Traveling the Long Road to Freedom, One Step at a Time

By Donovan Webster

Through a dark midnight drizzle, Anthony Cohen is on the run. Like a slave escaped from a plantation in the antebellum South -- only 150 years later -- Cohen is testing his fate on the Underground Railroad. He has now spent 700 miles and six weeks engaged in hook-or-crook transport, moving fast and light, retracing a route once used by runaway slaves as they sought refuge in Canada.

As it was for his predecessors, Cohen's trip has been difficult. "I'll go by foot, boat, train, horse, buggy, any historically accurate way I can hitch a ride," he's fond of telling listeners. "I even had myself shipped by train in a tiny box -- from Philadelphia to New York City. A slave named Henry (Box) Brown did that in 1848. He had himself mailed from Richmond to Philadelphia. Man, for me, that part of the trip was terrible."

Right now, though, Cohen is traveling by every escaped slave's most standard means: his feet. In tonight's case, he's hoofing a rainy towpath along the Erie Canal in western New York State. He's exhausted and behind schedule. He's a little discouraged, too, though he's trying not to show it. Earlier tonight, he'd been buoyed by the prospect of making the nearly 40-mile trip to his next stop by boat, but departure time came and went -- and he never heard from the captain.

So with more than 80 miles still stretching between him and Canada, and only three days to get there, Cohen must rely on himself to make up the difference. "It happens like that sometimes," he's saying between runner's gasps. "Promises get broken. You end up walking all night instead of taking a boat, where you could have rested. Can't let it get you down, though. You just put the miles you need to cover out of your mind -- and you go until you get there."

This particular leg's duration, he knows, stretches 37 miles. It will keep him at a dogtrot until past sunrise. All night long, the sound of his footfalls will move across fields, swamps and suburban backyards; often he'll come close enough to houses to see what's on TV inside. There are few lights. Fortunately, the towpath is an easily followed conduit to the Niagara River and Canada beyond, just as it was for fugitive slaves.

And just as it was for escaped slaves, snarling dogs will chase Cohen. Mosquitoes devil him constantly. Frogs and crickets serenade his toil. At the end of this night, in the sleepy canal town of Middleport, New York, he's been assured he'll find a safe house. When he reaches it, the owners will give him food, plus a few blessed hours of sleep in an almost hidden back room. The next day, after an early dinner, he'll depart again, moving farther up the towpath toward Canada.

"At times like this," the 32-year-old historian says between breaths, "I try to think of the escaped slaves coming North. They wouldn't have quit. They had no choice. Most had never been off the plantation. Everything they knew -- food, shelter, clothing -- had always been provided. Then they were on the run: in unknown country, hunted, not knowing who to trust. Their only hope was a promise from the last safe house that a house up the road -- perhaps a yellow one, with a quilt hanging on the line outside as a signal -- would take slaves in. They had to avoid the slave-catchers. They were absolutely alone. Nobody would do this if they didn't have to."

Cohen stops to catch his breath. Gravel crunches beneath his feet. A startled heron squawks and takes to the sky, its departure pushing rings across the dark canal's rain-socked surface. "You can only understand history so much from reading a book," he says a minute later, raising his pace once more. "Sometimes, to grasp the deeper 'whys' of things, you have to give yourself a new perspective. That's why I'm doing this."

To today's Americans, the Underground Railroad -- a network of roads, rivers, conveyances and safe houses that guided an estimated 30,000-100,000 escaped slaves toward freedom between the 1830s and the end of the Civil War -- remains perhaps our least-known roadway. Lacking the Oregon Trail's aura of pioneer gumption, the tragedy of the Trail of Tears or the eight-cylinder razzle of Route 66, the Underground Railroad has always been more associated with slaves and abolitionists than with fixed routes or solid locations.

