Alice Baumgartner  00:00

What do you do if you are an enslaved woman? And you have a child? And are you going to risk bringing that child with you on this incredibly difficult, dangerous, risky escape route? Or do you wait and try to find some other opportunity for freedom, perhaps by the law? And in the U.S.-Mexico border lands, there are so many instances of women doing that?

Eleanor Paynter  03:28

And so in this episode, we're focusing on the Underground Railroad. And I guess I would start also with a question about terminology, because I want to be careful myself with how I'm referring to the people whose journeys we're talking about when we speak. And I've brought the two of you in conversation. I'm very excited about this, because you're working on the Underground Railroad from very different perspectives and also in different regions.

So Gerard, I was really moved by a talk that you gave last year when you talked about the Underground Railroad, as illustrating a kind of migration as resistance. And I'm also really interested in hearing more about the work that you're doing on the Underground Railroad locally here where we are in the Finger Lakes region. And Alice, really glad to have you here. In particular, for the perspective you're going to bring on this really under discussed aspect of journeys to freedom, southward movements, which I mean, I'm especially struck, I grew up in Texas, and did not know about these, this aspect of the Underground Railroad or these journeys. So I'm really glad to be able to put them in conversation and hear from you about your work. I've been thinking about enslaved people who are escaping situations of enslavement and seeking freedom. What words are really central for you in thinking about these journeys, because I want us to be on the same page.

Gerard Aching  04:54

Well, first, let me say, I'm very pleased to be here and thank you for this invitation because it's a topic that I have not, you know, concentrated on, but I think could be very rich for our conversation. Very pleased to meet Alice and to have a look at her book because I also would like to know a lot more about that work. Since it's not one that I'm familiar with.

But just thinking about the words, I think one of the things that you mentioned is, you know, I refer to people going off as freedom seekers. I mean, that's one of the key words. And I think that would also be of interest, you know, going south, because the difference between thinking of, simply of fugitive gives you the sense of a fear of immediate action. Whereas if you're thinking about freedom seekers, you're beginning to get a sense of the reflection, that may be involved, before taking decisive action, to go into clan, to stay in migration, to put your hand, to put yourself in the hands of complete strangers, and places that are unfamiliar to you as you head north or as you head south. So I think that I'm glad that we're thinking about your question of waiting and, you know, thinking about agency, because it's a time, it can be a time of reflection before taking decisive action. And I think that goes both for my work as well as Alice's. So maybe we can just begin there.

Eleanor Paynter  06:41

Alice, did you have anything to add with the question of terminology as we begin to speak about this?

Alice Baumgartner  06:47

I've really struggled with this terminology, I understand the critique of using "fugitives from slavery," "runaway slaves," "fugitive slaves," both for the connotations that Gerard mentioned about fugitivity, as well as the desire to use person-first language, like "enslaved people" rather than "slave."

At the same time, I have reservations still about freedom seeker to mean a fugitive from slavery, because it seems to suggest that the people who weren't escaping by fleeing, that they somehow weren't seeking freedom. And it's one of the reasons I was so excited about this theme of waiting, because waiting is part of freedom seeking. And I wonder if maybe the solution to this, perhaps academic question of terminology, is to think about freedom seekers in the broadest of senses. They're probably most enslaved people were themselves freedom seekers who just had different opportunities, some who had to wait longer than others and who waited their entire lives without having any opportunity to make good on that seeking.

Gerard Aching  07:59

I think that's an excellent point, because I think one of the people that I, one of the persons I think about is the case of Frederick Douglass and his Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, where he mentions the turning point. He calls it the turning point and people think about this very often where he comes into a pitched struggle with Mr. Covey. Mr. Covey is supposed to be a "slave breaker" and so many people sort of focus on that particular episode where Frederick Douglass fights and then does not get punished by this so called slave breaker. And so he sees that as a particular sort of triumph, and then he calls it a turning point. The turning point, meaning sort of a point of no return, where he lets it be known that anybody who wants to beat him, as Frederick Douglass, will have to fight to the death. Right. So he speaks about that turning point.

