Wilma

8/24/14

I think most of you know that I'm trying to write the next "greatest novel" and that my heroine is an old gal named Wilma (who incidentally looks a lot like me - go figure).  Early on I thought it would be fun for Wilma to turn up Lincoln's Missing Diary (this is truly fiction, because his diary is at the Smithsonian. Wilma would then find her way to Washington and using a map her husband had left for her, would uncover all manner of secret things.

At the moment, I have redirected my words to describe slaves, trading of slaves, their treatment and escape.  While poking around on the Internet, I found that there was a church founded in Baltimore by a free black man.  The church still stands.  Underneath the church was a sub-basement and a tunnel. I have done quite a bit of reading about the Underground Railroad and found pictures of quilts that would hang outside to let the slaves know that it wasn't safe for them to go to the house, building, etc.

Slaves also looked for moss growing on the north side of a tree, migrating birds fly north in the summer; and finally the North Star always points to the north.  The slaves called the Big Dipper the "drinking gourd".

One woman escaped carrying her grandchild on her back.  When she approached a river that had large chunks of ice on top, she literally leaped from one piece to another.  A slave trader was waiting on the other side of the river, but he was so impressed with hard she was trying to escape, he let her go.  Situations like this were rare, and more times than not, escaped slaves were caught and punished generally by beating them with a whip.

I have books piled up on a side chair with varying titles but all of them are about the slave passage on the ships, slave treatment before and after auction and lastly 

The history of the slaves, their brave attempts to gain freedom and the Underground Railroad, have made for some fascinating reading.

P