Garrett and Michael lifted her carefully, carried her up the ladder and onto the deck. The sun was setting and the light made Dinina's eyes water. She could see the Wilmington docks, could see buildings beyond, could see free territory for the first time in her life. We need to move quickly, Garrett said.
There are people in this city who would gladly return you south for reward money. My wagon is waiting. We travel tonight. They carried Dinina off the ship and into a waiting wagon.
Garrett covered her with blankets and they began to move through Wilmington streets. "Where are we going?" Dinina asked. "To a safe house first, where you can rest and recover your strength.
Then north through Pennsylvania and New York to Canada. The journey will take weeks, possibly months, depending on your condition and the baby, but we will get you there, Dinina. I have never lost anyone. I have guided, and I do not intend to start with you." Dinina closed her eyes, allowed herself to feel the smallest measure of hope, the first real hope she had experienced in years.
She was not free yet, not legally, not safely, but she was closer than she had ever been. And if she died tomorrow, at least she would die knowing she had tried, knowing she had resisted, knowing that people had risked everything to help her because they believed her life mattered, because they believed the system that enslaved her was evil and worth fighting.
That night, in a small house on the outskirts of Wilmington, Dinina slept in a real bed for the first time in over a week. She ate warm food prepared by Garrett's wife, a woman named Rachel, who treated her with the same kindness Sarah and Hannah had shown. And for the first time since learning she was pregnant with Elias Cartwright's child, Dinina allowed herself to imagine a future, a future where her baby would grow up free, where no one could sell them, where they would be fully human under the law. It was a fragile hope, easily destroyed, but it was hope nonetheless, and hope Dinina was learning, was the most dangerous and necessary thing an enslaved person could possess.
Dinina's journey from Wilmington to the Canadian border took seven weeks. Seven weeks of traveling at night through forests and farmland. Seven weeks of hiding in barns and cellars and attics. Seven weeks of trusting strangers whose only connection to her was a shared belief that slavery was an abomination that required resistance.
Thomas Garrett guided her through Pennsylvania, passing her from one conductor to another. Each person in the chain knowing only what they needed to know, enough to help, but not enough to endanger the entire network if they were caught. In a farmhouse outside Philadelphia, Dinina met a Quaker family named Coleman who gave her new clothes, sturdy boots, a warm coat for the journey ahead. In Rochester, New York, she stayed three days with Frederick Douglass himself, the famous abolitionist who had escaped slavery years earlier and now dedicated his life to helping others achieve the same freedom.
Douglass spoke to her about the importance of telling her story once she reached safety, of documenting what had been done to her, of bearing witness so that future generations would understand the reality of slavery beyond the sanitized versions slaveholders preferred to present. “Your survival is an act of resistance,” Douglass told her. Every day you live free is a defeat for Elias Cartwright, for Thornton Graves, for every person who profited from your bondage. Do not waste that victory by remaining silent.
By the time Dinina reached the Canadian border in late January of 1850, she was eight months pregnant, exhausted beyond measure, but alive. She crossed into Ontario on a night so cold the ground was frozen solid, her breath visible in the frigid air. The moment she stepped onto Canadian soil, she fell to her knees, not from weakness, though she was weak, but from the overwhelming realization that she had actually done it. She had escaped.
She was free. Not just spiritually or morally free, but legally free under the protection of a government that did not recognize property rights in human beings. Thomas Garrett knelt beside her. You made it, Dinina.
You are safe now. No one can take you back. No one can claim ownership of you or your child. You are free.
Dinina wept. great racking sobs that came from somewhere deep inside her, from the place where she had buried years of grief and rage and fear. She wept for herself, for Ruth, for her mother patience, for the seven women Thornton Graves had murdered, for every person still enslaved in the south, for the sheer cruelty of a world that required such desperate measures simply to be recognized as human. Garrett helped her to her feet and they walked the final mile to a settlement of formerly enslaved people who had established a community near the border. The settlement was called Dawn and it consisted of approximately 200 people who had escaped slavery and were now building lives as farmers, craftspeople, teachers.