But then what's not studied as much is where Frederick Douglass talks about a "tender point." And when he talks about the tender points, he's referring to those people who decided not to run away because they have kin and family who were very important to them. So that's why, you know, I mean, the lesson for me in sort of focusing on a turning point and the tender point is to think of any enslaved person as having to deliberate between leaving one's kin and family behind. She says it's very difficult and he does not put down anybody for doing that. In fact, he empathizes, right, which to me says that, he's saying that people are making deliberate decisions during a moment of reflection where they can either, is it with these circumstances, is it worth it for me to leave my family and friends behind, or are the circumstances as such that I cannot take it anymore that a turning point is a point of no return. Right? So I think between those two points, we get a sense of waiting, deliberating, making sort of rational choices about leaving or staying. So I completely agree with that point.

Eleanor Paynter  10:26

Maybe it's useful. I got so into what you were saying about the question of terminology that I didn't take a minute to just ask you to introduce yourselves. And so maybe we can zoom back out for a second. And I'll ask you each to situate your work for us since we are going to be moving between different regional contexts and also different moments in time. Maybe I'll turn to Alice, could you introduce yourself and offer a little bit of information about your work on the Underground Railroad and these movements?

Alice Baumgartner  10:54

Absolutely. I'm Alice Baumgartner. I'm an assistant professor of history at the University of Southern California. And I originally was started graduate school as a Latin American historian and was doing research in the summer of 2012, in northeastern Mexico and came across just document after document about enslaved people escaping into Mexico, and their enslavers attempting to kidnap them back, and most surprising of all, to me as a Mexican historian, someone who was training to be a Mexican historian, that Mexican citizens and Mexican officials were often helping, to assist these enslaved people in resisting their kidnappers. And that sent me down this rabbit hole of trying to understand why enslaved people were escaping to Mexico, what types of lives they were able to create for themselves there, and why the Mexican, their Mexican neighbors were assisting them in that. And as a result of that rabbit hole, I found myself becoming more of a US historian, even though I have this training in Mexican history, and really have just learned so much from the huge, deep and complex scholarship about slavery in the United States, fugitivity in the United States, as well as in other regions in Latin America.

Eleanor Paynter  12:23

I really appreciate hearing you contextualize that, how you got to this project, in part too because your book to me speaks to the history of the Civil War, and the history of enslavement in this country in a much more transnational way than I'm used to hearing them discussed, and I really appreciated that in your work. Gerard.

Gerard Aching  12:46

Yeah, so I'm in two departments. I'm in the romance studies department, at Cornell, as well as Africana. And my placements in both departments have been, you know, very good for the kind of work that I've wanted to do. I've been trained as a Caribbeanist, and have been doing most of my work on slavery and colonial literatures in the 19th century of the Caribbean regions. So of course, this is another story of somebody who's being trained in one area and here I am in upstate Central New York, surrounded by, you know, the roots of the Underground Railroad.

So it was then that I began to about 6 or 7 years ago, began to co-teach a course on the Underground Railroad, a seminar, an undergraduate seminar, and where we would visit some of the sights here, and this is where the whole story began for me. So the challenge for me is to be thinking spatially quite differently because when we think of a sort of an escape, in the Caribbean context, we're not thinking there was no Underground Railroad, you think of escape as heading to what might be called bush, or morne, or monte. And it's the place that is both an escape from the plantation but it's also a site of possible worship, of being able to sustain certain cultural practices and so on away from the plantation. And so to be thinking about the different types of space here of an underground railroad was quite interesting. And in both cases, to, you know, to bring them together on the whole question of what do we understand by notions of freedom, you know, given those spaces, so it's been an interesting challenge, and, you know, also feel very fortunate to be able to go out into this landscape here in central New York and be able to, to go to sites with students and now with faculty and collaborate with them on projects.

Eleanor Paynter  14:51

What are some of those sites?

Gerard Aching  14:53

Well, one of the sites is that we have right here in Ithaca is the St. James AME Zion Church, which is our underground railroad station. And this is where we are currently, well, this weekend, we'll be beginning an excavation there with colleagues from the Cornell Institute of Archaeology and Material Studies. So this is in conjunction, of course, with the approval of the church, the church seems very excited about it. So we're having colleagues from that Institute and, in fact, it brought on approximately eight other faculty members to do this, this really bonafide excavation in which we would have 12 teams of Cornell students, mostly from Archaeology, but not only, but also from English and History. And kids from the neighborhood, kids from the community also be part of those teams. So from this Saturday, at approximately nine Saturdays we will be, you know, during the bonafide professional, you know, scholarly excavation with them. So that's, you know, that's become our key area.

