This Strange New Feeling

by Julius Lester

  Knight and Hughes stepped into the hallway and were shaken to see it crammed with men, white men!

  “I overheard one of them say that the only way you were coming out of your room today was dead,” Parker continued. “Now, I’m sure that was just so much bravado. But then again, I’m not certain. I’ve never seen my people like this.”

  Knight and Hughes stepped back into the room, their faces drained of color. “We’ll get in touch with the police,” Hughes said. “They’ll get your people and you out of here.”

  Parker shook his head. “Maybe I haven’t been very clear. All I have to do is step into that hallway and tell those men that you aren’t leaving town, and . . .” He threw up his hands and let them fall to his side.

  Hughes and Knight went into a far corner of the room and whispered together for a few minutes.

  “Is there a train out of here today?” Knight asked finally, his voice sullen.

  “It leaves at two thirty,” Theodore said solemnly.

  “Very well. But I want you to understand that we’ll be back, and when we do, we’ll bring the United States Army with us.”

  Parker didn’t respond except to say, “My followers and I will go with you to the train station to assure your safety.”

  VII

  Though Hughes and Knight had left Boston, it was apparent that William and Ellen were not safe there any longer. The President had not sent troops as he had threatened, but that did not mean that he wouldn’t.

  Ellen and William began disposing of most of their belongings. They couldn’t carry much to England, the only place they were sure slave catchers couldn’t reach them.

  It was uncommonly warm the afternoon in the second week of November when William, Ellen, and Lewis Hayden gathered in Theodore Parker’s study.

  “Seems like we’re having a touch of spring just for the two of you,” Lewis said, smiling gently at them.

  “I was thinking the same,” Ellen said, her hand clasped tightly with William’s.

  “You look even more beautiful than the first time I saw you,” William said, gazing at Ellen, whose long brown hair spilled over the shoulders of the white wedding dress.

  “I’m glad you think so,” she responded shyly.

  “I know so,” he said seriously.

  Rev. Parker entered the study and smiled when he saw William and Ellen standing by the French doors leading to the backyard. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen a more lovely bride and groom.”

  They turned and smiled.

  “Do you remember our slave marriage, William?”

  He chuckled. “It was a Saturday, and so hot I thought I was going to faint. We went out to Ira Taylor’s plantation so your mother could see you get married. And old man Taylor, who was as much of a preacher as a two-by-four, looked at you and said, ‘Ellen, you want this man?’ You said, ‘I do.’ He looked at me and said, ‘William, you want this woman?’ I said, ‘I do.’ Then he said, ‘You can jump the broom, ’cause you married now.’ And two slaves ran up with a broom. They held it about six inches off the ground and I took your hand and we jumped over the broom and that was it.”

  “That was just the way my marriage was,” Lewis put in.

  “Well, that kind of marriage wouldn’t be recognized in England,” Parker said. “And you deserve better,” he added.

  After the ceremony he reached into a drawer of his desk and took out a Bible. Placing it in William’s right hand, he said, “You’ll find all you need to know for your and your wife’s souls in here.” Then, reaching into another drawer, he took out a large bowie knife and, placing it in William’s left hand, said, “Use it only if you have to, and not in hate. Now you may kiss the bride.”

  With the Bible in his right hand and the bowie knife in his left, William took Ellen in his arms and kissed her.

  Then Ellen stepped back and looked at him. There was so much she wanted to say—that she was sorry for not having known it was not enough just to love him. Freedom had to be loved too.

  But she didn’t know how to say that for him to know, really know. So she took the Bible and knife from his hands and put them on the desk. Then she took his hands and held them tightly in hers and looked deeply into his eyes.

  And he knew.

  Notes

  “This Strange New Feeling” is a true story based on an account published in The Anglo-African Magazine, Vol. 1, No. 10 (New York: October 1859), pp. 321–4, reprinted in 1968 by Arno Press. The characters of Ras, Jakes Brown, and the slave owner are taken from that account.

  “Where the Sun Lives” was suggested by the following entry found in Vol. 1 of Helen Catterall’s Judicial Case Concerning Slavery, p. 210:

  William Yates, a free man of colour, died in 1829, having first made his will, by which he gave his whole estate . . . to . . . in trust for his wife, Maria, who was his slave, to be paid over to her as soon as she could obtain her freedom, and get permission to remain in the State. All the personal assets were insufficient to pay the testator’s debts and Maria was sold.

  “A Christmas Love Story” is a true story recounted in Running a Thousand Miles for Freedom; or, The Escape of William and Ellen Craft from Slavery by William Craft. William Craft’s book, published in 1860, omits some details and incidents, which are recounted in Lawrence Lader’s The Bold Brahmins: New England’s War Against Slavery (1831–1863), and John Daniels’s In Freedom’s Birthplace: A Study of the Boston Negroes. Additional information on the Crafts was found in William Lloyd Garrison’s newspaper The Liberator for the years 1849 and 1850. All characters in my retelling of the story are historical. Lewis Hayden became the first black public-office holder in this country when, in 1859, he was appointed messenger to the Massachusetts Secretary of State. He held this position until his death in 1889. The Reverend Theodore Parker continued as a prominent figure in the antislavery struggle to the detriment of his health. He was eventually forced to go to Italy to try and regain his health, and died there in 1860 at the age of 49. A friend commented that he looked seventy. The characterization of Parker is based on the portrait in Lader’s book. The story Lewis Hayden tells about his mother can be found in John Blassingame’s Slave Testimony.

  William and Ellen Craft lived in England from 1850 to 1868. Their two children were born there. It is believed that when they returned to the United States they went to Savannah, Georgia, to become heads of an agricultural school. The school was burned by the Ku Klux Klan in 1871 and rebuilt in 1873. William and Ellen returned to Boston in 1878. It is believed that William went to Africa at some period, but exactly when and for what purpose is not known. Likewise, I have been unable to trace William and Ellen after 1878.

  Little is known of their two children, except that their son lived in England. Their daughter married W. D. Crum, who became the United States Minister to Liberia, where he died. Perhaps this was the occasion for William Craft’s visit to Africa. A grandson, Henry K. Craft, graduated from Harvard in 1908 and taught at Tuskegee Institute, Alabama.

  My own retelling of the extraordinary story of William and Ellen has its inception, perhaps, in 1961, when I moved from Nashville, Tennessee, to New York City. During my first summer in New York I met a young black woman with sandy brown hair, blue-green eyes, and an irrepressible spirit. One day I shared with her my feelings of elation at no longer living in the South, which at the time was still segregated. And while sharing these feelings, I said, for some reason, “I think I feel the way William and Ellen Craft felt.”

  She looked at me quizzically. “What do you know about them?”

  I told her the story of their escape, though I don’t recall now where or when I had first heard or read it. When I finished, I asked, “Why did you ask?”

  She smiled. “Oh, William and Ellen Craft were my great-grandparents.”

  About the Author

  Julius Lester won a Coretta Scott King Honor for This Strange New Feeling in 1983. The renowned author of many books for children and adults, he has also recei
ved a Newbery Honor for the groundbreaking To Be a Slave, the Boston Globe–Horn Book Award for John Henry, the Coretta Scott King Award for Day of Tears, and was a National Book Award Finalist for Long Journey Home.

  Mr. Lester is a professor emeritus at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, where he taught Afro-American Studies, history, English, and Judaic Studies. He lives with his wife in western Massachusetts.