American Journalist Gathers Love

Stories from the Slavery Era

美国记者收集奴隶时代的爱情故事

Award-winning journalist Betty DeRamus has written about race riots, refugee camps and other news events around the world. But more recently she's been pursuing a different kind of story -- this one dating as far back as the 1600s and set against the backdrop of African American slavery. She describes what she found in a new book called Forbidden Fruit: Love Stories from the Underground Railroad.

Ms. DeRamus began writing Forbidden Fruit after meeting the descendants of an interracial couple who overcame huge obstacles to marry in the mid-1800s. That spurred her on to look for more love stories -- at family reunions, in court documents, census records, unpublished memoirs and old newspapers. Looking back at a time when marriages between slaves were not legally binding in the United States…and when masters could sell or move their slaves at will.

Betty DeRamus: It's the story of couples who faced mobs, bloodhounds, bounty hunters, bullets, whippings, everything you can imagine, every possible peril. When the first escape didn't take, they had to do it again and again and again, before they finally were able to achieve their goal.

Many stories in the book unfold along the “Underground Railroad,” the organized network that sheltered fugitive slaves during the decades before slavery was abolished in the 1860s. Other feature people who relied on more informal methods to stay together. Some couples walked across several states or waited decades to be reunited. One pair traveled in disguise from south to north, with bounty hunters in pursuit, then sailed to England. One young woman hid herself in a wooden chest and had herself shipped to the man she loved.

An 1806 Virginia law led some people to renounce their freedom.

Betty DeRamus: That was one of the surprises in my research, the Virginia Assembly ruled that any newly-freed blacks would have to leave the state. And some of those newly-freed blacks petitioned the Virginia Assembly saying they would rather go back into slavery than be free without their families. I tell the story of Joseph Antoine, a slave in Cuba, who was freed, moved to Virginia and fell in love with an enslaved woman. When her owner was about to move west, he threatened to sell her off to someone else so that Joseph Antoine would not be able to see her any more -- unless he agreed to become what was known as an indentured servant, which was temporary slavery, and he did so.

Forbidden Fruit also includes the account of the couple who launched Betty DeRamus on her research. Isaac Berry was a black slave living in Missouri when he fell in love with Lucy Millard, a white minister's daughter. After learning he was about to be sold, he fled north to Windsor, Canada, walking by night and hiding out by day. Lucy promised to follow him. The couple great grandson Jim Cross says Lucy was supposed to leave home for boarding school at the time. But, instead, she bought a train ticket north and eventually reached Windsor.

Jim Cross: As the story is told, she walked that summer looking for him, and finally one evening heard him playing his violin in a tavern. She recognized him because he had a special way of playing. And they met, they married and stayed in Canada, I think, for 19 years.

The couple eventually resettled in Michigan, and opened a school that welcomed mixed race children. But Jim Cross said they paid a high price for their life together.

Jim Cross: They never saw any of their families again, Isaac didn't see his mother or his brothers or sisters again, and Lucy gave up her family -- for love, which has to be pretty powerful.

The story of Isaac and Lucy Berry has been handed down from generation to generation.

Jim Cross: It's our roots, our beginning in this area. It's caused our family to be very energetic. Lawyers and many, many educators, professional people, business people, have come out of this family and have done remarkable things.

Not all the stories in Forbidden Fruit end happily. But Betty DeRamus says most of the stories are about reunions, and she hopes they will provide a new way of looking at the history of African American slavery.

I’m Nancy Beardsley.

注释：

race riot 种族暴动

refugee camp 难民营

descendant [di5send(E)nt] n. 子孙，后代

spur [spE:] v. 鞭策

reunion [ri:5ju:njEn] n. 团圆，重聚

census [5sensEs] n. 人口普查

mob [mCb] n. 暴徒

bounty hunter 为领赏而追捕逃犯者

peril [5peril] n. 危险

disguise [dis5^aiz] n. 伪装

renounce [ri5nauns] v. 放弃

indentured servant 契约佣工

tavern [5tAvE(:)n] n. 酒馆，客栈