"Much of what we think we know about African American history isn't completely true," says Betty DeRamus in the introduction to
Freedom by Any Means.
"According to the usual story, slaves gained their freedom by running away, being freed by their owners, buying their way out of bondage or having someone else buy them. But how do we account for people like John Bowley, who bluffed his and his family's way to freedom, or Althea Lynch, whose cooking sprang her from jail? And what about all
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"Much of what we think we know about African American history isn't completely true," says Betty DeRamus in the introduction to
Freedom by Any Means.
"According to the usual story, slaves gained their freedom by running away, being freed by their owners, buying their way out of bondage or having someone else buy them. But how do we account for people like John Bowley, who bluffed his and his family's way to freedom, or Althea Lynch, whose cooking sprang her from jail? And what about all those who managed to win their freedom by sidestepping tricks and traps or winning lawsuits?"
Bowley, Lynch and dozens of others are as vivid and surprising as the very real characters who made the veteran journalist's first book,Forbidden Fruit, a best-seller.Essencemagazine describedForbidden Fruitas "a rich collection of true slave-era tales that are at times haunting, often riveting, but always triumphant in the end."
The same can be said ofFreedom by Any Means, which takes a broader look at the various extraordinary ways that enslaved and dehumanized people achieved freedom and the means to a self-determined life. Among these people are visionaries who not only survived against the odds, but prospered -- building businesses, owning land and other property.
The historical research that grounds this beautifully written narrative is drawn from unpublished memoirs, census records, government reports, periodicals, books and much more. The story of slavery and the African American experience before the Emancipation Proclamation "isn't one story," according to DeRamus, but rather a multitude of stories. This book reveals how men and women were willing not just to risk their lives to escape the slave system, but able to use their intelligence and cunning to manipulate the court system, outwit slave traders and brave the unknown in order to assert their humanity.THE BIG BLUFF
No one yelled for the sheriff when a free black man named John Bowley showed up at a Maryland slave auction in December 1850. To the small crowd at the Dorchester County courthouse, Bowley was just another black man saying good- bye to the enslaved family he was about to lose. But the thirty-four-year- old husband and father hadn't come to the courthouse to smell his children's fear or kiss their tears. He hadn't come to watch his wife shrivel up either -- all her green hopes gone -- as a slave trader hauled her away. He wasn't that kind of man. He was a man who could build a ship from prime white oak and tar, pegs and passion, and then make it dance with him across the sea. The kind of man who could sail through storms and laugh at the wind. He brought no cash to the sale of his wife and children on the steps of the old brick courthouse in Cambridge, Maryland, but he brought something equally powerful.
He brought a plan.
His scheme would have made a riverboat gambler grin, drag his chair to the nearest poker table and prepare to bluff. His scheme was brash, tricky, risky and -- in the eyes of most rational people -- impossible. Yet it was Bowley's last hope. Unless it worked, his wife and children would be sold on the courthouse steps. Unless it worked, his family would become the property of men who wore good suits, oozed charm, smelled like they'd been born sipping whiskey and gambled on just about everything, including the fate of their slaves.
Cambridge was the seat of Dorchester County on Maryland's Eastern Shore, a place where quiet villages nestled along rivers with names that conjured up images of once- numerous Indian tribes -- the Nanticoke, the Wicomico, the Pocomoke and, in the case of Cambridge, the two- mile- wide Choptank River. The Choptank churned with crabs so plentiful you could scoop them up from the sea grass at low tide. Bay trout, Spanish mackerel, shad, bluefish, herring, rockfish, white perch and oysters bathed in its waters, too. In the opinion of at least one observer, Cambridge was
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