The Secret Maps of the Underground Railroad
Cameron Armstrong, Oberlin Underground Railroad Monument (1977)
animation by Joel Silverman
Maps played a veiled role in charting the perilous path north along the Underground Railroad, the network of secret routes and safe houses used to escape enslavement into free states and from there to Canada. This legacy can be traced through a mix of myth, metaphor, and evidence of ingenious methods of communication substituting for traditional cartography. Due to the risk of being caught providing or using incriminating evidence, it was unusual for physical maps to be created for the paths to freedom. The legacy of anti-literacy laws in the American South that made reading and writing by enslaved people punishable by fines, flogging, or imprisonment made written directions impractical. The consequences for whites helping to free enslaved people often included tar-and-featherings or prison. Lynching or being returned to bondage was the fate of free Blacks caught in the South trying to free their brethren. “I shall have the consolation to know that I had done some good to my people,” was Harriet Tubman’s response to a question why she risked the peril of re-enslavement. So rather than risking printed maps, directions to escape the South were often memorized or passed along verbally with landmarks serving as guides.
Abolitionists would also coach fleeing slaves to use natural landmarks to navigate their journey. Rivers, mountains, and constellations like the Big Dipper served as natural maps for those seeking self-emancipation. Abolitionists would teach songs like “Follow The Drinking Gourd” (follow link to listen to Eric Bibb’s terrific recording) instructing escaping slaves to follow the north star towards freedom by orienting themselves using the two stars at the end of the Big Dipper’s bowl.
Photo: Jerry Lodriguss
The song contains coded guidance that only those on the run would understand. The song specifies the time of year to depart (in spring, “when the first quail calls”), instructions to stick to riverbanks (known by Alabama listeners to be the Tombigbee River), past two hills and a distinctive grove of dead trees, then along the Tennessee River and finally to Paducah, Kentucky at the Illinois border, where conductors on the Underground Railroad would provide passage across the Ohio River. Sung in work fields and around campfires of plantations, those who learned the lyrics had a memorized route to follow on their flight towards liberation:
The riverbank makes a very good road,
The dead trees will show you the way.
When the great big river meets the little river,
Follow the drinking gourd.
For the old man is a–waiting for to carry you to freedom
If you follow the drinking gourd.
Just look at the vast expanse of this distance on an 1849 map and imagine trying to navigate this based on work songs sung in a cotton field or whispered around a campfire:
Sherman & Smith, Travellers Guide Through The United States of America (1849)
animation by Joel Silverman
There is a popular, although historically debated, theory that a safe house along the Underground Railroad was often indicated by a quilt hanging from a clothesline or windowsill. These quilts would have been embedded with coded signifiers, so that by reading the shapes and motifs sewn into the design, an enslaved person on the run could know the area’s immediate dangers or even read the cloth as a map where to head next. According to Smithsonian folklorist Marie Claire Bryant, the received legends of these codes might be apocryphal, but a bear paw on a quilt hung in a window is recalled by slave descendants to have meant, “Follow the next animal trail to find water and food”, or a log cabin equated to “Seek shelter now, the people here are safe to speak with.”
Smithsonian Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage
The existence of such deeply encoded maps reveals the urgency of human insistence on free movement (i.e. freedom itself). These liberation maps are tools for spatial reclamation. As artists navigate these contested spaces, their resulting artworks signify with map-meanings, imbued with the complexities of human experience ungraspable from the simulacra of any paper map. Further, these map/walks enable the practice of participatory psychogeography by the community. This is the intention behind my and Mira Silverman’s regular Drift the Map walks that we facilitate for the Museum of Design Atlanta. Drifts lead viewers to reenact historical city walks to draw their own conclusions regarding complex social and psychological landscapes. In one recent walk, we took an audience to retrace the 4.3 mile funeral procession of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. from Ebenezer Baptist Church to Morehouse College. Hundreds of thousands of mourners packed Auburn Avenue and Hunter Street in 1968, but on our 2023 walk, the streets were eerily quiet as Atlanta’s downtown often is now. The walk illuminated the continuing resonances of that day in the built landscape, and served as an indictment in the city’s disinvestment in the Sweet Auburn and Gulch corridors in the decades that followed.
