The possibility of writing a novel about the Underground Railroad had been simmering in my mind ever since I read an editorial by William Lyon Mackenzie, a 19th century crusading newspaper editor and later leader of the Rebellion of 1837. In it he lashes out at the people of Queenston in Upper Canada (now Ontario) who, on a particular Sunday in the 1820s, had stood by while an escaped female slave was dragged screaming onto the ferry that would carry her across the Niagara River back to the United States and to the slavery she thought she had escaped.
But, I protested to myself, our mythology has always encouraged us to believe that Canada was the land of freedom, a welcoming haven for fugitives fleeing the slave owner’s whip. Was our notion of freedom and safety in Canada based on a lie?
A visit to the Welland County Museum near St. Catharines, Ontario helped me see the complexity of black history in Canada. In their excellent exhibit rooms I learned that St. Catharines had indeed been an energetic terminus of the Underground Railroad—the famous Harriet Tubman’s favourite haven for the fugitives she rescued. Many people in that small city welcomed the fugitives and helped them move on to areas away from the border where they would be safer. But, as in all communities, some of the residents were actively hostile and this created danger for the recently arrived fugitives.
As well, because many slave owners offered rewards for the return of the people they considered to be their property, bounty hunters (also called slave catchers) crossed into Canada and attempted to kidnap fugitives and carry them back to the American South. Enough were successful in this to make staying near the border too dangerous for newly arrived fugitives. From a writer’s point of view, these perils and hidden tensions were just what I needed to make an interesting story
Before I could start writing I needed to know more about the life my characters might have lived on a plantation and about the journey that brought them to the brink of the Niagara River and so close to freedom. Most of the fugitives kept secret the stories of how they escaped. Some refused to tell even their grandchildren decades later for fear of bringing reprisals on those who had helped them. But I found two wonderful sources of first-hand information.
In Philadelphia hundreds of fugitives passed through a safe house run by an African-American named William Still. Still recorded their stories in documents kept secret until many years after the Emancipation Act of 1863.The knowledge of who had worked on the Underground Railroad was incendiary information long after the need for an escape route had passed. In Canada, journalist Benjamin Drew interviewed several hundred fugitives and published their stories in 1856 under the title Narratives of Fugitive Slaves. These stories, thrilling adventure tales of miraculous escapes and near-disasters, provided incidents with which I could flesh out the journey my family of runaways was making. The fugitives were all risk-takers and presented wonderful role models for young readers.
The research I did into plantation life cast a much darker shadow over the story. Stories of inhuman whippings, physical torture and the sexual exploitation of female slaves as young as twelve make the subject of slavery very difficult to interpret for young readers. My challenge was to suggest the grim reality of life as a slave without dwelling on the gruesome details of the worst horrors. To do this I made Eliza, my fugitive slave girl, eleven—old enough to be aware of the injustices of her situation without having yet suffered the more extreme horrors to come. I decided to concentrate on the despair of slave families whose safety and comfort depended on the whims of their owners and the stresses fugitives experienced when they chose the long and dangerous flight north to freedom.
Excerpts from the acceptance speech for the 1999 Children’s Literature Roundtables’ Information Book Award given at the Serendipity Conference in Vancouver, February 2000.