But then there are also other areas throughout this region, not far up is Harriet Tubman's residence, you know, about 40 to 50 minutes away from here, going north. And in between there are lots of the places, there are lots of homes that were Quaker homes, that were hiding places, things like that. So we are sort of discovering the documented as well as the ones that are all history and folklore, so that we're making sure to have that be present because I think when you begin to speak to some of the people around here about the Underground Railroad, people just have a lot to say, and, you know, they may know of a family member, they may know somebody who lived in the residence before, and it just opens up a whole sort of, I can think of it as a sort of historical imagination of what it would have been like to traveling on the Underground Railroad, or assisting people on it, you know, so that's, I mean, I could name sites, but there's so many.

Eleanor Paynter  17:06

You bring up several questions that I think have a direct connection also to the problem of time or the question of time and waiting to impart and this is maybe something that both of you could address in different ways through your work, the question of actually doing this work now, you know, a couple of centuries after the events themselves. And I wonder if it's useful to also just spend a moment thinking about what is the nature of that work? What what are we waiting to understand? Or what kinds of processes of recovery or memory work are you involved in? And how is that maybe engaging these stories and these experiences in a different way, because so much time has passed?

Alice Baumgartner  17:59

That's such a good question. And I am having a hard time figuring out even where to begin. But one of the first things that came to mind when you started asking about memory, is the difference in how we remember the Underground Railroad that ran to the northern states and Canada, versus how we really don't even know that much about the escape route that ran to the south, into Mexico. And there's been a lot of really great work that is in motion right now from, for example, the National Park Service, National Underground Railroad Network of Freedom, they're adding more sites in Texas to try to help us make this more present in our contemporary understanding of Texas humanities. It is also doing an NEH-funded teacher training program through for Texas history teachers in K12, is doing a lot of really great work to help those teachers teach the role of slavery and say, the Texas Revolution. But, in general, I mean, I didn't know about that enslaved people were escaping to Mexico when I first came across these documents and Mexican archives. And that issue of why it is that this escape route has remained so under study was something that really fascinated me because it wasn't that people weren't paying attention to these communities of descendants of enslaved people who escaped to Mexico.

Kenneth Wiggins Porter, who was a Harvard trained historian in the early 20th century, really one of the key historical figures for studying African Americans in the West. He went to northeastern Mexico in the 1940s and interviewed the descendants of some of these enslaved people who had escaped to Mexico. And he couldn't get his manuscript published because although he had written about topics that today sound really miniscule and not that important, you know, French municipal assemblies, they're important, they're important. But this particular story, editors sent him letters saying no one's interested in this at all. And part of that might be that he was writing in the 1940s, he hadn't had that interest in African American history as a result of the civil rights era. And we also have this problem when we think about Mexico not as a place that someone will want to escape to, but a place that people want to escape from. And that assumption, I think, makes it harder for us to see that might be an opportunity for inside people to escape. But the final point that I wanted to make, and it relates to Kenneth Wiggins Porter and this question of time, and how do we do this work when it is, over a century ago that this was happening, and I was so fortunate, that Kenneth Wigan Porter had done these interviews with these descendants in the 1940s, only one generation were moved from those freedom seekers who actually escaped. And his interviews were one of the few sources that really helped to understand what it was like to live to escape, and to live in Mexico because of the sources that existed in Texas and in Mexico. It was really hard to trace people across that border, which really stands testament to their ingenuity, their resourcefulness, that they invaded their enslavers in the same way that they are evading historians now, but there are these difficulties about studying fugitivity with so much time lapsed, and that that creates some interesting questions about how we remember these particular escape routes.

Eleanor Paynter  22:05

I want to join. I want to come to you with this question about studying after, but since you brought it up, Alice, I think it would be helpful for people to hear from you. What kinds of things you are learning from these interviews? So what do we know about who was escaping to Mexico and what kinds of experiences they went through? What were they navigating?

