PHOTO: NEW YORK PUBLIC LIBRARY
An American Story
By Caroline Donnola
One thousand miles up the coast
along the Overland Mail Route
on train tracks
with fires blazing
and furnaces groaning,
by steamer and stagecoach and sheer cunning;
a light-skinned woman
passing for white
dressed as a planter
travels with her servant—
a tall, dark man,
his first cameo appearance
as a slave
escorting his master
on a journey to the North—
But really
a husband escaping bondage with his wife.
Push on, Ellen!
Push on, William!
A story with a hundred twists and turns—
of terror and courage,
devotion and hope—
a quest for freedom
with still so many miles ahead,
and not nearly enough behind.
Finally, they reach the North,
with its abolitionists
and Anti-Slavery Society,
its passionate former slaves,
now freedom fighters,
leading together in righteous battle.
And then,
the Fugitive Slave Act—
taunting, hobbling, goading them,
the constant threat
of being dragged back South
in chains.
Decent Bostonians
defied the new law.
They tricked and foiled
those slavecatching-bounty-hunting-sons-of-bitches
and sent them running back to Georgia.
Push on, abolitionists!
Push on!
Still,
they could not protect
Ellen and William
against the deadly power of the law,
so the running
began
again.
Their breathing fast,
their resolve steady.
Hundreds of miles
on land and on sea,
through Maine and Nova Scotia,
barely making it to their ship.
Forced to travel in steerage
with Ellen already ill,
they tossed and turned through winter storms
until finally sighting Liverpool.
Dry land at last!
Freedom at last!
Where the slave catchers held no sway.
They had run and run and run—
slogged through mud,
bounced up and down
on bumpy trains and stagecoaches,
escaped the paddy rollers of Macon,
survived the treacherous trip to the North,
then thousands more miles
across an unforgiving sea,
the wind always pushing them up and out.
How strange it must have seemed
to Ellen and William—
these gutsy, defiant former slaves,
these leaders of the cause—
to be forced to cross the Atlantic
to escape the great experiment
in order to be deemed fully human,
to be welcomed
in the very country
that invented slavery.
A strangely American story.
And yet
many thousands of miles,
hundreds of years
and millions of tears later,
here we are.
We still stand at a precipice.
Will we push on as Ellen and William did?
As the abolitionists did?
Or will we sink into the kind of despair
that shuts the door on creating a fighting chance
to build a new kind of world?
One that we haven’t yet begun to shape
but which we, nonetheless, must.
Caroline Donnola has been writing poetry since childhood. In 2021, she published The Year That Was: Poems for Troubled Times and is currently working on a new poetry collection. She recently edited A Poet’s Journey: Life, Love, and the River by Harry Kresky. Caroline has been an independent political activist for four decades. After retiring from her position at Independent Voting in 2022, she launched a freelance writing and editing business. This month she is teaching a weekly virtual poetry writing class. She can be contacted via LinkedIn or by email at carolinedonnola3@gmail.com.
Beautiful, Caroline, and so skillfully done! I say we push on.
Thank you, Steve. And yes, I agree!
Such a beautiful response to this book, Caroline. Thank you for immortalizing their story in poetry. When I was reading, the feelings inside made me feel like a poem would be appropriate, and nobody can do it quite like you can.