than sympathy and perpetual beggary.
We must produce what we consume.
” His ideological debt to Josiah Henson and the founding principles of the Dawn colony was made clear by his choice of the old man as the society's president. Bibb himself would serve as its recording secretary, and its real leader.

Among those who attended the Toronto convention was a woman who would soon upset the entire black cosmos of Canada West. Mary Ann Shadd, at twenty-nine, was also a product of the underground world, although of a very different background from Bibb. Her father, Abraham, an affluent shoemaker, had served as an underground conductor in West Chester, Pennsylvania, throughout her childhood, and she no doubt grew up familiar with the sight of furtive refugees recuperating in the family home. She was, like Bibb, very light-skinned, and her small, often angry eyes burned like coals when she was impassioned. She was a born muckraker: well-educated, unabashedly opinionated, and highly articulate, she had already made a name for herself in African-American circles by publishing a remarkable attack on the influence of “corrupt” and “superstitious” black clergy over black communities. Inspired by what she heard at Toronto, she abandoned her job as a teacher in New York City and moved to Canada. When Bibb invited her to accompany him back to the Detroit River settlements, where there was a desperate need for teachers, she leaped at the chance. She settled at Windsor, opening a school in a drafty barracks left from the War of 1812, and taking on many of her students free of charge. Henry Bibb had no idea what he was in for.

Initially, the two got along well. They shared many of the same qualities: both were young, literary, and emblematic of a rising generation of black leaders who were already looking beyond slavery to a permanent Canadian home for refugee blacks. But their relationship soon soured.
Bibb pragmatically believed that fugitives were most likely to be happy, at least initially, among their own people, and that for the foreseeable future they had to depend on the financial support of friendly whites to survive. Shadd argued that full black equality could only be achieved through complete integration with whites, and she was caustic about segregated communities of any type, no matter what the motivation, believing that they condemned blacks to second-class status. She also denounced outside fundraising as “begging” that “materially compromis[es] our manhood, by representing us as objects of charity.” There were also personal differences. Although she lacked Bibb's capacity for personal leadership, Shadd was a type rare in her era, an independent, middle-class woman with a mind entirely her own, self-confident to a fault, unafraid to confront men on their own ground, and set on a professional career.

By 1852 Shadd's relationship with Bibb had disintegrated completely. She came to believe that the Refugee Home Society was nothing less than a scheme to enrich Bibb and his supporters. She claimed that neighbors derided the society lands as “Bibb's plantation,” and that the settlers who occupied the land were for the most part “shiftless” whiskey drinkers. She wildly denounced Bibb himself as an out and out fraud who had used donations to buy himself a house, a farm, and a boat, and had ignored the needs of the fugitives for whom he was “begging.” She even added, gratuitously, in a letter to a white missionary whom she knew would spread her accusations far and wide, “His chickens have been roosting on good fugitive clothes the entire season,” while the needy went about in rags. Although Bibb's manifold talents appear to have stopped at the threshold of financial management, there is no evidence, apart from Shadd's polemics, to prove that he was personally corrupt, or that his white colleagues in the project were anything but sincere. Wounded, he retorted in kind, referring to his nemesis as “Shadd-as-Eve-the-Evil,” and asserting dismissively that the only opposition to his projects came from “a set of half cracked, hot headed individuals.” In March 1853 Shadd established her own competing newspaper, the
Provincial Freeman
, the first ever in North America to be published by a black woman. Although the black abolitionist Samuel Ringgold Ward was listed as editor, most of the copy was written by Shadd herself, who distinguished its columns with her trademark crackling invective. The controversy between Bibb and Shadd ultimately served no one well, but it did show to fugitive slaves who had never enjoyed political
life of any kind just what it meant to exercise the freedoms of speech and the press in a public debate over the
way in which blacks were to be free
. In their polemics, it is possible to see the foreshadowings of debates that would continue through the twentieth century, and beyond: over integration versus self-imposed segregation, over the financial obligations of whites to blacks, over the consequences of dependency on public welfare.