Alice Baumgartner  22:29

Absolutely. So Kenneth Wiggins Porter was interviewing the descendants of the Black Seminole who were originally the descendants of freedom seekers from Georgia and the Carolinas, who had joined the Seminole Indians in Florida. They had been forced from their homelands in Florida, first Indian territory, and in 1850s, a contingent of Black Seminole and Seminole Indians left Indian Territory and went to Mexico where they joined a military colony in the northeastern Mexican state of Coahuila. They became this magnet for freedom seekers from Texas, there was this black community in northeastern Mexico that was armed to defend the Mexican border from intruders of all kinds. And so it's sort of a surprise that that was a draw that freedom seekers would escape to that military colony. And so the descendants that Kenneth Wiggins Porter was interviewing are the descendants of those Black Seminoles and those freedom seekers who had escaped to join them in Mexico.

Hard to sort of differentiate who were the ones who were originally coming from Florida, who were the ones who had come and escaped through Texas, but I think that that distinction is less important than the view that those interviews gave us that was able to include in the book about what life was like for those who had joined the military colony, that they showed a lot about the tensions between the Black Seminole and the Seminole Indians. It showed the difficulties of being in this position where they had to take up arms at a moment's notice to help defend Mexican sovereignty against invaders from the United States, but also indigenous peoples, they were having to pay a price for their freedom and that was conscription in Mexico's campaign to try to exterminate these, what they call "Indios barbaros," technically translates as barbarous Indians. So it shows us really the complexities of what "freedom" meant and Mexico is far from a perfect freedom. That said, there are, we know, some other freedom seekers who escaped to Mexico who did not join that military colony, that was one option. But other freedom seekers took a different option. They found work in Mexico cities, sometimes on ranches, on haciendas. And those freedom seekers had a different experience, although it's much harder to reconstruct that experience because those freedom seekers often adopted Mexican names, they married into the Mexican community, they learned Spanish.

And all of those factors make it much harder to trace what happened to them. But we can sort of piece together a little bit that they were integrating much more into the community than, say the Black Seminole and the freedom seekers who escaped to join them. They were facing a variety of different types of degrees, of course, of labor arrangements in Mexico, which was a cash for economy, which did rely on labor systems like indentured servitude and debt peonage. So they also had a different experience than those Black Seminole military colony. But long story short, kind of waiting for her help to get by those interviews help to fill in a pretty big piece about at least one option for freedom seekers who escaped to Mexico, which was joining these military colonies.

Eleanor Paynter  26:33

Thanks, and Gerard. come back to you with the question of, again, engaging with these histories in various points in time. And maybe if you could also give us a sense of what it is that you, perhaps what you anticipate being able to engage with things to excavation or anticipate learning.

Gerard Aching  26:52

I think just, you know, thinking about the time lapse itself, between, you know, thinking of a movement of an Underground Railroad movement, roughly, between the 1830s and 1860s, as the sort of major sort of movement of peoples, according to Eric Foner, that's between 1000-5000 Freedom seekers a year and that's a big guesstimate because, again, there's so much we're not supposed to know because it was clandestine. It was civil disobedience, and you could have been, you know, it would have been a federal crime to assist anybody on the Underground Railroad. So there's a lot that we're not supposed to know, which is why, sort of pedagogically, I asked my students to read the slave narratives, and then also to read the histories of the Underground Railroad, and then I asked them to write a roughly five-page creative writing assignment from the perspective of a freedom seeker, or from the perspective of someone assisting, and we've managed to put that, you know, those narratives on our website. But again, that is an attempt to try and capture these stories or an understanding as it's what I mean by the historical imagination, again, to try and, you know, go through an exercise of empathy, to understand that situation to the best that we can, you know, as a sort of compensation for the fact that there's so much that we won't know or will ever know, about the Underground Railroad.

