Folktales and Legends of the Middle West Page 6
That was enough for Febold. Having grown attached to Arabella, he cursed the landscape that had caused her death.
“Every wagon train that goes by this cabin is headed to California,” he told his grand-nephew, Bergstrom Stromberg. “I’m going there myself. But I’m not going to stay. I’m going to find out why they’ve got such mild, pleasant weather and so many lush farms, and bring the secret back to Nebraska. Why, if we had seventy-two degree days all year round, and avocado and lettuce farms, our counties would be busting at the seams, just like Los Angeles.”
Febold’s cousin Hjalmar had died of his broken neck a few years before, so he was finally free to set out for his original destination. If anyone could make palm trees grow on the Great Plains, it was Febold Feboldson. But as far as anyone knew, he never came back to Nebraska. There were rumors he became a bartender in Tijuana, or a trainer whose thoroughbred broke the mile record at Pleasanton Fairgrounds, or the captain of a ship trading for tea in China, or a farmer who grew an avocado as big as an ox’s head. There was even a rumor he grew a beard, changed his name to Leland Stanford, and ran for governor of California, although there’s not much resemblance between Febold and the politician.
Sadly, after leaving his adopted home state, Febold was forgotten there until the 1920s, when his exploits were rediscovered by a man named Wayne Carroll, a contributor to the Gothenburg Independent, a newspaper serving a little prairie town settled by Swedes like Febold himself. Where Mr. Carroll heard the stories we don’t know. He may have interviewed Bergstrom Stromberg. But they’re certainly more colorful than anything else published in that long-defunct paper. So colorful we’re still telling them today.
PEG LEG JOE AND THE SONGS OF THE UNDERGROUND RAILROAD
o the slaves of the Southern plantations, the Midwest was a destination on the pathway to freedom. In one of the most famous scenes in Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Eliza crosses the frozen Ohio River by leaping from ice floe to ice floe, until, “as in a dream, she saw the Ohio side, and a man helping her up the bank.” Slaves were not completely free in Ohio, because the slave catchers still operated in the North. But they were able to hide in the series of safe houses known as the Underground Railroad that guided them across the Great Lakes to Canada, where slavery and slave catching were prohibited.
In the case of a one-legged Indiana abolitionist known as Peg Leg Joe, however, the Underground Railroad actually reached into the South. Peg Leg Joe infiltrated plantations in Alabama, providing slaves with a mental map to Illinois by teaching them a song called “Follow the Drinking Gourd,” which contained coded references to landmarks on the road north. One spring day in the 1850s, Peg Leg Joe appeared on the plantation where a young couple, Mattie and Henry, had recently “jumped the broom,” a slave custom signifying marriage.
Mattie usually didn’t pay much attention to the tradesmen who came and went on Mr. Harris’s farm. They arrived to shoe the horses, or sweep the chimney, or replace a wagon wheel, and then they were gone, often the same day. None of that was her business, and she had her own work to do, in the kitchen and the laundry.
But in her mind, there was no ignoring the carpenter who came to oversee the building of a horse stable. He was as curious a sight as Mattie had ever seen. In place of the man’s right foot, he walked on a wooden peg that pressed a round hole into the dirt wherever he stepped. After the peg-legged carpenter passed by the main house, Mattie and another girl ran outside to look at his footprints. One set was a normal left boot print, the other a disc.
“His name is Joe,” reported Mattie’s husband Henry, who had been enlisted to work on the stable. “They call him Peg Leg Joe. He used to be a sailor. Used to call at Mobile, which is how he got to know Alabama.”
“How did he lose his leg?” Mattie asked.
“He didn’t say. Cassius said he heard he lost it fighting with pirates on the Spanish Main, but you know how Cassius makes up stories. Cassius said every time you hear the wind through that big cypress tree, it’s Isaac’s ghost moaning.”
Isaac was a field hand who had died from a whipping administered against that cypress tree, after he’d been caught trying to escape. That had been six years ago. No one had left Mr. Harris’s farm since.
That satisfied Mattie’s curiosity about the peg-legged man. But apparently, the old sailor continued thinking about Mattie. A week later, after dark, there was a knock on the door of the cabin she shared with Henry. Henry had built it with his own hands after they jumped the broom, so they didn’t have to share quarters with the other hands. Henry rolled off their straw mattress and peered through a chink in the door.
“Who’s that?” he asked.
“It’s Joe,” said the voice on the other side of the door.
Henry opened the door. Peg Leg Joe took off his hat and strode into the cabin, imprinting his distinctive tracks on its dirt floor.
“Is there something wrong with the stable?” Henry asked. A late night visit from a white man was always a cause for anxiety.
“No, there’s nothing wrong with the stable,” said Joe.
“Then why you got to see me in the middle of the night?”
“I had supper with the overseer tonight,” Joe said. “He told me I might be missing a pair of hands soon. He said Mr. Harris is planning to sell you to raise money to send his son to college up North, at Harvard.”
