ROOTED WISDOM AUDIO ESSAY
This transcript was generated using a combination of speech recognition software and human transcribers, and may contain errors. Please check the corresponding audio before quoting in print.

MECCA LEWIS: Hello, I'm Mecca Lewis. And as you can hear, I live in a city.

(layered sounds of the city; sirens, cars and trucks driving, horn honking, bus door opening, train announcement)

Baltimore, Maryland is my hometown. There's a lot of history here, including the Underground Railroad. Several freedom seekers used trains out of Baltimore to liberate themselves from bondage, including Frederick Douglass. But today, to learn more about the experiences of self-liberators, we're going to go to a place that sounds like this:

(birds singing, water flowing, woodpeckers tapping, Barred Owl call)

And meet a historian who sounds like this:

ANTHONY COHEN from the Rooted Wisdom: Nature’s Role in the Underground Railroad film: Home to over 600 varieties of plants native to the Chesapeake region. Where the west wind sweeps across the forest to routes Harriet Tubman used when leading others to freedom, and where Tuckahoe Creek flows downstream to the birthplace of Frederick Douglass. This landscape still bears witness to nature's role in the Underground Railroad.

MECCA: That's historian Anthony Cohen at Adkins Arboretum. The setting for the Rooted Wisdom: Nature's Role in the Underground Railroad Guided Experience. Found at naturesrole.org (note: the website has been changed to rootedwisdom.org). As an interpreter, Cohen uses experiential history to educate others. He has a better way to explain it.

ANTHONY: So I take objects, places, artifacts, determine what the intrinsic story is that they have to tell, and then build programs and experiences around those.

MECCA: So in terms of you talking about like your interpretation, what does it mean to you to be tasked with interpreting like history relating to our ancestors as black people?

ANTHONY: That's a great word, tasked because it feels on the one hand like the lightest lift ever. It's like, assign me more, please. Right. I love interpreting our history, especially history that emerges from the period of slavery, dark history, if you—if you will, because I think it continues to speak to the American mindset.

MECCA: Yeah. I think it's interesting having the capacity to be like an interpreter because I feel like interpretation is kind of subject to change at any time. And I'm curious to know, like how often you are sort of making a solid statement or finding something as a fact or, like a piece of a story, but then revisiting it, or how often do you have to reinterpret?

ANTHONY: I often think of the work I do and the work that colleagues of mine do, as if we were land surveyors. You know? So you go out with your equipment and you establish the boundaries, but that has to be done ongoing. And you find where someone may have been off a little bit here. And so you readjust and it comes into clearer focus. So, pursuit of history is a process. And the process never ends.

MECCA: I'm wondering what do you, what do people in general, like what do we understand about the Underground Railroad as people of the United States?

ANTHONY: I'm nearly 60 years old, and when I was a kid in school, I had this notion that the Underground Railroad was this route to freedom. I got that part. But, I thought that Harriet Tubman had invented it and that when you reach the north, there were people there to help you. It wasn't until much later (chuckling) in life where I began to wonder, well, how did people get to the north so they could get the help? Shouldn't they have gotten the help, you know, while they were still (chuckling) enslaved? And so today we understand that enslaved people traveling the route were self-liberators. So they took the first step in search of their own liberty.

MECCA: Sometimes I don't know if it's just that I'm like older or if things are different and changing, but it is it does feel special to kind of be in a place where people want to sort of assess what they do know about the history of slavery in the United States and especially the Underground Railroad is sort of like main talking point about that in that story. But it is exciting to sort of be in a place where we're kind of all recognizing that there's a particular narrative that was formed and we're kind of looking to reassess what it is. And it's funny you say that you're 60. I'm 23, and I also for a very long time was like, well, the Underground Railroad, I know for a fact, is not a real railroad. And that's pretty much all I was told. And especially being in Maryland, where there's so many like physical resources that we could visit in places we could go to learn about it that wasn't super accessible. So it was just kind of a long time coming for there to be some sort of popular retelling of this history and creating a new narrative.