But nevertheless, I think the Underground Railroad itself serves as a sort of a blueprint for, well, it was one of the first sort of movements in which you have black and white Americans working together for a common cause. And so very often my students, myself, other faculty, also think of, for example, the Black Lives movement, and its allies. So the questions of who is an ally, what is an ally, what are the circumstances, what are the requirements for allyship, become important. And so there's a blueprint for that earlier on, in which we can see what worked, what didn't work in terms of the Underground Railroad. So there are lessons to be learned from that time and I think they're of most relevance today. I mean, one of the things that we can do in thinking about the Underground Railroad is just to get a sense of the different organizations, abolitionist organizations to see that they weren't all equal. They were all doing different things. Some were interested in emancipating African Americans so that they could be sent to colonize, you know, to leave the United States and go to West Africa, which was very different from, you know, organizations that wanted immediate abolition of slavery and so on. So we get a chance to see again, the possibilities of allyship, you know, the strategies that work and didn't work. So I think it's good for us to be thinking back to the spirit of the Underground Railroad as a sort of a blueprint for some of these questions. The second part of it was about the question you asked about

Eleanor Paynter  30:20

What you anticipate learning from excavation?

Gerard Aching  30:26

It's a big question that comes up. And it's the question that the archaeologists, my colleagues get. And the challenge that I've put to them, is, we've already begun to unearth some sort of ceramics and glass from mid-19th century, so just about when St. James, St. James was built at 1833 to 1836, so that, in fact, we're beginning to get some materials ready. And that was just a preliminary take, because the real thing begins tomorrow. And so I asked them, whatever you find, we will consider to be signs of helpfulness, signs of resilience, signs of, you know, of courage. And I think we're on the same page there, because there's a way in which, again, going through the Underground Railroad, and that experience may be seen as one of flight. But we also need to make certain people understand that that flight was also an act of courage. So that, in fact, finding, you know, these artifacts will be helpful for us and just sort of telling that story. And so the most important thing for us, and what makes our project with St. James coherent is just, we're interested in assisting St. James to tell its story. So that's about it.

Eleanor Paynter  32:00

Sounds like for both of you, putting these stories together, either through physical objects in the material work, or Alice, your work with these interviews and different kinds of documents that you found, I imagine requires a lot of reading between the lines. And I love this concept of the historical imagination. Because it seems to sort of acknowledge that kind of creative work that's required. And I don't mean creative in a sort of fantastical way, but in a, you know, sort of opening up new ways of seeing things that haven't been documented. And I wonder what you both think is especially significant now about being able to put these different regional context into conversation? What other aspects of these journeys are maybe bigger questions about freedom and that moment in time, by looking at these contexts together, by seeing it as, if it's fair to say by seeing that somehow as a more complete history?

Alice Baumgartner  33:11

One of the questions that I always get when I talk to both academic and public audiences about enslaved people escaping to Mexico is was it an Underground Railroad? And I think the assumption behind that is, where there are safe houses with candles in the window, and quilts hanging in this popular imagination about the Underground Railroad to the north that has been shaped by this very long history of Wilbur Siebert, who conducted these interviews with conductors on the Underground Railroad in the late 19th century. This, I hope I'm not exaggerating too much by saying that, a romanticized vision of the Underground Railroad in which the white conductors are the main actors, the main protagonists, rather than the enslaved people themselves, who are escaping, as Gerard said so movingly, as a testament to their courage, is a testament to their hopefulness that there could be something better elsewhere. And one of the things that I think we get so clearly from the comparative perspective is that the center stage is really occupied by the freedom seekers themselves. And that even the Underground Railroad as we know it to the Northern States, and Canada, it was not free African Americans were participating in that alongside white people, that this is not a story of Wait, see, here's it's really a story of African American ingenuity and resourcefulness and courage and hope, despite all of the odds, and the same is true of the escape route to Mexico.

It wasn't as organized as we know, thanks to the work of Eric Foner and others. It's not as organized as as the northbound route. There were occasional people who, you know, helped in such people escape to Mexico. But if there weren't safe houses, and there weren't these networks where they would be able to send someone from one place to another, at least according to current research, you were still, there're really interesting archaeological studies that are in process right now in Texas that maybe will change that. But I think it doesn't, regardless of what they find, it doesn't really matter whether it was organized or not, because the thing that is most important about these escape routes are the enslaved people themselves, and what they were able to do, and the fear that they provoked among their enslavers by the mere act of trying to escape.

