Type a short summary of this section of the book. This time she told them about the long agony of the
Middle Passage on the old slave ships, about the black horror
of the holds, about the chains and the whips. They too knew
these stories. But she wanted to remind them of the long hardway they had come, about the long hard way they had yet to go. She told them about Thomas Sims, the boy picked up on
the streets of Boston and sent back to Georgia. She said when
they got him back to Savannah, got him in prison there, they
whipped him until a doctor who was standing by watching
said, “You will kill him if you strike him again!” His master
said, “Let him die!”
Thus she forced them to go on. Sometimes she thought
she had become nothing but a voice speaking in the darkness,
cajoling, urging, threatening. Sometimes she told them things
to make them laugh, sometimes she sang to them, and heard
the eleven voices behind her blending softly with hers, and
then she knew that for the moment all was well with them.
She gave the impression of being a short, muscular,
indomitable woman who could never be defeated. Yet at any
moment she was liable to be seized by one of those curious fits
of sleep, which might last for a few minutes or for hours.
Even on this trip, she suddenly fell asleep in the woods.
The runaways, ragged, dirty, hungry, cold, did not steal the
gun as they might have, and set off by themselves, or turn
back. They sat on the ground near her and waited patiently
until she awakened. They had come to trust her implicitly,
totally. They, too, had come to believe her repeated statement,
“We got to go free or die.” She was leading them into freedom,
and so they waited until she was ready to go on.
Finally, they reached Thomas Garrett’s house in
Wilmington, Delaware. Just as Harriet had promised, Garrett
gave them all new shoes, and provided carriages to take them
on to the next stop.
By slow stages they reached Philadelphia, where William
Still hastily recorded their names, and the plantations whence
they had come, and something of the life they had led in
slavery. Then he carefully hid what he had written, for fear it
might be discovered. In 1872 he published this record in book
form and called it The Underground Railroad. In the foreword
to his book he said: “While I knew the danger of keeping
strict records, and while I did not then dream that in my day
slavery would be blotted out, or that the time would come
when I could publish these records, it used to afford me great
satisfaction to take them down, fresh from the lips of fugitives
on the way to freedom, and to preserve them as they had
given them.”