ANTHONY: Yeah. And you know, I think perspective is the key player in this. There are the stories to be told and then there's also the stories we wish to tell. With Rooted Wisdom we specifically poured over the records, looking for references to the natural world and how that played in planning and affecting these escapes. What we discovered is there was an immense amount of cultural knowledge of nature, of the landscape, how to survive in it.

One person in mind who's an enslaved man from Georgia named John Brown, he's not the abolitionist. His description of navigating north by feeling around the base of trees at night for moss when he couldn't see the North Star. He felt for the longer, lusher moss, which grows on the shady side of the tree, as well as searching for the dry, parched moss, which he reckoned was exposed to the sun and indicated the southern exposure. Right. So there was the compass, the forest compass in the moss, and that allowed him to take more steps along his journey.

Enslaved people were people who lived on the land, by and large, and so they were able to intuit its ways. And that was data that was there all the time, but people weren't looking for it. So sometimes desire goes in search of the truth.

MECCA: I'm curious to know what kind of support people who wanted to seek freedom north needed outside of the knowledge that they already had, being sort of the purveyors of the land.

ANTHONY: The people that they met along the way that provided shelter and assistance and direction were first and foremost, other enslaved people, free black people and anti-slave white Americans who joined together across the landscape until network became more robust, mainly above the Mason-Dixon Line, which could then get to places further beyond, such as Canada. If you were escaping from this region or Spanish Florida, if you were coming out of the Carolinas or Georgia heading south, or Mexico, if you were in Texas, you know.

MECCA: And does that look like just sort of these first hand, in the moment, learning experiences, or like learning through experience? Or were there other sorts of support systems that were found or were needed to make such a trek?

ANTHONY: Yes. And I would say, that were—that were found because we have the story of people who wander sometimes for days, sometimes for months, until they determined that they had reached free soil. People who had avoided contact with strangers along the way because they didn't want to be betrayed. And so you can only imagine that if some of these folks had asked the right people at the right time, they could have gotten to their destination quicker. But to secure one's liberty, you needed more than just arriving on free soil, because anywhere in the United States, even in the northern so-called free states, you were still bound to the terms of service. Self-liberators were referred to as fugitives. The actual legal term was fugitive from labor. That was the legal term. (chuckling) They were fugitives from labor.

Once you got to that northern location, the most successful people were able to then use intermediaries to write back to their owners and arrange terms to buy their freedom so they couldn't be pursued anymore. So that was kind of like the the the high watermark of assistance that people received.

MECCA: Well, (chuckling) it's not very much (chuckling). I understand why it takes a long time (chuckling) to go on—I mean, I could I couldn't imagine someone being, you know, walking around and being too afraid to just ask which direction is north.

ANTHONY: It's interesting because the power of the North Star. It is hard to find the narrative of someone who reached freedom, who does not mention the North Star, but there were enslaved people who didn't travel at night. They chose to travel during the day.

I remember one traveler describing being on the side of the road and watching carriages pass and then venturing out on to the road because cleanest, most efficient path, you know, to walk on until someone coming in the direction towards him would spot him and he'd flag them down and say—Excuse me, I'm separated from my master. Have you seen him? He was in the carriage and it was painted blue. And then the people would be like—Oh yes, we passed it on the road and it's just you're almost there. Just keep going! (chuckling) You'll catch up with them! (chuckling) And being able to use the worst of a situation and flip it on its head. Because, to become the best of a situation.

(owls calling, birds singing, water flowing, woodpeckers calling. Followed by footsteps on a gravel road then crunching leaves)

MECCA: What should we expect as we prepare to descend into this forest?

ANTHONY: We are leaning into winter. It's pretty much started. The leaves that are falling have pretty much done that. We're able to see into the forest more clearly. At the time of contact, we're talking European contact, this was a thickly forested landscape. By the time that slavery ended after the Civil War, much of the Eastern Shore had been clear cut, with the forest timbers going for boatbuilding. Sometimes pines and white oak were brought down in whole and transported without being cut up to awaiting ships to be processed in New England. So that was part of the daily lives of enslaved people.

Shall we go in?

MECCA: It's pretty interesting that there seems to be, is that a stream or is it just marshy over there?