Gerard Aching  36:03

These are points that are well taken, because there is a degree to which the Underground Railroad is romanticized and romanticized in a the way that Alice mentioned. I think, and I agree that if we were to think of the freedom seekers at the most basic level of wanting a better life and wanting to be out of bondage, then we would have to understand that the movement, known of the Movement South, was occurring before anything was recognized as an underground railroad. Right. So the escape itself, the courage that was required, because not only what we think primarily of if someone was escaping from a plantation, the sort of physical obstacles, you know the threat to life and limb in terms of the escape is one thing that comes to mind. But then, you know, the generations of tales told by the slave owners, that they would be escaping to someplace would mean that the freedom seekers would be escaping to destitution, they would to poverty, to hunger, to the many ways in which they would be forgotten, that they would be, you know, driven into states of wildness and so on.

You know, these were the things that the slaveholders were saying forever, right, so that, in fact, it's not just the physical obstacles, but then there was a whole, you know, a sort of psychological work that slaveholders were doing, you know, to have people not run away at the same time that slaveholders are telling people in North or others that slaves were better off on the plantations than, you know, Africans were in Africa. So these were the tales, and so when you had the mere act of running away just contradicted, you know, the ways in which slaveholders justified enslavement, justified the dehumanization of Africans and African Americans. So the mere act of of leaving the plantation did that, you know, and we could think of it, just the numbers that went up to the north, for example, you know, cause the sort of consternation that led the southern slaveholders to push in Congress right for things like the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 as a way to make assisting freedom seekers a federal crime, which was a way to get around the personal liberty laws that were enacted in the northern states that would give freedom seekers some sort of protection. Right. So running away, just flew into the face of that discourse from the southern slaveholders. And I think that's important. And that's beyond, above and beyond the fact of the Underground Railroad because people were escaping before that. It's not to say, and again, also to Alice's point that the people, I think also Eric Foner's, right, that the people who is not only the freedom seekers but the people around the black churches for example, who either free or free themselves who were assisting with collecting a penny a week for example, just to buy the clothing and food needed to get people on the underground railroad. Their stories have only, you know, not been taught, you know, so I mean, all that needs to happen, you know, so it's not understood as Saviorism, as White Saviorism as Alice mentioned, but you know, very important contribution on the part of black communities around the churches and in rural areas as well as urban to help freedom seekers.

Eleanor Paynter  39:50

Just to tie it back to the question of waiting and the question of time, what you bring up makes me think about, you're addressing the "making movement possible" as one key aspect of this and the different ways in which that happened in the different actors involved making escape possible in the face of these restrictive laws, for example, these violent policies, in the face of all of the obstacles that they confronted. You also talk about then, sounds to me like a kind of manipulation of time as a way of, I mean, and of course, people talk about this in general with enslavement as sort of holding the future captive, it seems like this is also a very specific instance of that. What you talked about Gerard, with the, you know, the manipulation of what they would tell people awaited them, for example, is a, somehow a play on time to sort of hold the future out as either giving a different picture of it or making making the future somehow impossible.

Gerard Aching  41:00

I mean that, I think that's, you know, one of the things that the slaveholders in fact, did then was to have a sense, or to give the sense both to the north, as well as to the enslaved, that being better off on the plantation was a very sort of civilized time. Right, there was a time where civilization could be cultivated, whether it's thinking of a sort of the civic institutions, but also of religion, as well, you know, that there could be some access to that, and in that sense, states were better off in this time, in this sort of "civilized time", which is, in fact, barbaric, by the very institution of slavery. So that was the myth, you know, of a sort of forward looking time in which the enslaved were labor, but at the same time, contributing to a sense of a more genteel society in some strange distortion of the word. So there is that, I think there is that play on the plantation time being a different time from "primitive time" from where Africans, you know, might have come from, according to the, you know, to the biases of southern slaveholders.

Alice Baumgartner  42:29

That also just made me think, Gerard, about you were mentioning Frederick Douglass's narrative earlier, and how he talks about how he doesn't know the year when he was born, you can only guess at his age, and the dates in the early parts of his narrative, his guesswork, and then he learns how to read and write. And he says, I can now begin to give dates that the freeing of his mind from the lies that enslavers were propagating, that's when he can enter time. And as Eleanor, you're putting out, putting forward so beautifully this idea that he can then begin to envision a future in a way that was denied to him and this timelessness of plantation time without time.