They welcomed Dinina with open arms with food and shelter and the kind of safety she had never known. 3 weeks later on February 19th 1850 Dinina gave birth to a son. The labor was difficult, lasting nearly 18 hours, but a midwife named Clara, herself, a former enslaved person from Virginia, guided Dinina through it with patience and skill. When the baby finally emerged, screaming his fury at the world, Dinina held him and felt something shift inside her.
Something that might have been joy or might have been terror at the responsibility of raising a free child in a world that still wanted to enslave him. "What will you name him?" Clara asked. Dinina looked down at her son's face, at his tiny fists waving, at the undeniable evidence that Elias Cartwright was his father written in his features. For a moment she considered naming him after someone she had loved, after her mother, or after William, the person she might have wanted his father to be.
But then she thought about all the people who had helped her reach this moment. All the people who had risked everything, and she made her decision. His name is Jacob, she said. After Jacob Brennan, the man who saved my life.
Clara smiled. Jacob is a good name. A strong name. That boy is going to grow up free.
Dinina. He is going to have opportunities you never had. He is going to live in a world where no one owns him. Make sure he knows how many people fought to give him that chance.
I will, Dinina promised. I will tell him everything.
Dinina lived in Dawn for three years, working as a seamstress and helping other newly arrived fugitives adjust to freedom. She learned to read more fluently with help from a teacher in the settlement, and she began writing down her story, documenting the abuse Elias Cartwright had inflicted on her, what Thornton Graves had planned to do, how the Underground Railroad had saved her life.
In 1853, she married a man named Samuel Richards, a blacksmith who had escaped from Maryland 5 years earlier. Samuel was kind and patient, and he understood that Dinina's past was not something that could be forgotten or erased, but something that needed to be honored and remembered. They had two more children together, both daughters, and they raised all three children with the understanding that their freedom had been purchased with the courage and sacrifice of people who believed justice mattered more than law. But Dinina never forgot about Ruth, her first daughter, the child Elias Cartwright, had sold in 1847.
She spent years trying to locate her, writing letters to abolitionists in the South, asking if anyone had information about a girl sold in Charleston, a girl who would be approximately 10 years old by 1850, a girl with light skin and a name that might or might not still be Ruth. The search consumed her, became an obsession that Samuel gently tried to temper, but ultimately supported because he understood that no mother could be whole while her child remained lost.
In 1856, Dinina received a letter from a Quaker missionary in South Carolina. The letter contained information about a girl matching Ruth's description who had been working on a plantation outside Charleston. The missionary had managed to make contact with the girl, had confirmed her original name was Ruth, had learned that she remembered her mother despite being only 4 years old when they were separated. The missionary wrote that Ruth was alive, was relatively healthy, but was still enslaved.
Dinina made a decision that terrified Samuel and everyone who knew her. She decided to go back, not permanently, but to attempt a rescue, to use the same underground railroad network that had saved her to now save her daughter. It was extraordinarily dangerous, returning to the South as a formerly enslaved person. Any white person who recognized her could claim ownership, could drag her before a magistrate, and present evidence that she was fugitive property.
But Dinina did not care about the danger. Ruth was her daughter, and she had already lost too many years. In the summer of 1856, Dinina traveled south with two experienced conductors, men who had guided dozens of people to freedom, and who understood the routes, the safe houses, the strategies for moving through hostile territory without detection. They reached South Carolina in August, made contact with the missionary, and learned that Ruth was now working on a small farm owned by a widow named Margaret Foster.
The rescue was planned for a moonless night in early September. Dinina and the conductors approached the farm after midnight, found Ruth sleeping in a small cabin with three other enslaved women, and woke her gently. Ruth, now 13 years old, stared at Dinina with wide eyes. Do I know you?
Ruth whispered. I am your mother, Dinina said, her voice breaking. I came back for you. I promised myself I would never stop looking and I kept that promise.
Now we are going to leave here. We are going to go north and we are going to be free together. Ruth began to cry and so did Dinina and the two conductors had to remind them that time was critical, that they needed to move immediately before anyone discovered they were gone. They made it back to Canada by late October, traveling the same routes Dinina had used 6 years earlier, relying on the same network of brave people who sheltered fugitives.