Never Too Late by Michael Phillips Page B

’cause I couldn’t carry but what my pockets would hold. But I got me a half dozen apples, some white biscuits, some dried oat crackers, a few hunks er cheese, an’ a slab er smoked bacon, dat is ef anyone er y’all’s hungry.”

F UGITIVES
    11

    B Y THE TIME THEY REACHED THE OTHER SIDE OF the river, the five runaways—or four, for the five-year-old girl mostly slept in her mother’s arms wrapped in a small quilt—might have been friends for years. Nothing can win a man’s good graces faster than food, and cold though they were, Seffie’s provisions hit the spot.
    The mother and one of the men were brother and sister. The other man had joined them alone several days into their journey. All were from New Orleans. The two siblings had another sister in Georgia who had connections to someone in South Carolina, they said, who had connections to anywhere a runaway slave might want to go. If they could make it to that station, they would be halfway to the North!
    But however high their hopes, the life of a runaway was a treacherous one, filled with risks and danger on every side, sometimes betrayal, and constant fear of nigger dogs who could smell for miles and were known to have jaws strong enough to tear a man’s leg right off. At least so thestories said. Slaves had been told such tales all their lives to keep them from running away. For those who ran anyway, the days and nights were therefore filled with more imagined terrors than were really there. Yet if they were caught, they might wind up dead or whipped until they wished to be dead, so the fear was real enough.
    They all knew they were hunted, would not be difficult to spot, and with two women and a child would not be able to move as quickly as the two men might have liked.
    Seffie’s strange absence at the plantation was initially a mere curiosity. Nobody suspected the truth about their soft-spoken cook, nor would have guessed that she had been planning her escape for years.
    Mr. Meisner was at first merely perturbed. By the second day, when his eggs were runny, his bacon limp, and his coffee bitter, he began to get worried, thinking that something had happened to her. By the third day, certain rumors of runaway activity in and around the area filtered vaguely into his mind, and he began to harbor suspicions. And on the fourth he issued a warrant for the arrest of one Seffie Black—even he did not know her real name, for he had not bought her until she was seven: — house slave, midtwenties, fat, soft-spoken . He listed a two-hundred-dollar reward for her return, alive. It was a large bounty to offer for a single woman. He thought it best not to mention the fact that she was the best cook ever to serve himself or his family. Kitchen slaves of her caliber were very difficult to find. To broadcast the fact would insure that he never saw her again. The huge reward, however, to a perceptive bounty hunter, would tell the same story, and that in all likelihood she was worth even more.
    Seffie never knew any of this. By the time she was officially listed as a runaway with a price on her head that in her mind would have been a fortune, she was three counties away.
    She and her companions, led by their nightly conductors, crossed Stone County, then George County, and were soon moving steadily across Alabama on that mysterious mode of transit known to slaves seeking freedom as the Underground Railroad.
    Two major river crossings stood ahead of them—the Tombigbee and the Alabama. After that their way would be mostly clear to Georgia.
    Their path ahead into the unknown was marked with uncertainty and fear. Every day brought a new floor or stable or bed of straw or open field or woodsy hollow to sleep in. They usually didn’t know the names of the dozens of people who led them from station to station. Mostly their guides were black, but a surprising number were white. They even slept in a few white houses along the