Status: a english project
All The Way To Canada
Wednesday September 8th 1847
The sound I heard last time was dogs! As soon as we heard them coming closer we packed up our meagre supplies that Massa Ross had given us and ran.
We found a stream and waded in, disguising our scent. The slave catchers eventually moved on, but not before the water we were hiding in chilled us to the bone. Luckily, once it was safe to come out we made our way to the meeting place Massa Ross had told us to go to.
There, a man was waiting in the middle of it, standing beside a carriage. Rosa starts to run towards him but I stop her.
“It might be a trap Rosa! We have to be careful! I’ll go out and tell him the magic phrase. If he gives us the good one back then you’ll come out.”
Rosa’s about to object, she’s always been protective of me, even taking the lash of the whip for me a number of times, but this time I had to do it so I sneak out into the clearing before she can stop me.
The man sees me and I can’t turn back.
“A friend is a friend of every friend.” I whisper to him, terrified.
The man smiles at me in the darkness. I wait for him to answer me with the phrase, and then we know that he’s our conductor.
“Then the friend must have many friends of friends.” He answers correctly.
Only then does Rosa come out, and we go into his carriage. It was my first time in anything that moved, and I was quite nervous, but by the end the motion lulled me to sleep.
We stayed at his house for a few days, until his wife heard a couple of slave catchers looking around for two girls, so we decided it was time to leave.
We crossed the Mississippi river by Samuels’s boat, and then loaded another carriage.
Right now we’re in another station, this time our conductor being a free coloured man. After a day’s rest we’ll head out again, this time having to walk for a little while. But its okay, because the conductor Samuel gave us a funny little thing that he said always pointed to our freedom. He called it a compass. So all we have to do is follow that.
Apparently we’ll go from station to station for another couple of months, and then make it to a real train that’s going to lead us to a dock where a boat is waiting. And the boat will sail us to Canada. All this is called the Underground Railway. They have coded words for everything. They taught us a few.
A station is a safe-house, a conductor is the person who’s helping us, freight is all us runaway slaves, dry goods are us girls and women and hardware are boys and men.
I know we’re close to getting there. I can just feel it. If the Underground Railway has its own name and all that coded talk, then it sure knows what it’s doing. It’ll get us to Canada safely. Rosa, my greatest friend, will not have to take my lashes anymore and I, Annabelle, will not have to work day and night for nothing, I will no longer be treated worse than an animal, I will be...free.
We found a stream and waded in, disguising our scent. The slave catchers eventually moved on, but not before the water we were hiding in chilled us to the bone. Luckily, once it was safe to come out we made our way to the meeting place Massa Ross had told us to go to.
There, a man was waiting in the middle of it, standing beside a carriage. Rosa starts to run towards him but I stop her.
“It might be a trap Rosa! We have to be careful! I’ll go out and tell him the magic phrase. If he gives us the good one back then you’ll come out.”
Rosa’s about to object, she’s always been protective of me, even taking the lash of the whip for me a number of times, but this time I had to do it so I sneak out into the clearing before she can stop me.
The man sees me and I can’t turn back.
“A friend is a friend of every friend.” I whisper to him, terrified.
The man smiles at me in the darkness. I wait for him to answer me with the phrase, and then we know that he’s our conductor.
“Then the friend must have many friends of friends.” He answers correctly.
Only then does Rosa come out, and we go into his carriage. It was my first time in anything that moved, and I was quite nervous, but by the end the motion lulled me to sleep.
We stayed at his house for a few days, until his wife heard a couple of slave catchers looking around for two girls, so we decided it was time to leave.
We crossed the Mississippi river by Samuels’s boat, and then loaded another carriage.
Right now we’re in another station, this time our conductor being a free coloured man. After a day’s rest we’ll head out again, this time having to walk for a little while. But its okay, because the conductor Samuel gave us a funny little thing that he said always pointed to our freedom. He called it a compass. So all we have to do is follow that.
Apparently we’ll go from station to station for another couple of months, and then make it to a real train that’s going to lead us to a dock where a boat is waiting. And the boat will sail us to Canada. All this is called the Underground Railway. They have coded words for everything. They taught us a few.
A station is a safe-house, a conductor is the person who’s helping us, freight is all us runaway slaves, dry goods are us girls and women and hardware are boys and men.
I know we’re close to getting there. I can just feel it. If the Underground Railway has its own name and all that coded talk, then it sure knows what it’s doing. It’ll get us to Canada safely. Rosa, my greatest friend, will not have to take my lashes anymore and I, Annabelle, will not have to work day and night for nothing, I will no longer be treated worse than an animal, I will be...free.