Underground Railroad Reenactment Reveals Heroes as Well as Villains

The two girls giggled nervously and shivered as they held hands and tried to keep up with nine others following a shouting woman down a moonlit hill.

But the giggles quickly subsided to shocked silence as the woman’s angry words sank in: “Hurry up! How am I gonna sell you with you acting so stupid?”

Sell you?

It was one of many almost-too-real moments in an unusual reenactment carried out in fields and woods on a recent cold night. Suddenly it was 1836. Suddenly the ordeal of a runaway slave was much more than a lesson in a history class. And the lifesaving refuge of the Underground Railroad, which ran near here, took on a new meaning.

The group moved down the hill by the light of the woman’s lantern. At the bottom waited two gun-toting men. Separating the “bucks” from the “breeders,” they lit into the group, shouting and forcing them to their knees.

“Keep your eyes down! If I catch you looking at me again I’ll poke your eyes out!” one man shouted.

The men finally agreed to pay $100 in the illegal sale, then marched the group off into the frosty night after threatening to cut off one man’s leg and telling a woman she’d be kept close by as a “bed-warmer.”

The two girls quickly learned how to avoid being screamed at. Eyes downcast, they answered with respectful “Yes, ma’ams” and “No, sirs.”

“You kind of wanted to laugh and cry at the same time,” 13-year-old Tasha Matsumoto said afterward. “You knew it wasn’t real. . . . “

” . . . But they talked to you like it was real,” added her friend Bethany Myles, 12.

That’s the idea of this project organized by Conner Prairie, a nonprofit outdoor living-history museum near Indianapolis. Its title is “Follow the North Star.”

Visitors pretending to be fugitive slaves make a two-mile journey around the museum’s historic village, encountering actors who assume the identities of Indiana’s free citizens--helping, hindering or preying upon the runaways.

As the group’s only black person, Bethany wondered at first if the others were just there for a game.

“Would they really even care after they went through it?” she asked. After all, this was not their families’ experience.

“But if this were still happening,” she said, “I’d be their slave.”

Her feelings softened along the way as people portraying white Quakers offered the slave group food and shelter. She said she also relaxed as the racially diverse group began working together.

That spirit defines the Underground Railroad, said James Horton, a professor of American studies at George Washington University in Washington, D.C.

“That’s the part of the story that is . . . most encouraging and inspiring,” Horton said. “It’s a heroic story of human beings refusing to be conquered.”

Interest has grown lately in the legendary slave escape route, which figured prominently in the movie “Beloved” and the recent PBS series “Africans in America.”

Organized efforts to help slaves reach freedom were in place in the early 19th century and continued through the Civil War. The name “Underground Railroad” is said to have originated after a slave fleeing Kentucky by swimming across the Ohio River vanished on the other side. His pursuers said he must have reached an underground road.

As many as 100,000 slaves escaped along the network of secret routes that began in the Deep South, twisting through dozens of states to end in Canada. Some routes even extended into the Western territories, Mexico and the Caribbean. The runaways usually traveled at night. . “Follow the North Star,” they were told.

Professor Charles Blockson at Temple University in Philadelphia, a descendant of slaves, has been instrumental in interesting the federal government in tracing the Underground Railroad and preserving sites along the way.

Congress passed a law this spring giving the National Park Service money for research and educational materials, and plans have begun in Cincinnati for an $80-million National Underground Railroad Freedom Center.

But slavery was abolished 133 years ago in America. Why has this kind of recognition taken so long?

Horton, who like Blockson is an author on the subject and worked on the PBS documentary, said the delay reflects a contradiction in American society.

At the founding of the nation, many of those who enshrined the proposition that all men are created equal also were slave owners, Horton noted, adding that many bridged this contradiction by arguing that blacks were inherently different from whites.

“Black people find it painful and very uncomfortable to deal with slavery,” Horton said. “And white people feel guilty.”

But Horton said slavery should be viewed as a story of heroism rather than victimization. And both races can find positive role models in the Underground Railroad, he said.

“For a white person, [helping fugitive slaves] was not something to do on a lark,” Horton said. The law against it carried severe penalties, even in many free states. “This was a very dangerous thing to do, and that gives us the means to talk about interracial cooperation.”

Most who aided the runaways were white Quakers and free blacks. The runaways were generally young men; enslaved women tended to stay behind with their children. If escapees were caught, the law required that they be returned to the South, where they faced harsh punishment.

There was no recourse for a slave if someone ripped up documents declaring his or her freedom. Children born to slaves who had escaped could be seized and returned to their parents’ owners, even years later.

The sense of vulnerability and injustice is something the Conner Prairie reenactments have tried to instill. Consider one orchestrated, but still unsettling, incident during a recent reenactment:

As a Quaker boy named Moses led the group down a village street, he coughed. At that, a slave hunter named Benjamin Cannon burst out of a doorway, gun in hand. Had the boy coughed on purpose? Could he be trusted? No one could be sure.

After herding everyone inside, Cannon stormed about, threateningly whacking a braided rope noose against tables and walls. At one point, he grabbed one man’s real-life wife.

Shortly afterward, when Cannon became briefly distracted, Moses whispered to the others to slip out the back door. As the group ran, they heard a gunshot and a scream. The woman had been “shot.”

Visitors in some groups took their role-playing so seriously that they ran into the surrounding cornfields to hide and had to be retrieved by Conner Prairie staff.

Every moment was filled with uncertainty, visitors said; every encounter began with suspicion.

Even in the company of Quaker “friends” who told them they could look up, most in the group avoided eye contact. They feared being yelled at, or worse, in the senseless world they had entered.

“We were always getting in trouble, and we hadn’t done anything wrong,” said Matsumoto.

Such impressions of running from slavery can’t be passed on through history books.

Though the reenactment was “frightening at first,” Gregory Townsend, a travel writer for Los Angeles-based Black Meetings and Tourism magazine, said it can help Americans to deal with a racial past that blacks and whites have often tried to forget.

“We just cannot progress until we know the true history of this country,” he said.

Marcel Riddick, the program’s manager, agreed: “I always say, it’s not black history. It’s American history.”