ANTHONY: Yeah, it looks like a low lying, marshy area. Yep.

MECCA: Like pretty dry and high up there and low and wet down here. What kind of opportunities does this present in terms of maybe challenges or, no, benefits in terms of moving throughout the landscape.

ANTHONY: On the plantation itself, enslaved people were given a portion of land to build their cabin, and that was often the lowest marshy is areas, areas that weren't ideal for farming. These were places where the white folks weren't going to be hanging out right. And so you could also seek out the spirit in places like this. This is where the secret church would have been found. Often at night, after the work of the day was done. When we think about communities, we would have to flip them upside down to find the nighttime world that enslaved people had for themselves.

(bull frogs calling and chirping, owls calling, insects chirping, water splashes)

ANTHONY: What else do we see? And I'm looking at this downed tree, hollowed out tree. And one here.

MECCA: Oh yeah. (footsteps on leaves) Whoa. That's crazy. Looks like it was burned up in there.

ANTHONY: Doesn’t it?

MECCA: Yeah.

ANTHONY: So here we have what would appear to be a very old sweet gum. How large do you reckon the tree is?

MECCA: My guess is going to be about, 30 feet tall. More? 30 feet tall? Yeah? Pretty thick. I couldn't give it a hug. Maybe a two of me could give it a hug, but it's pretty big. But also the—at the base, there's a huge hollow that honestly is just about perfectly my size.

ANTHONY: In the forest. You find these grand hollowed out trees. We also have a story of someone using a similar hollowed out tree as a shelter on his journey on the Underground Railroad. And his name was Harry Grimes. He was from North Carolina, suffered terribly under enslavement, had an enslaver who was a drunk and would frequently beat the slaves. One time, came after Harry with a knife and stabbed him.

MECCA: Oh no.

ANTHONY: And he realized that he needed to get out of dodge. So he fled into the forest for months, but he lived in the hollow of a tree.

MECCA: I kind of want to try getting in it.

ANTHONY: You want to try getting in it? Great. Yeah.

MECCA: Yeah. I couldn't imagine.

ANTHONY: That's incredible.

MECCA: This really does protect you from the wind, but it's no home. It's crucial.

ANTHONY: What do you see in there, or what do you feel in there?

MECCA: It does feel kind of secure in a nice way. Like I could imagine coming out and just hanging out in this.

ANTHONY: Wow.

MECCA: And being by myself. But it is kind of sinister too, you know, have to be in a place that feels kind of comfortable, but knowing that it is like the shelter for someone who is fleeing from a terrible situation.

ANTHONY: Yeah.

MECCA: But it's kind of a duality, I suppose. The dual feeling of like—wow, this is really comforting and kind of nice. But I also feel for the idea that someone has to live in this. However, you would definitely be very protected from the elements.

ANTHONY: Absolutely.

MECCA: No wind. I'm sure there are plenty of bugs in here though. But also you have to be kind of small, like I'm kind of barely fit in there.

ANTHONY: Yeah, I think I would more barely fit in there. (chuckling) I think you're a little smaller than I am. Harry’s story we know from a book called The Underground Railroad by William Still, who operated a station in Philadelphia. And from roughly 1850 to 1860, he recorded the stories of hundreds of people who went through his station and then after the war, published his notes as a book. And so it's really the first comprehensive account of a single station on the Underground Railroad, but also the network that fed into it.

In his book, he had an artist depict Harry's story. You see him inside of the tree opening and he's wielding an axe and he's about to chop a snake in two that he called, I think, the great poplar snake or something like that. It had to be all drama. But the snake is coiled up and is ready to get Harry, and Harry's ready to level the blow in defense of his—his tree house.

MECCA: Fighting over the shelter.

ANTHONY: Yes, yes, yes. Because it's so cold and the time of year I chose not to tell that story prior to your going in here. If it was summertime, I'm not sure we would have let you go in there could be a snake. (chuckling)

MECCA: Yeah.

ANTHONY: And having been inside, do you reckon you could sleep comfortably in that during the night? Would that be the idea?