Henry and Mattie looked at each other. Six months they had been married, after growing up together on this farm. They had courted since they were old enough to be interested in each other that way, and neither had ever been interested in anyone else. If Henry was sold to a distant plantation, they might never see each other again. Mattie could understand why Mr. Harris had singled out Henry: he was only nineteen or so, the tallest, strongest hand on the farm, with years of hard work left in his body before it wore out. Henry might fetch a thousand dollars on the auction block.
“What’s any of that to you?” Henry asked, speaking Mattie’s mind as well. Why did a man who earned his wages from Mr. Harris care what happened to his boss’s slaves?
“I’m not from Alabama,” Peg Leg Joe said. “I’m from a place called Whynott, Indiana. And don’t ask me why it’s called Whynott; we’ll be here all night. The first time I ever saw slaves, they were unloading cargo on the docks at Mobile. And then I walked into town—this is when I still had both legs—and saw a man chained up like a criminal, being auctioned off like a breeding bull. Well, I think any man’s got the same right to earn his living as I do. Since I lost my leg and quit sailing, I took up carpentry, and I’ve gone from one plantation to another, plying my trade and helping folks like you escape. I’ve helped two so far, and neither of them were captured. It’s still dangerous, though, so you two think about it. If you’re interested, give me a sign while we’re working on the stable, Henry, and I’ll tell you everything you need to know to make it North.”
Peg Leg Joe put his hat back on, tipped it to Mattie, and walked out the door.
“Spring ain’t the best time to leave,” Henry said to Mattie. “It’s better to leave in the fall, when the corn is ripe and you can live off the land.”
“You might be sold by then,” Mattie said. “And there’s something else. I figured it out this week.”
“What’s that?”
“I’m with child. If we wait, I’ll be too heavy. Or we’ll have a baby, and we can’t travel with a baby.”
Mattie and Henry decided right then that they would rather be whipped to death like Isaac than live the rest of their lives apart from each other, as parents of a fatherless boy or girl. The next day, during a break from carrying boards for the stable, Henry nodded at Peg Leg Joe and raised two fingers. Peg Leg Joe nodded back, but he did not return to the cabin that night. Or the next night. Or the night after that. By then, the stable was almost finished, which meant Peg Leg Joe would soon be leaving the farm. Mattie and Henry began to despair of ever speaking with him again. Finally, at midnight on the fourth night, they heard a kn
ock on the door. Peg Leg Joe began by apologizing for his long absence.
“I don’t know if anyone saw me the first time I visited,” Peg Leg Joe explained. “But if they did, I didn’t want them to see me coming here two nights in a row. It might lead to unwelcome rumors.”
“The whole place asleep this late,” Joe assured him.
“I’m going to teach you a song I taught to the others,” said Peg Leg Joe. “It explains the route you’ll need to take, and makes it easy to remember.”
He began singing:
When the sun comes back
When the first quail calls
Then the time is come
Follow the drinking gourd
The riverbank is a mighty good road
The dead trees show the way
Left foot, right foot, carryin’ on
Follow the drinking gourd
The river ends between two hills
Follow the drinking gourd
Another river on the other side
Follows the drinking gourd
Where the little river
Meets the great river
The old man waits to carry you to freedom
Follow the drinking gourd
When he was finished, Peg Leg Joe explained the song’s meaning. “When the sun comes back” was a reference to spring, the best time to leave Alabama to ensure you made it to the Ohio River before the winter’s freeze. “The river bank is a mighty good road” was the Tombigbee, which could be followed north into Mississippi. Along the way, Joe had carved his distinctive footprints into dead trees, as guideposts to mark the route. The headwaters of the Tombigbee were “between two hills” at the twin-peaked Woodall Mountain. The “river on the other side” was the Tennessee, which flows north into the Ohio. At that confluence, “where the little river meets the great big river,” a boat would be waiting to carry them across the Ohio River into Illinois, the southernmost free state. Throughout their journey, as they traveled at night to avoid detection by slave catchers, they should follow the drinking gourd—the constellation known as the Big Dipper, whose handle pointed toward the North Star, a beacon shining over the land of freedom.
“The stable will be finished in a few days, and I’ll be moving on,” Peg Leg Joe told Mattie and Henry. “I want you to wait at least a week after I leave to run. I don’t want word getting around that slaves disappear when Peg Leg Joe is on a plantation. That’ll blow my cover, and throwing me in jail will be the nicest thing they’ll do to me.”
Henry and Joe did not speak again, except when Joe gave an order on the work site. After the job was complete, and Joe rode away, Henry and Mattie waited more than a week to make their escape—until the next full moon, which would illuminate their nighttime travels until they could locate the Tombigbee River. They left just in the nick of time: their absence was discovered when Mr. Harris sent his overseer to their cabin, with orders to chain Henry to a wagon and deliver him to the slave market in Mobile. Furious, the master of the plantation printed up posters offering a $100 reward for the return of his valuable property, and had them nailed up in public squares all over the county.