Eleanor Paynter  43:19

I'm thinking about the ways that people are referring to the Underground Railroad now. And recently, scholars working on, you know, contemporary precarious migration into the U.S., and also in the Mediterranean, have cited the Underground Railroad as a kind of reference point to think about different practices of resistance and resilience in these contexts. And I wondered if you would comment on whether that works? I mean, we also both talked about the risk of romanticizing the Underground Railroad, I don't mean to say that the scholars focus on migration today are doing that, but I just wonder, you know, maybe it's useful to sort of think about when it works to use that as a kind of metaphor, or if there are ways in which it doesn't quite fit, thinking about the context of, for example, Mexico-U.S. migration today or African-Europe migration via the Mediterranean?

Gerard Aching  44:25

I think that's, you know, just thinking of the use of the Underground Railroad as a metaphor, I mean, if you were to think along very strict lines of thinking and the historical circumstances, then it wouldn't work, wouldn't be accurate in the sense that certain circumstances that lead us to be speaking about the Underground Railroad as a somewhat organized activity of civil disobedience. Right? This is to say people of conscience, citizens of conscience within the country reacting in forms of civil disobedience against their country in order to have people travel to some state of freedom. Right? But if it's the kind of metaphor that's describing, or invoking, again, organized actions by people who have conscious for social injustice, I can see the ways in which, you know, the Underground Railroad can be interesting, though, again, to move against the sort of romanticization of the Underground Railroad, it wasn't as organized as people think. Right? So you may get maps that show these were the roots of the Underground Railroad, but those maps ... because routes would disappear, would emerge in other spots, and just depended on circumstances who was there, who was running where, who was being chased by a bounty hunter. So all of that would constantly be changing, and they would, and any sort of activity, what some of the abolitionists called practical abolitionism, which is how they referred to the Underground Railroad, is it would be constantly in flux, right? Then, you know, the activity was quite different in the urban areas from the rural areas, and it just depended who was there, who was, you know, who was willing to undertake this, this sort of illegal activity and so on. So, if the whole question is about, you know, social injustice, and what, you know, a group of people will organize to do, I think there is some resonance. But I think we would just have to judge in terms of the, you know, the degree to which on the one hand, you're thinking about civil disobedience, and the degree to which you're thinking about activities that are not.

Alice Baumgartner  47:01

The national Underground Railroad, National Network of Freedom that the National Park Service has been working on, since the 1990s, has redefined what Underground Railroad or what they mean by Underground Railroad. And they're they're seeing it as the freedom seekers themselves. And I think if we think about it in that way, I guess, I feel like I'm all for having the Underground Railroad be used in any way that can help fight injustice, whether or not it's, you know, is it exactly like the Underground Railroad as we think about it in the north? Well, no, but what if we just redefine the way we think about the Underground Railroad and are able to bring people, make people interested in this who wouldn't otherwise have been interested. That seems like a pretty compelling thing to me.

Gerard Aching  47:53

Yeah, I think that's a great point, Alice. In sense it fits, if Underground Railroad means a certain commitment, right, to solving problems of social injustice, you know, to do that in an organized way, or not, I think that is probably the most valid basis upon which to speak of an underground railroad.

Eleanor Paynter  48:19

I have one of our students here, Jordi, had this presentation last semester, wrote a paper about, thinking about these comparisons, referring to it as an ethos that being Under Railroad ethos that moves over time, and that seems to resonate with what you're saying. Yeah. Are there things that you would recommend that folks who want to learn more about this could read or watch or stay tuned for?

Gerard Aching  48:47

When I understood that we were going to be speaking about, yes, the Underground Railroad, to escape, but also just thinking about waiting, we should be thought of Harriet Jacobs's text, "Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl." I would highly recommend that to anyone because not only did she do that deed of waiting, at the garage of her grandmother's house seven years, right. She, in other words, she had forced her slave master to sell her children to somebody to, actually to her, somebody who she had the children with, he didn't know that, right? So it was a ruse in order to do that, but she hid away for seven years in a space that was maybe three feet high, nine feet long, seven feet wide, something like that, garage at her grandmother's house just in order to make sure that her children had a future away from the plantation.

