Runaway (choose your own adventure

chapter ten - oh hey ho, of to Ohio we go

There were several was a slave could live the rest of their life as free people. The first two are if you could buy it, or if your owner let you go. The last three are more complicated. You could either find a lawyer and earn your rights in court, which was very hard but there were several occasions where it happened, you could live in the north but have to stay in hiding because of the Fugitive Slave Acts. The last was that you could leave to Canada, a farther way but Canada didn't abide by the acts, and gave all African Americans freedom, but would never make it without conductors such as Harriet Tubman, this is a quote from after the underground railroad was shut down"I was the conductor of the Underground Railroad for eight years, and I can say what most conductors can't say — I never ran my train off the track and I never lost a passenger." ...

We spent weeks traveling. I told him that I only needed to go to the next station but he refused. Every time I asked why he was doing this for me, he responded the same. If you don't help as much as you can, there's no point in helping. He decided that it would be a good idea to travel all the way to Ohio with one horse pulling a wagon. He stocked up on food and kept a few jugs of clean water, he had obviously done this before which thoroughly surprised me. He even had a working alibi for why he only had food, water, and a couple of blankets. He said that he was a wandering fur catcher and that the reason he didn't like people seeing underneath was that the animals could get angry and see hope to get out, along with the fact that he had bad cages and it had happened before. and then when people would look under anyway, there where actual cages and he also kept his dog and some stray animals that tried to take the food, which he did in fact, sell for their fur. He was known among the sewers he sold and it made him the perfect person to hide with. The first few times I would always get terrified, worried that I would be caught, but behind the cages and baskets of food, also under a leather wagon cover and blanket, made me pretty hard to see. This man opened my eyes, he completely stunned me with how kind he was. My entire life I had dealt with people who either hated me because of my skin or people who there as a stepping stone. This man on, the other hand, was the kindest person I have ever met, risking his free life just for one person at a time, ready to throw away his life in hopes of making others better. Spending so much time with him, I realized that I would genuinely miss him when I got to Ohio. In fact for the first time in a long time he made me smile.