Certainly many Americans know of Harriet Tubman, the fugitive slave who became the railroad's most famous slave transporter; and Frederick Douglass, an escaped slave who rose to become an eloquent abolitionist and statesman; and even the abolitionist minister and editor, Henry Ward Beecher. But beyond these figures and a handful of their colleagues, the Underground Railroad means little to most Americans. Those who have studied history may be familiar with the Fugitive Slave Law, passed in 1850, which made it a federal crime to harbor runaways. The legislation fast became a social and philosophical lightning rod, as it showed the U.S. Government to be a tacit supporter of slavery. But the actual, physical layout of the railroad itself? To most Americans it's an amorphous concept, a chunk of history lost.

Beginning in the spring of 1996, however, Anthony Cohen and one of his supporters, the National Parks and Conservation Association (NPCA), a private, non-profit advocacy group that educates citizens about the national park system, began to change that perception. Just as Lewis and Clark's explorations are now marked along the Missouri and Columbia rivers, spurring curiosity about their journey, Cohen and others hope that, by the end of the century, routes and stops on the Underground Railroad will bear the same dignified status, perhaps even as a national park or a series of historic sites. "Much of the railroad is still around," says Cohen, strolling the sun-shot canal towpath the day before his 37-mile night. "You only have to look for it."

Seen correctly, Cohen says, the Underground Railroad is as compelling a story as any event in American history. "First, you've got the human-rights issue of slavery," he says. "Today its questions are still relevant. Would you risk your well-being to help others, even if you knew jail was the punishment for getting caught? Would you break the law to do what's morally right? Then you've got the drama of the fugitive slaves. Men, women and children running from a Southern plantation, fugitives in the purest sense. They lived wild in the woods. They stole hogs to eat. They risked their lives on this journey, and for one thing -- freedom. They chanced everything to gain something we take for granted: equality as a human being." To prepare, Cohen did little physical training -- escaped slaves wouldn't have had such a luxury. Instead, he spent hundreds of hours in the Library of Congress and other archives, where he pored over documents and slave accounts to nail down routes and transport modes. Then, in Sandy Spring, Maryland, on May 4, 1996, after filling a backpack with a change of clothes, he hit the road like a fugitive slave: moving on foot, occasionally traveling on trains, hitching rides on canal boats. Unlike the slaves, he travels mostly by daylight, though travel in darkness is sometimes necessary. By the time he beds down at night -- ideally in a barn or secret room said to have been an underground stop -- he's traveled 10-25 miles, addressed school groups or village historic societies, and spent the rest of the day assessing purported underground-railroad rooms or anecdotes.

He has no assistant, no support staff. "It's all me," he says. "I've got a cellular phone, an 800 number with voice mail, and a site on the World Wide Web (http://www.npca.org). People contact me. They say: 'Tony, stay overnight in my barn; talk to my school.' And I try to set it up. I have to keep things pretty loose though, since I'm on a few missions at once: walk, speak, research. Keeping my schedule flexible is the only way I can do all three things and not go crazy."

His walk has also caught the media's notice, a circumstance that inspires increased hoopla with each successive stop. In fact, a few days from now, when he arrives in Buffalo, New York, for a Juneteenth Festival (an annual holiday celebrating the emancipation of slaves, usually observed on a weekend in the "teens" of June), he'll be greeted by 60,000 festivalgoers, three newspapers and a camera crew from the local ABC affiliate. All of this interest, Cohen says, stems from the fact that few Americans of any race know much about the Underground Railroad and how it affected their nation's history. Often run by Quakers or free Northern blacks, the railroad spirited fugitive slaves to safety; but it also served as saboteur in an era when America's industrial North and agrarian South were increasingly at odds.

"Remember that the South was an agricultural economy, primarily cotton," Cohen says. "Those crops were tended by unpaid slaves, who often made plantation owners incredibly wealthy. So the Underground Railroad wasn't only a high moral cause; it helped wound the Southern economy. Religious and political commitment to the Underground Railroad was one reason for its success; there were less noble pressures as well."

