What Humans Are Capable Of

I finished Bound for Canaan this week, and I can't tell you how enlightening the book was! There was so much information, so much of which I didn't know, that I was dazzled!  I now know how very, very complex the whole issue of slavery was for many more years than I realized, and I have a great deal of admiration for all the people involved in making slavery the major moral issue it became.  I now look at the black people who live around me with new eyes, wondering if they are descended from slaves who benefited from or who were involved in making possible the Underground Railroad.

I really believe everyone should read this book because it will fill in all the blanks in your education about the Underground Railroad.  Most people are content to think the whole thing consisted of a bunch of brave white people who helped hide runaway slaves in their attics or cellars.  With the exception of naming Harriet Tubman and Harriet Beecher Stowe, most people probably couldn't bring to mind a single abolitionist or Underground Railroad conductor.  I was like that.  But there were hundreds upon hundreds of people needed to make it work over those decades, people who stepped up, making large and small contributions, doing it mostly for no monetary gain--courageous people who risked their lives and often their livelihoods to keep the enslavement of fellow humans from being comfortably practiced in this nation, and finally, though it took a great war, to end it.

I learned about the many cities, such as Detroit, that served as centers of underground activity from very early on.  I knew about Cincinnati and Philadelphia, but I didn't know about the many other places where slave holders and their hired kidnappers (looking for escaped slaves) were afraid to go because they would not be able to recover their "property" without a fight.  I didn't know how widespread the Underground Railroad eventually became, to where protecting fugitives was openly acknowledged and encouraged by whole towns, counties, and even states.  I didn't know that there were thousands of American black people who had to escape this country all together, settling in Canada where they lived as citizens and where they were beyond the reach of slave catchers who would kidnap them and drag them back to bondage.

But I also didn't know that slaves in the deep south had very little hope of escape, so tightly controlled was the entire region's plantation system, the slave economy and its structure so deeply entrenched in the state and local governments, and indeed the culture of the region, that anyone who wanted to help slaves or who believed slavery was wrong had no way of acting on those beliefs without taking a terrible risk.  There were few slaves, apparently, from Mississippi or Alabama or Georgia or South Carolina who escaped to freedom in those decades before the civil war. North Carolina for a while had a colony of Quakers who were active in helping the enslaved, but eventually, when the laws got more and more stringent and heavily biased toward slave holders, the North Carolina abolitionists had to escape themselves or risk death.

I have never have had much sympathy with the southern cause, but I came away from this book with tremendous anger toward the stubbornness of those slave holders and really the entire system, clinging desperately to what they must have known was an evil, evil system, and all for the sake of money, really, when it comes down to it. They wanted cheap labor, and as my mother points out astutely, they didn't want to have to work.  They fancied themselves aristocrats, I guess, like the 18th century lords and ladies of England and France, lounging about in their castles or mansions while the lowly did all the work.

Of course, the whole country benefited from the slave economy that made the production of cotton and other staple crops so cheap that we could lead the world in the manufacture of fabric and other goods. No part of our nation is exempt from blame.  Think of all the mills and factories that existed because of cotton, tobacco, sugar cane and rice, all the goods produced and sold to people who could afford to buy them because they were making money on the backs of their fellow humans.  Think of all those nice young New England girls who worked in the cotton mills, able to buy trinkets or send home money to farm families because of people who had been kidnapped, imprisoned, tortured, raped, beaten, starved and, if not killed, in every way possible demeaned and destroyed their entire lives.  If they had known, would those young women have thought it a fair exchange?  I wonder.

But what's perhaps most amazing about this book is the hope that springs from every page.  Despite all the conditions that made it next to impossible to fight against this evil institution, people still did.  They risked everything to eradicate what they saw as a stain on our democracy, and they won! Eventually, they won. In this book, human deeds are shown to be both horrifying and awe-inspiring.  People are capable of both great evil and great good.  And we should never forget that.  Despite the fact that we are still fighting the battle that began when the first kidnapped Africans landed in this part of the world, we are capable of triumphing some day.

I've always believed in humans' ability to triumph, and Bound for Canaan, despite the horrors it brings to light, has only reinforced that belief.

Next time I'll talk about something more mundane--a new mystery by Nevada Barr.  See you then!