Forbidden Fruit Read Online Free

comfort
     him, goes the story, because he failed to rescue Harriet and their children.
    Joseph Antoine would have understood Dangerfield Newby’s and Henry Bibb’s desperate
     attempts to rescue their wives and children. He probably wouldn’t have understood
     why, between 1970 and 1990, the proportion of black women married by age twenty-four
     plunged from 56 percent to 23 percent as more black men shambled into prisons, died
     young or found it difficult to imagine making enough money to support a family. Joseph
     Antoine’s largely forgotten story survives only in his barely legible petitions to
     Kentucky’s Jefferson County Court, but it is a powerful reminder of how far some black
     men and women once went to determine who and how they would love.

2
A Love Worth Waiting For
    T he woman’s face looked as familiar as a burlap sack waiting for someone to stuff its
     mouth with Georgia cotton. Oh yes, sweet Jesus, James Smith knew that face. The woman’s
     face seemed as much a part of James Smith’s past as the taste of hoecakes snatched
     from ashes and the high tenor saxophone wail of hounds. The woman’s face might have
     seemed as familiar as that jail cell in Richmond where a branding iron had seared
     James Smith’s face and neck, his skin hissing and sputtering like salt flung on flames
     and then surrendering, Lord God, to the pain.
    But was this really the wife he had left behind in Virginia with a short kiss and
     a long prayer? Was this the face he’d imagined each time he crossed a river whose
     name he didn’t know or outran a bounty hunter too slowed down by whiskey and rage
     to catch him?
    Smith would tell reporters later that his legs trembled on an October day in 1850
     as he neared a house in Sandwich, Ontario. It was the home of a woman who could have
     been the wife for whom he’d longed, prayed and searched for seventeen years. Finally,
     he gathered all of his strength into one ball and tossed it to the woman, whispering
     the name that he’d been waiting so long to say: “Fanny?” And, according to newspaper
     accounts, she answered, “Yes,” and greeted Smith as her “beloved husband.”
    In 1852, antislavery newspaper editor Henry Bibb described this reunion between two
     fugitive slaves calling themselves James and Fanny Smith in a five-part series in Voice of the Fugitive, a Canadian antislavery newspaper. The series described one of the most incredible
     love stories ever plucked from the pages of the Underground Railroad, the sometimes
     organized and sometimes improvised slave-aiding network that gave fugitives food,
     transportation, directions and, sometimes, information about safe havens and the slave
     hunters tracking them. Yet James Smith’s story is more than the tale of a man punished
     for praying and more than the saga of a couple who wouldn’t turn their love loose.
    It’s a story about faith.
    Not the puny, soft-fleshed kind of faith that people embrace when they’re in the mood
     for a Sunday-morning stroll with God. There was no flab in James Smith’s faith. No
     weak or neglected spots. He had the kind of faith that was muscular enough to withstand
     beatings and endure jail terms. He had the kind of faith that kept pace with him as
     he shambled away from his family in chains. He had the sort of faith that made him
     pray out loud when silent prayers would have saved him from torture.
    His ordeal began around 1833, when Smith—probably not his real name—decided he wanted
     to join his owner’s Baptist church, one of the denominations that especially appealed
     to blacks longing for emotional and expressive religion. The desire for religious
     expression was strong among people from a continent where the gods, some good, some
     evil, lived inside everything and gave things their special qualities. Some slaves
     would go out into midnight fields and pray in ditches or cover their heads with iron
     pots to muffle the sound of their prayers. Meanwhile,