Cohen's immediate goal is to "heighten awareness" that, from the 1830s through the Civil War, a complex network of Underground Railroad routes existed. The one he is retracing worked up through Maryland and Pennsylvania, then swung west across New York State and into Canada via boats on Lake Ontario and the Niagara River. Other routes worked farther west, through Kentucky and Missouri, up into Ohio, Indiana or Illinois, finally crossing into Canada via Michigan and Wisconsin, and by boat on Lake Erie. Still others went south to Mexico or Cuba.

Cohen also wants to reinforce for people that, whatever transport was used -- "And most everything was," he says -- the railroad wasn't a locomotives-and-steel subway, a misconception that helped inspire the project. As the son of a retired Department of Agriculture entomologist father and a schoolteacher mother, Cohen was raised in the Washington, D.C. suburb of Silver Spring, Maryland. (Cohen's family name, it appears, does not come out of slavery. His great-grandfather was adopted by a Jewish family.)

After graduating from American University in 1994, Cohen went to work as a freelance historian for Montgomery County, Maryland. The county historical society had published his senior thesis, The Underground Railroad in Montgomery County, Maryland, as a book. One day in the spring of 1995, while Cohen was addressing a local elementary school, a fourth-grader (9-year-old) asked about the Underground Railroad's trains. "The other kids laughed at him, which got me thinking," Cohen says. "I mean, it wasn't a stupid question. The kid just didn't know."

Before long, Cohen began publicizing his idea for retracing the railroad and soliciting sponsors -- out of which emerged his affiliation with the National Parks and Conservation Association. "Vincent de Forest, a mover and shaker in trying to get the Underground Railroad accepted as a unit of the National Park Service, pointed Tony our way," says Jill McKay, on-line services coordinator at the NPCA. "In March of 1996, as Tony was preparing for his walk, he began working with us as an intern, compiling our Underground Railroad database. Then someone thought to put his information on the World Wide Web, and we thought maybe he'll get one message a week: the Website gets several hundred visitors a day. At least 10 of these people post messages for Tony every day. People have really hooked up to Tony's walk and, using our Website, they are inspired to pursue their own family history."

For his journey, Cohen was lent a cellular telephone and given an 800 number at NPCA. But he still had to go out and walk, researching as he went. A documentary film of the project is in the works -- with equipment donated by the American Folklife Center of the Library of Congress -- as is a book to be written by Cohen, which will filigree events of his trip with historic anecdotes about the railroad.

"I began finding stories almost immediately," he says. "I was directed to a black minister in the town of Waterloo, Maryland. His name was Reverend Howard, and he took me to a stream called Deep Run that had a series of caves along its banks. It was where Harriet Tubman used to hide fugitive slaves. After they'd had a chance to rest there, she'd lead them downstream to the Patapsco River, where a railroad line went. When a train passed, the slaves could catch it to Baltimore."

Cohen, however, has to be careful. A story's existence doesn't always mean it's true. Because of this, he's constantly double-checking background data with libraries and historic societies along the way. "My favorite false legend so far," he says, "happened in Poughkeepsie, New York. I was passing through and this man said: 'The Underground Railroad ended right here, in this town.' Well, because I check this stuff out, I said: 'OK, where did it end?' He pointed up the road to this sort of modern-looking apartment complex. He said: 'It ended at the Harriet Tubman Apartments.'"

Cohen laughs. "I marked it down in my notes," he says. "But I didn't check, it out." He shakes his head. "That guy pretty much summed up what Americans know of the Underground Railroad. They don't know dates or routes. They know Harriet Tubman's name."