And so I just think of that wait to make that happen and that is a measure of human resilience, you know, but I think, but more than the book, I also just think and it's the kind of question that I asked rhetorically for for listeners for us just thinking about, even the experience of an enslaved woman who is pregnant thinking about the future of that child. I don't even think we can begin to fathom. That wait. I don't, you know, I think it's something you know, to think about as well, because I think it brings home, you know, the importance of purpose of flight from the plantation in order to secure those futures, for the children.

Eleanor Paynter  51:04

Yeah. I'm glad to take this moment also as an invitation to think about other examples of reading or instances of reading that remind, let people linger with after the episode. So thanks for that, too.

Alice Baumgartner  51:21

Oh, there's so much I want to say. I still don't have, we don't have time for, I'll try to be quick. When reading suggestion that I, well, let me start by saying that there are a lot of books that are going to be coming out in the next couple of years about enslaved people escaping to Mexico. Mikayla Dane, Maria Esther Hammack, Thomas Marie, there's a lot of books to keep an eye out that are going to be great for deepening our understanding of this escape route. Another book that came out last year that I would highly recommend is William Thomas's "A Question of Freedom," which is about enslaved people who petitioned for freedom in the area around the District of Columbia and Maryland, and one of his arguments is that we should be thinking about freedom seeking, not just in terms of running away to a jurisdiction that had abolished or restricted slavery, but also think of it as enslaved people who escaped to a judge, to a lawyer who sued for their freedom because of legal interactions. And I suggest that book not only because it's beautifully written, and really well done, but I think that idea of legal escape as well as physical escape, links up really nicely to which Gerard was talking about about what do you do if you are an enslaved woman and you have a child? And are you going to risk bringing that child with you on this incredibly difficult, dangerous, risky escape route? Or do you wait and try to find some other opportunity for freedom perhaps by the law?

And in the U.S.-Mexico border lands, there are so many instances of women doing that and I'll just briefly mention one because it relates to waiting that there was an enslaved woman named Minerva, who was born on a plantation in western Louisiana, her enslavers took her first to Arkansas, and then to what was then the Mexican state of Texas, which was a violation of Mexico's laws banning the importation of enslaved people, and those laws gave her a claim to freedom. She was on the eve of the Texas Revolution, her enslaver died and the enslaver's wife forced Minerva and her children to go to Louisiana, and she claimed her freedom in the court of Western Louisiana on the grounds that she had been imported in violation of Mexico's laws and that she had been imported in violation of the United States' laws against the slave trade, which is really, it's a remarkable document, her claim to freedom by invoking these laws, but it is her waiting, and unfortunately, she doesn't win this case. But the reading, well, that case was going through the courts. That was three years of in sort of protected by the court that, that meant something. She needed that time until her enslaver made this mistake where they gave her a legal claim. And it was a pretty strong legal claim against the court. Western Louisiana wasn't really buying these arguments so  thinking about freedom seeking, in legal, as a legal escape, I think really opens our eyes to the ways in which enslaved women could exercise these opportunities that maybe didn't come with the same risk of physical escape that you were not hopefully going to be chased by dogs, if you went to aware or you were not going to be shot for trying for escaping without responding to, you know, white passerbys who asked you for a pass, the risks were less, and the possibilities for freedom were nonetheless still there.

Gerard Aching  55:38

I also think that Alice makes the point very well, in her book that, you know, the access to sort of legal means was something that you could find sort of much more in the Spanish tradition in Cuba, Mexico, and so on. But imagined that within the US is also, you know, a significant contribution to give us a sort of a complex idea of, you know, the ways in which you can go about pursuing freedom. But then also, I think, you know, one of the points being made in the pursuit, you pursue freedom, you pursue justice, and then having that three year period, while you're waiting for justice, is something that we think about when we're also thinking about, you know, the long wait for justice, because, because after freedom, there should have been equality. And since we're still waiting for that, that waits continues.