Ebenezer Baptist Church, April 9, 1968 (funeral of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.), photo: Bettman Archive
2023 animation by Joel Silverman
Consider the centrality of walking in Night Coming Tenderly, Black, Dawoud Bey’s 2017 series of 25 photographs conjuring landscapes seen by enslaved African American fugitives as they escaped from the South along the final reaches of the Underground Railroad. The psychogeography evoked in the series can be considered an example of “embodied cartography”, where maps are not just visual representations but also involve sensory and emotional engagement with space.
Dawoud Bey, Untitled #25 (Lake Erie and Sky) from the series Night Coming Tenderly, Black, 2017
Photographing in an imagined first-person view, Bey sought to instill in the viewer the embodied sensation of moving stealthily under cover of dark through an unfamiliar nocturnal landscape to elude slave catchers on the hunt, accompanied by the mounting promise of freedom as the northern border of the United States drew ever closer. Printing his large-format photographs in the darkest of tones, and taking his title from a couplet by Langston Hughes, “Night coming tenderly / Black like me”, Bey has said that he “wanted to hold darkness itself in a tender embrace.” The act of walking is encoded into the experience of viewing the piece. Last year, I made a research request to view one of the Night Coming Tenderly, Black images in the Art Institute of Chicago Photography Study Room. The work is stored framed in glass (unusual for the photography archive) and is so large that it does not fit on the viewing shelf dedicated for photography scholars. A previous time I had attempted to make an appointment to view one of these works, at the Oberlin College Allen Memorial Art Museum a few miles from where Bey made the photographs, the work was deemed “sadly too large for us to move to the study room” and permission to view the work was denied to me. At the Art Institute of Chicago, it takes two rather more obliging art handlers to pull it out of storage where the artwork is then placed on the study room floor (it will not fit on the viewing shelf), appearing as a massive dark cypher from across the room, and only revealing itself as a photograph upon approach:
Thus Bey’s photograph about emerging from servitude by walking under cover of night unfolds most fully when encountered through the act of walking as well. The almost entirely work dominates the viewing area with its density and size like the monolith in Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968).
Just as Bey grasps for a vision of the final steps of self-emancipation under cover of a moonless night, only in the final steps of the viewer’s approach to Night Coming Tenderly, Black does the image resolve itself as a landscape. The photograph is dramatically printed with its highlights at Ansel Adams’ Zone II, a darkroom expression so dark that there is only the faintest suggestion of texture. Photographer Minor White described Zone II tones in a printed landscape as only useful to present “the loam of a freshly plowed field, or a cave.” Yet Bey deftly employs this density for clouds and white sprays of sea foam.
Bey’s piece imagining the final steps out of slavery presents a response to Carrie Mae Weems’s Ebo Landing, from the Sea Islands Series (1992), a march at the other temporal end of enslavement, evoking a scene of Ibo men who walked into the Georgia marsh, allowing the water to swallow them rather than accept a life of shackles. Weems’s photographs of Dunbar Creek are paired with a text panel presented as a campfire ghost story:
Carrie Mae Weems
Ebo Landing, from the Sea Islands Series (1992)
In a 2023 exhibition at The Getty Museum, Getty curators suggested that Bey and Weems have been engaged in tandem during their careers in a decolonization of the Western landscape tradition, “[bringing] attention to American landscapes and experiences largely absent or simplified in the nation’s historical record, reframing United States history by attending to Black lives and losses.” That the act of charting a walk through enemy territory forms a metaphor for a pivotal landscape series of each photographer (Weems’s from 1992 and Bey’s from 2017) can be seen as a quarter-century (and counting) visual conversation between these two artists who are also longtime close friends.