Another day finds Cohen not on the road but in the attic of the old Hargous-Briggs Mansion, in the canal town of Pittsford, New York. Pittsford, seven miles southeast of Rochester, was established in 1789. A prosperous town during the boom years of the Erie Canal, the 1820s and '30s, it is said to have been a major stop on the Underground Railroad. The mansion is a hulking, Federal-style monster that's now part of the St. Louis Church and School. It also has all the earmarks of a onetime slave harbor. The street level is a quadrant of four square parlor rooms. The parlors to the house's south side, however, are a little less deep than those on the north. And while those south-side rooms appear to share a common wall and a heavy swinging door, they don't. In between them, a secret passage of narrow stairs leads from the house's basement to its third-floor attic. In the cellar, an opening, now bricked over, faces the canal a short distance away. In the dark and stuffy attic, where Cohen now stands talking with the church's facilities manager, Sally Schrecker, a large wooden cage rests beneath the eaves. Cohen, who has opened the cage door and is now standing inside its 8-by-10-foot space, makes fast work of assessing its age. "How old did you say the house is?" he asks Schrecker. "Begun in 1812; finished in 1815. One of the owners was a judge."

"Hmmm," Cohen says. "That's certainly promising. Judges in fact were sometimes part of the Underground Railroad, since they socialized with the local ministers and educated people, who were usually among the railroad's supporters. Having a judge on the abolitionist side had big benefits. When someone would get arrested for harboring slaves, a sympathetic judge could dismiss the case on technicalities, or his office could lose the paperwork -- thereby throwing the whole thing out."

Cohen runs his hand across the hinges. "This iron-work is hand-forged," he says. "So it's possible it was here during the period of the railroad." He observes the cage's orientation in the attic, set back from a narrow window. "Look," he says. "This cage is 18 inches from the window and the wall. Why? It's so people on the street couldn't see what was inside." Inside the cage, he sees a length of forged chain attached to a fitting pounded deep into another roof beam. He says this arrangement looks like a standard shackle from the time of the Underground Railroad. "This room's a mystery," he says.

But he knows of other locations with parallels to this room. Occasionally, when someone hiding slaves feared local law officers were becoming curious, the harborer would bind and shackle the slaves and lock them up. That way, if the fugitives were discovered and accusations started flying, he'd say the slaves had recently been captured and were awaiting transport back South.

Cohen steps out of the cage, latching the door behind him. As he heads for the secret stairway, picking his way across the attic's patchy floor and exposed joists, he shrugs. "Is this a bona fide site?" he asks. "Perhaps. This stairway seems legitimate; the house certainly has the right lineage. But only documentation will authenticate the site. During the time of the Underground Railroad, few people kept documentation; they didn't want to get caught with incriminating papers. Unfortunately, that absence of records means that we are often left with little hard evidence." On another afternoon, in the canal town of Spencerport, New York, perhaps 20 miles west of Pittsford, the cafeteria at Bernabi Elementary School is packed with kids. The room is sweltering: some 300 of Bernabi's third- and fourth-grade (8- and 9-year-old) students are in attendance, rapt. Cohen is onstage at the room's far end. He has just started telling the story of Henry (Box) Brown. "He was a slave in Richmond, Virginia, and sometime in 1848 he had himself shipped to freedom in Philadelphia," Cohen is saying. "He did it in a wooden box measuring 3 feet by 2 feet by 26 inches. He was in there for 26 hours!" The students gasp. "So when I was in Philadelphia," Cohen goes on, "I decided to try the same thing, only I'd ship myself from Philly to New York City."

He sits on the floor, curled tight, knees at his chest. "With the help of a few friends," Cohen says, "we measured around me. My box's dimensions were 24 inches by 28 by 30. We built a trapdoor into one side, so the only person able to open it was me. We drilled one-inch air holes in the box, so I could breathe. Then we figured out that people would be able to see me, so we covered most of the holes over with stickers."

Cohen stands back up, pacing the stage again. "All I had in the box with me was my telephone, a bottle of water, a small quilt, a pillow and a pocketknife," he continues. "The trip was supposed to take two hours, but the train was late. It took more than five hours. Inside the box, the temperature rose to more than 100 degrees. My glasses fogged over. I could see sweat forming on the box's hinges; they were dripping. It was so hot I had to shift around and pull out my pocketknife. I cut the legs off my pants."

