## The Woman Who Said Yes
Before the escape could happen, Robert Smalls had to ask his wife.
This seems like an obvious thing to note, and it is also the thing that sometimes gets compressed or omitted in accounts that frame the escape primarily as Smalls’s individual achievement. It was not an individual act. It was a collective one, beginning with a decision that Hannah Jones Smalls made in the spring of 1862.
Hannah was several years older than Robert, enslaved like him, working as a hotel maid in Charleston. They had married on December 24, 1856, when he was seventeen and she was in her early twenties. She had two daughters from before the marriage — Clara and Charlotte — and she and Robert had a daughter of their own, Elizabeth Lydia, born in February 1858, and a son, Robert Jr., born in 1861. The cost of buying their family’s freedom was $800, an amount that Robert had been slowly saving toward but had not come close to reaching.
Hannah’s reported response to her husband’s plan for the escape has been passed down through family memory. She said it was a risk. She said that he, she, and their children must be free. She said that where he died, she would die. The language carries echoes of the Book of Ruth — “whither thou goest, I will go” — and has the quality of a phrase that has been held for generations. It should be understood as family tradition rather than a verbatim contemporary record. What it points toward is real: she agreed. She was told the plan. She helped arrange for the children and the other women to board, and she helped bring a white bedsheet that would serve as a surrender flag once they were past the Confederate guns.