Mattie and Henry had left the farm with no food and only the clothes on their backs. They feared that carrying bundles would identify them as fugitives, rather than slaves on a master’s errand. They followed creeks downstream to the river, listening every night for the cock’s crow as a signal to conceal themselves in caves, or the hollows of trees. Even traveling at night was dangerous, because slave patrols rode in the darkness. The penalty for escaping was thirty-nine lashes. Before leaving, the couple had rubbed red onions and spruce pine on their shoes to leave a scent that would confuse the bloodhounds. Sometimes, Mattie and Henry rubbed their backs against trees so the dogs would think they had climbed into the branches. As they headed upstream along the banks of the Tombigbee, they would go entire days without eating, because no fruit or crops had ripened yet. Finally, to feed his wife and the child she was carrying, Henry sneaked onto a farm, seized a chicken that had strayed from its coop at night, and before it could protest, broke its neck with a single twist.
“We’re going to have to cook it,” Mattie said, when Henry showed her the chicken. “It’s too tough to eat raw.”
“Someone will smell the fire,” Henry protested.
“We can do it in the morning.”
“They might smell it then, too.”
“If I can’t eat, I can’t go on,” Mattie moaned. “I gotta feed me and this baby. Otherwise I might as well turn myself in while you go north.”
To Henry, freedom would have meant nothing if his wife remained in slavery. And the thirty-nine lashes might cause her to lose the baby.
After the night faded into morning, he built a fire in a hollow tree stump, wrapped the chicken in leaves, and placed it inside to roast. The chicken was only beginning to brown when Mattie and Henry heard the barking of dogs. Mattie remembered the words to another song she had heard on the plantation, about running through a creek to wash away a scent, just as Moses and the Israelites had crossed the Red Sea to escape the Egyptians:
Wade in the water
God’s gonna trouble the water
Who are those children all dressed in red?
God’s gonna trouble the water
Must be the ones that Moses led
God’s gonna trouble the water
Wade in the water, wade in the water, children
God’s gonna trouble the water
Grabbing the half-cooked chicken, Mattie ran toward a creek they had passed the night before, Henry following behind. The barking was growing louder. They jumped in and sat in the water up to their necks until the barking faded, but they were soon faced with new predators: a pair of water moccasins, writhing on the surface, began circling them. Henry waded to the bank, broke a branch off an overhanging tree, and beat it against the water until the splashing drove away the snakes. When both dangers were gone, they stuffed bits of the sodden chicken into their mouths, choking down the barely-edible meat before hiding themselves for the day.
Mattie and Henry could cook no more meat, and the crops were still too young to eat. The next night, when they stumbled upon a lumber camp, Henry had an idea. The couple concealed themselves in the woods, in a spot where they could observe the comings and goings of the workers. In the morning, an all-black crew arrived with a white overseer, armed and on horseback. After giving his crew their instructions for the day, the white man rode off. When he was confident the overseer would not return until the evening, Henry emerged from the woods and approached the crew. It was risky: there were steep rewards for the capture of escaped slaves, so it was always better not to count on the friendship of strangers. But his wife was hungry, so Henry pressed his luck.
“Sir,” Henry addressed the oldest workman, “my wife and I are travelers, and desperately hungry. We were hoping you could spare us some food.”
The logger could see that a week’s flight had already sharpened Henry’s features, pushing his brow and cheekbones against his skin. He gave Henry two strips of beef jerky.
“You go back into the woods where you come from,” the logger instructed. “No telling when the boss comes back. I seen the posters for you, and that’s as much as he makes in a year. But if you stay where you are, I’ll bring some more food tomorrow. I’ll leave it in that hollow stump over yonder, so you can come get it after dark.”
Henry thanked the man and returned to his hiding place to share the jerky with Mattie. They slept through that day, and then through another day. When the overseer had led away the loggers, and darkness had fallen, Henry looked inside the hollow stump. He found a burlap sack, containing a fugitive’s feast: enough jerky and corn meal to feed them for a week. Rationing themselves to two strips a day, and mixing the corn meal with water to make a soft sort of cake (they dared not repeat their mistake with the fire), Mattie and Henry passed the next two landmarks in Peg Leg Joe’s song: climbing the pass between the peaks
of Woodall Mountain, they found the Tennessee River, and began following its course downstream. Clearly, though, it was going to take more than a week to reach the Ohio, and the boat that would carry them to freedom. Peg Leg Joe had directed them to escape in the spring, so they would arrive before the river froze. That was months. They needed a faster method of travel. Passing a farm one night, Henry spotted a horse tied loosely to a post.
“That would speed us along,” he remarked to Mattie.
“You know what they do to horse thieves,” she said.
“I know what they do to runaway slaves, too. I’d rather be hung for stealing that horse than whipped and sold off to chop cotton for the rest of my life so young Master Harris can go to college. You wait here.”
Henry climbed through the fence and approached the horse, which stared at him silently through spiritless eyes. The horse was a bony, unshorn gelding, but no one would leave a good horse out here in the yard, where anyone could lead it away. The horse looked too old and scrawny to pull a plow. Henry thought he might be doing the farmer a favor by sparing him the trouble of shooting and burying it. His fingers easily untangled the knotted rope, and he led the horse through an unlocked gate.