Then, as the train pulled out of the station, Cohen (who was traveling unbeknownst to railroad authorities) saw the door of the freight car slide open next to him: "It hadn't been locked!" The kids gasp again. "It was terrifying! " Cohen says. "I thought I was going to fall out! I could see through a little hole only partially covered by a sticker. I saw trees, cows, farms: New Jersey! It was all flashing past. And I kept thinking: 'If I get jiggled out, I'll die. I'll get smashed. But if I stay in this box much longer, I'm going to die from the heat.' The pain was terrible -- I was all scrunched up. And I kept thinking: 'Come on, Tony, you can do this; Box Brown did it for 26 hours.' Then, when I got to New York, they almost didn't take me off the train. My box had been marked to go farther on, to Long Island, but some friends found me and pulled me off. When I got out, I drank water nonstop for hours. I'd sweat so much, though, that I didn't have to go to the bathroom for almost three days."

The children are amazed. The room -- its 300 little faces fixed on the stage -- remains silent throughout Cohen's monologue. When his talk ends, kids keep him trapped for another hour, asking questions about slavery, about his journey, about race issues and American history and whether he ever feels like quitting.

Later that evening I ask Judy Halley, the fourth-grade teacher who invited Cohen to Bernabi, how the assembly played. Walking alongside Cohen for a few miles as he continues up the towpath, she smiles. "Someone saw his Web page," she recalls, "so we e-mailed him, asking if he'd stop by. You wouldn't believe the difference this kind of presentation makes. Children learn that history happened in their town. That kind of realization opens a whole world to them."

Two relentless days of walking pass. Sixteen or 20 hours each. At 10 p.m. on Thursday night, in the canal town of Gasport, New York, he's still about ten miles from his destination -- without enough time to walk the rest of the way. His hostess for the evening, Carol Murphy of Murphy Orchards in the town of Burt, New York, is waiting up for him. Cohen's especially interested in Murphy's e-mail message: Beneath a trapdoor in her barn lies an underground chamber. It's a room said to have once housed escaping slaves. From what Cohen has heard, the Murphy farm -- perhaps two miles from the shore of Lake Ontario and near the mouth of Eighteen Mile Creek -- shows every indication of being the real thing. So at Gasport's steel deck bridge, which spans the canal, Cohen hops into a van and, in a few Detroit-made minutes, crosses a stretch of western New York that would have required hours on foot.

Immediately after meeting Murphy and her daughter, Xandy, Cohen is shown to the barn, where Carol opens a dusty, out-of-the-way trapdoor set into the floor. Xandy plugs in an orange extension cord that drops through the hole in the floor, and through a narrow, angled passage a light flicks on. "That's it," Carol Murphy says. "Would you like to go down and explore?"

A rickety wooden ladder descends through the tiny entrance and into a secret room. The air smells musty and carries an underground chill. The 12-by-15-foot room is covered in crumbling white plaster. The floor is coated in a layer of black, moldering detritus stretching to all corners. Even after 150 years, the scent of desperation or fear is easy to smell. You can feel it.

Cohen walks around the room. He posits that, given the narrowness of the entrance, this was not a root cellar or a fireproof storage area. The smallness of the passageway wouldn't allow for anything larger than human beings to slip through. Seeing soot on one wall and a hole in the arched ceiling, Cohen surmises that a fireplace may have stood there, its chimney pipe passing through the hole. The floor is among the most amazing finds of his trip.

Layered with six inches of smashed crockery, fragments of shoes, rusted eating utensils, pieces of leather gloves, tar paper shreds and unidentifiable moldering black bits, it is a cultural archaeologist's mother lode. Cohen hopes that archaeologists will someday visit here to carefully sift the floor's pile.