MECCA: Actually, I didn't think about—when I went inside of it—I wasn't thinking about anything other than just sort of resting for a moment. I could not imagine sleeping in that actually you'd have to stand and your head would be, you know, resting maybe on the inside of one of the tree's walls. But I could not imagine sleeping in there. No.

ANTHONY: So even shelter is something you have to negotiate.

MECCA: Yeah. You've got to take what you can get, I suppose. And I'm not sure you could be super picky about where you choose to sleep.

ANTHONY: Yeah.

MECCA: And how just being able to get rest in general, I'm sure, is a privilege when you're, you know, on your way.

ANTHONY: You know, that's also illustrative of the pros and cons of traveling during different times of year.

MECCA: Yeah.

ANTHONY: And what are the cons of this time of year?

MECCA: My fingers are doing surprisingly well, but frostbite at the very least.

ANTHONY: Yes.

MECCA: Hypothermia. It's kind of damp in there, the bottom.

ANTHONY: I think you you nailed most of them. 


MECCA: Yeah.


ANTHONY: In the warmer months, when the canopy is thicker, you could perhaps build a fire that would be less visible from the surrounding landscape. Now you would be more exposed, but you'd be in more need of a fire now, right? You think so? Yeah. What do you think the benefit would have been traveling at this time of year as opposed to the summer.

MECCA: Shaking the whatcha-ma-call-it on my hair. Well, I imagine the benefits would definitely be the sun setting much earlier. So you're covered by night for more of the day. 


ANTHONY: Yes.


MECCA: Which probably provides some sense of security and being able to rest for longer. And if you're not competing with—I mean, actually, I don't know if animals are hibernating, you might have to fight someone for a tree hollow. But, um. Yeah, I guess the absence of other insects and pests and smaller creatures that might be more hazardous and present when it's warmer.

ANTHONY: Absolutely.

MECCA: Yeah.

ANTHONY: And looking at the non-historical weather app, it's 37 degrees, but allegedly feels like 27. What are you feeling?

MECCA: Yeah, I definitely just had to put my gloves on. It's pretty cold. I—being inside of the hollow like prevents wind but it it's a little even colder inside of it so.

ANTHONY: And you're wearing some kind of insulated.

MECCA: Yeah, I'm decked out I'm wearing thick socks. I'm wearing long johns. I'm wearing fleece lined jeans down coat, another coat underneath it. And Tony how are you feeling? You've got, you’ve got a, you seem like your jeans aren't fleece lined.

ANTHONY: They are not If you read like many of the runaway slave notices, clothing is described. And so wool, cotton, multiple layers. My guess is if they were well prepared upon their departure that they wouldn't be too far off in terms of being able to keep comfort. But some people escaped without much notice because they were about to be sold, or an act of violence was about to be perpetrated. So, they just had to skedaddle.

It does, in my mind, evoke the classic picture of the Underground Railroad, which is keep on moving on. So I think in a situation like this, I would want to be moving.

I am noticing, one more thing about the tree.

MECCA: Oh the moss.

ANTHONY: The moss, Yeah, the moss. So I had mentioned before John Brown. And how he was able to determine direction based on moss growing around the entire base of the tree. Do you want to take a stab?

MECCA: Well, definitely thicker, greener, longer at the base on the non-hollowed side. It’s sort of drier towards the front. Oh, definitely way more crawling up the other side of this tree. I'm not oriented directionally right now, and I wish that I could tell by looking at this moss, what direction I was standing in.

ANTHONY: I'll ask one of the crew what time it is.

MECCA: It's 3:12pm

ANTHONY: It's 3:12pm.


MECCA: Yeah.


ANTHONY: Just some great basic facts. We know Sun rises in east, sets in the west. I'm going to guess that sun set at this time of the month is going to officially be about 5 o’clock. But we were also in the forest, so the sun will set, you know, below the tree line and it'll be darker a bit sooner, but that is definitely the west, right? So the backside, which you said was longer and greener, is definitely north. Yes. And the side where we're seeing no moss is the south side, but that's where the opening is of the tree. And the first moss that we're seeing going from south to north is appearing here at the southwest side. So that seems to be tracking with John Brown's wisdom.

