So she sold Tallow Creek. Charles Fenwick bought it at the courthouse door on the 11th of February for $9,800. He had wanted that 420 acres for 19 years because it lay against his own north line, and he paid more for it than any assessor in Adams County thought it was worth. Hand Absalom Tate observed dryly that if the man had made that offer in December, there would have been a solvent estate to conserve, and she would have lost every soul on the place. Fenwick did not come to the sale himself.
He sent his factor. She never spoke to him again. The mortgage was cleared and the taxes and the costs and when everything was paid or Renfruit had $214 and a trunk.
And on the 22nd of February 1850, she walked down the levee at Natchez under the hill and bought deck passage on the steamer Ariadne for herself and 19 people. And the clerk looked at the manifest and then up at her and said, ““Ma’am, you’ll want papers for these.”” She had papers.
Isham Fay had spent three weeks on them, a bill of sale for every soul in her name, notarized, and a written pass in her hand for each, and a letter from Absalom Tate on his own paper, stating that Mrs. Renfruit was removing her property to the state of Ohio for her own purposes. It was all perfectly legal and perfectly ordinary. Planters moved property up river all the time.
Nobody ever asked why a woman was taking 19 field hands to Cincinnati in February because the only reason anybody could imagine was a bad one and bad reasons did not require explanation.
They were stopped twice at Vicksburg. A man in a good coat came down the deck counting heads and wanted to see the papers and looked a long time at Obed and said, “You are carrying a fortune in one man there, ma'am.” And she said, “I am carrying a debt.” And he laughed and went away.
At Memphis, two slave catchers came aboard at midnight, looking for a woman and a boy off a place in Tunica County, and they went through the deck passengers with a lantern, holding it up to faces, and when the lantern came up to Zilpa's face, Zilpa looked straight into it and did not blink, and when it came up to Cressy, Obed stood up. He simply stood up in the dark on a crowded deck, and the man with the lantern took two steps back before he knew he had done it, and said, “All right, all right.” and went on. They passed the mouth of the Ohio at Cairo on the eighth day and turned east and upstream.
And for two more days the river ran with Kentucky on the right hand and Illinois on the left, and nobody on that deck slept much, and Anil, who was 61 and had never in his life been north of Vicksburg, sat all night with his blanket around him, watching the lefthand bank go by.
They landed at the Cincinnati public landing on the 4th of March, 1850 in snow. The Hamilton County Recorders Office was on Court Street, and the clerk was a young man with ink on his cuff and a cold, and he had done perhaps 40 of these in his career, and was not surprised by any of it, which was, or thought, the most extraordinary part. Ohio was free soil. It had been since it was a state. Only the year before, in February of 1849, the legislature had repealed the worst of the old black laws, the ones that had required black settlers to post a $500 bond and produce a court certificate of freedom before they could live and work there.
A deed of manumission executed and recorded in that office was a fact the state of Ohio would honor, and the state of Mississippi could not reach.
They did it one at a time. It took most of two days. The clerk wrote out the form and read it aloud and asked each person their name and each person said it and Orura signed at the bottom 19 times until her hand cramped and she had to change the pen. Some of them had never in their lives been asked their name by a white man holding a pen. Anil gave his as Anil Marsh after his father who had been sold off in 1804 and whose surname he had carried in his head for 46 years without once having a use for it.
Cressy gave hers as Lucretia Fay, and said it clearly, and looked sideways at Isham Fay, who had put down his adze in Natchez, and sold his shop, and come north with them, and had spent 10 days on that deck, pretending he had not been looking at her, and who now went the color of brick in front of a room full of people. Winner chose the surname Freeman, and said it defiantly, as though somebody might argue. Zilpa stood a long time before she answered.
“Zilpa Ransom,” she said at last. The clerk wrote it. Then he said without looking up, ““Any children to be entered, ma’am?”” And Zilpa said, “One, a girl born the 9th of May, 1826, and sold out of my arms the same day, and I never was told her name nor where she went, and I do not know if she is living,” she said it steadily.
“You can write that down, or you can leave it out, but you asked me.” The clerk stopped writing. He was 26 years old. After a moment he said, “I'll write it down.” And he did. And that entry is the reason anybody knows about her at all.
And then it was the last one. Obed came up to the desk and the room got quiet because he took up the whole of the space in front of it. And because everyone in that office had spent 2 days waiting for this without admitting it, the clerk dipped his pen. “Name?” Nothing.