"Look at the way the room's shaped," Carol Murphy shouts down through the entrance. Cohen glances around. The room and its passageway form a rugged L, with the largest portion invisible to anyone poking his head down through the entrance. "I think there used to be a board barricade down there," she says. "We think it was there so if slave-catchers showed up, it could be fitted into place like a fake wall, so the room would look like a small cellar."

Cohen spends a few more minutes in the chamber. He lifts objects off the floor and examines them, then places them back precisely where he found them. Coming up the ladder, Cohen is ecstatic. Carol Murphy is waiting near the barn's sliding door. "What's down there," Cohen says, "is history. Beautiful, amazing, untouched history." He points down the ladder's rungs and back into the hole. "The Underground Railroad," he says, smiling. "It might very well be right down there."

The next evening, after a long day of walking, Cohen finally sees Canada. It's sunset. And as he strolls through the tended grass of Niagara Reservation State Park, he's bubbling over. After days of "film at eleven" TV-news interviews, he's dodged the media tonight. By his own choice, nobody will be there to ask how he's doing when he finally lays eyes upon what every fugitive slave once hoped to see.

As Cohen approaches Niagara Falls and the yawning chasm between the American and Canadian shores, sunlit mist from the falls throws a sentimental, pinkish glow on the scene. At first, Cohen can't believe he's arrived; he's hopping with excitement, almost leaping into the air with each step.

Then, as he nears the falls' edge, he becomes more introspective. For a long minute he stares at the palisades on the far shore: Canada. For another long time he looks at the falls, the tumbling water hypnotic and full of shifting color in the sunset. His dark eyes are blank, almost glazed. For a man who usually has a palette of quick comments and easy facial expressions on reserve, Cohen's features have gone slack. "After six weeks of walking; after all these miles," he says, "It's almost too much to take in. Huh. There it is."

Then after a stop in Buffalo, where he marches as a guest of honor in the Juneteenth Festival parade and films an interview for local television, there is only one thing left to do. On Sunday, June 16, at a little after 5 in the afternoon, Cohen boards a small fishing boat at the Harbour Place marina in Buffalo, and sets out for Canada. His pilot is Kevin Cottrell, a local historian and black-history tour operator. Cottrell, who has guided groups on legs of the Underground Railroad since 1993, is giving Cohen a wide berth as they board the small, red aluminum boat for the mile-long run across the river.

"I know what he's feeling right now," Cottrell says. "And it's powerful stuff. For black people in America, gaining freedom and understanding the sacrifices of those who came before us, that's our heritage. When you get to this river, and you get your first taste of what it must have been like to reach out and touch that sense of freedom ... Well, it knocks you back."

Cohen, for his part, is pacing the marina's dock, hugging most of the dozen people who've arrived to see him off. Tears often well in his eyes. "It sounds corny, I know," he says, shaking off a weepy bout, "but after walking all that way, I thought this would be the happiest moment of the whole trip. Instead, I feel incredibly sad. More than any other time in the past six weeks, I'm suddenly understanding how difficult this trip must have been. The fugitive slaves had families they'd never see again. They were leaving the only life they'd ever known. They were leaving it all behind, right here."

Then he gets in the boat and goes. Ten minutes later, Cottrell's skiff noses against the Canadian shore at Fort Erie, Ontario, at a known landing for runaway slaves. As Anthony Cohen steps from the boat onto land, conflicting emotions seem to cross his face like a lightning storm. From all around, members of the Niagara Black History Association approach and welcome him to Canada. He climbs the bank before turning to glance back across the river. He drops to his knees. Tears come into his eyes. "Without this shore," he finally says, "the fugitive slaves would have had no refuge." He pats the grassy soil, then breaks into a bittersweet smile. "It looks so simple," he says, plucking up a few strands of grass as he emits a tiny, relieved laugh," but this is freedom."

Donovan Webster writes from Charlottesville, Virginia.

(The article has been cleared for republication and in English and in translation by USIS (including the Agency's homepage on the Internet) and the press outside the United States.)


Gateway	1996