MECCA: I’m also noticing all these thorns. I don't know if this is particularly like, you know, they're the only sort of really green things that are alive right now. But I couldn't imagine searching for where to go and accidentally stepping on this in the smallest, you know, that being the least of your concerns, I'm sure. But even this, my coat’s gotten stuck on as we came down. But I would not want to step on this either.

ANTHONY: Yes, I think it's a good nod to those daring, ingenious travelers who took to the public roads. Fewer encumbrances, more of a straight line, if you will, to some destination, more opportunities perhaps of being detected, but also more opportunities of receiving help, and that the forest is where you would hunker down to probably sleep.

While the cold is definitely a looming danger, the leaves, I think, are the perfect advance warning system of danger coming. You could hear someone (footsteps on leaves) right approaching. (footsteps on leaves) So that would be a benefit.

(footsteps on leaves, pileated wood pecker calls, followed by footsteps on gravel)

MECCA: Hey, you’re very much right that the the paved road is a much easier path to travel on.

ANTHONY: Absolutely. Roads, rivers, anything that kind of forges a line between points I think was very helpful. And some of these paths they traveled daily. What was produced on the farm had to be taken to market. People weren't always on lockdown.

MECCA: Right.

ANTHONY: And they shared that knowledge. And as they went from place to place, they met people and they got a sense of the outside world. So that's how the journey would begin. It's the middle and the end, which they had to improvise with. Yeah.

MECCA: That was definitely a kind of a really insightful experience to be able to like physically put myself in a position to imagine how it might feel like sort of stepping out as someone would who was looking to liberate themselves from their enslavement. But I'm curious to know a little bit more about maybe on an emotional level what people were thinking and feeling when being outside and being in those conditions that we just experienced.

ANTHONY: Yeah, we get something from the narratives. There are frequent passages about people's state of mind, especially around the fear of pursuit, leaving family behind, fear about taking family with them, because then of course everybody is exposed, right?

For me, when I walked the route of the Underground Railroad from Maryland to Canada in 1996, I traveled eight weeks, over 800 miles, 10 to 25 miles a day.

MECCA: Wow.

ANTHONY: And I was stopping in all the towns along the way, asking people what they knew about the Underground Railroad. One of the things that I gathered from the experience that I think is most likely applicable to the mindset of the actual people who went on the journey is my belief that adrenaline was probably the chief fuel used on the Underground Railroad and that at times, whether you're being pursued by dogs, or followed by people, or trying to out run a storm that's forming and is about to unload on you while you're in the middle of nowhere with no shelter, whatever it is, nights about to fall before you get to your next destination. There is this inner desire to kind of push through the problem. And so, hunger, sore limbs, other forms of discomfort just kind of dissolve in that moment because you're just focused on the problem at hand. And that had to be an incredibly useful kind of survival mechanism.

MECCA: Yeah, and I can only imagine, like, let's say you arrive at the destination you're hoping to or you arrive in a place where you feel more secure than before. And the emotional baggage or weight of the experience that you had getting to that place. I wonder, I mean, that must stick around forever as well in itself.

ANTHONY: One woman who escaped with her husband said she was frightened about everything when she began having only been a house servant. But, by the time she reached Canada with her husband, she had crossed rivers on a log. I mean, she did it all. In Canada, she had killed her first bear.

MECCA: Whoa.

ANTHONY: And it transformed her. She was just a completely different person.

MECCA: It sounds like maybe with that particular account that there's a sense of like personal development and growth and you feel stronger and empowered by maybe like killing a bear and sort of taking care of yourself. But you know, I couldn't imagine ever like—it would be just like, I would be distraught if I had to come to a point where I had to be in a position to just radically change what I felt like I had to do to get basic things like food and protect myself in a way that I'm not used to. It sounds like it could also lend to a level of trauma afterwards as well.

