Free Never Too Late by Michael Phillips

woman. A smile slowly spread over her face.
    â€œI see da quilt er freedom made it back home agin!” she said. “Dat’s what I wuz wantin’ ter see, all right.”
    â€œDen is you da one dey call Amaritta?” asked the mother.
    â€œDat’s me, all right.” Looking around at the weary group sitting around the fire, she added, “So where’s y’all boun’?”

W AYSTATION
    13

    T HE STATION MISTRESS CALLED AMARITTA WAS housekeeper on the plantation of Master and Mistress Crawford in South Carolina. Neither of the Crawfords had the faintest idea that an increasing number of runaway slaves came and went under their very noses and that their housekeeper helped direct many slaves on their way north. People seemed to be coming and going and traveling in every direction imaginable. They didn’t even know that the weathervane made of a horse’s head on their barn had been adopted by the railroad as a secret sign, and that houses and barns all the way up to the North with the same design were sought by fugitives as places of refuge.
    Within three more days, two of the men of the group were on their way to Ohio, a man and his wife headed for Kentucky, where they would be met by a group traveling to Indiana, and Seffie and the mother and brother and daughter were left alone on the Crawford plantation. By then they had been moved from the cave into the slave village where precautions were taken to keep them out of sightfrom any of the white workers or slave children whose tongues might not be reliable.
    Amaritta was making arrangements for the mother and her brother and daughter to join a train that would hopefully have their sister from Georgia onboard en route to eastern Ohio. Two days before they were to arrive she went to Seffie in the slave cabin where they were being kept.
    â€œIt’s ’bout time you wuz decidin’ where you’s gwine be goin’, honey chil’,” she said. “You can’t stay here much longer afore da master’ll gits wind er somefin’ he finds himself wonderin’ ’bout.”
    â€œI got no place ter go,” said Seffie. “I tol’ you, I got no kin in da Norf dat I know ’bout. I jes’ wanted to go norf to be free. I don’t know what ter do.”
    â€œIt ain’t jes’ gettin’ you norf, hit’s findin’ a place fo you once you git dere. An’ so—”
    Amaritta was interrupted by two children—a girl of four or five and a boy a few years older—running into the cabin.
    â€œLucindy . . . Caleb,” she exclaimed, “—what’n tarnashun . . . you skedaddle outta here!”
    The little girl stopped at sight of the stranger, her eyes white and wide in the middle of her little black face.
    â€œWho dat?” she asked.
    â€œHush yo mouf, Lucindy, chil’. It ain’t nobody . . . now git!”
    The two ran outside.
    Amaritta shook her head. “Yep,” she said, “we got’s ter git you movin’ along real soon. Dat scamp Caleb, he’s a talker. Now dat he’s seen you . . . yep, we gotta git you on anudder train mighty soon.”
    Within a week Seffie was on her way again, this time with two other women and one of their husbands. Their destination was southern New York State, where the man had a brother who had made good his own escape from the South three years earlier and now had a big house and small printing business where Seffie would be welcome. If they could put her to work, they would. If not, they would help her find something else.
    By the time Seffie crossed into North Carolina, listening to her new traveling companions tell about what they had heard about life in the North, where everyone was free—whites and blacks alike—for the first time her hopes began to rise that she might really make it after all. The dream of freedom had been so vague and her journey from Louisiana so long. But