ANTHONY: Oh, I believe so. The couple that I just described, John and Eliza Little, establish themselves in Canada and accrue an amount of wealth. Eliza comments she can walk into any store and be treated with the same respect as any white woman. She's got her groove, but her husband remains bitter, really bitter. And he challenges the reader. He's like, let any man come here and see John Little and say that the Negro can't accomplish anything. But you can tell, you can tell, that while they've achieved freedom on the face of it and independence and security that they have exiled themselves. Right. And so everything that they knew from the past is gone. The bridge has been burned.

And that's one of the things about the Underground Railroad that I think is rarely spoken of. It was a bittersweet railroad. You gained something, but you had to give up something. And what you had to give up was often family, friends, the communities that you built, the communities you built for other people, right? None of that accrued in your favor. It was all gone. So it's a story of triumph and achievement, and a story of great loss and despair.

MECCA: What is it like and what do you learn every time you sort of step back into the landscape and bring someone along with you to sort of talk about this history?

ANTHONY: It changes moment to moment, person to person. I see people, you know, who I guide on these experiences, who come out just completely dumbfounded and will say—I never knew this, why was this history kept from me?—As if our culture has conspired to (chuckling) to cover up the past. Oh wait! (chuckling) It has. (chuckling) And that's that's pretty powerful. I see people connecting the dots. Somehow translating the experience of people from a century and a half ago to the present and just it's kind of like ballast for the ship, if you will. Like, you know, it's in the past. But they also know that people from many different cultures in many situations around the world are on these roads and seeking sanctuary and escaping from injustice. But what are they escaping to, right? That's like the present, that’s the dilemma for the ages. And that's where we come in as people in the present. We have to open our doors. We have to fight oppression and that can be very daunting.

MECCA: Yeah, absolutely.

ANTHONY: I think most of all I see people just so thrilled and elated that the stories are being told and that they can have a tangible connection. I mean, look around. You have all of the elements land, water, sky—everything is here and it's very sensory and very emotive. And so just even walking through this landscape tells a story of its own that doesn't require words.

MECCA: Well you referenced walking from Maryland to Canada, and walking through the arboretum today, I'm curious to know, like what it feels like for you to walk and sort of follow these paths that our ancestors literally also followed. And what it's like to do that so often as well.

ANTHONY: For me, walking as a mode of connecting with the past, is like me jumping into a fast moving stream. I'm just along for the ride, right? The great adventure is seeing what's before you, and sometimes what's before you is the past.

MECCA: The word that I would use to describe how I feel like moving forward is just like, slower.

ANTHONY: Oh, yes.

MECCA: Yeah, it was. I don't know. I think that particularly experiencing the landscape as a form of hearing the stories, or hearing them in tandem and being outside gave me my own visuals and images in a way that I've truly only seen in a book or in a, you know, in a movie. And there's so many choices that, like were very clear to me that, were made for stylistic reasons or esthetic reasons or whatever that like, aren't as accurate. And really it was it was interesting to be able to experience that for myself and feel like, yeah, when you say—It’s the sky and you look at the trees—you’re very right about that, you just kind of you don't have to look to the slave narrative movie with, you know, what's his big name. You can just kind of go outside, Yeah.

ANTHONY: Right. Our stories are all around us.

(insects chirping and birds singing)

(bicycle bell rings)

MECCA: Oh, credits. Credits, credits. All right. I'm Michael Lewis, your host. Thank you to Anthony Cohen, our guide through the past and the Arboretum. Learn more about Cohen's work at menare.org and buttonfarm.org.

Today's audio essay is a co-production of Adkins Arboretum and Schoolhouse Farmhouse. It was written by Mecca Lewis, Lauren Giordano and George Burroughs and produced, recorded, edited and mixed by Lauren Giordano and George Burroughs. Special thanks to Gina Tiernan, executive director of Adkins Arboretum.

To learn more about Rooted Wisdom and the relationship between nature and self liberation, visit naturesrole.org (note: the website has been changed to rootedwisdom.org).

This material is based upon work, assisted by a grant from the Association for the Study of African-American Life and History, ASALH funded by the 400 years of African-American History Commission. Any opinions, findings and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the ASALH or the Department of the Interior.

And now I’m going to leave you with a few sounds from Adkins Arboretum.

(insects chirping, birds singing, water flowing, woodpecker tapping)