What’s clear from the account is that William was managing multiple things simultaneously: his own performance as an enslaved attendant, his attention to what he could observe of Ellen’s situation, the practical logistics of tickets and luggage and rail connections, and the specific incidents as they came. He describes the Macon station incident — the former employer walking along the train — with the quality of a near-miss that only became a near-miss in retrospect. He couldn’t have known, in the moment, that the man would not reach his car. He simply held still.
The account William gives of the Charleston customs house incident is particularly telling. He wasn’t there; he was presumably in a waiting area or a segregated space. He learned about it from Ellen after the fact. His rendering of what happened draws on what she told him, filtered through his retrospective reconstruction of the incident for readers who needed to understand the crisis. The steamer captain’s intervention is recounted as a resolution, but how William experienced the time between the problem and the resolution — not knowing whether Ellen had been detained, whether the plan had broken down, whether the next thing he would see would be a constable — is not in the text.
This is worth noting not as a criticism of the narrative but as a reminder of what the narrative is. It is a rhetorical artifact designed to do specific political work. It presents the escape as a story with structure: problems, responses, resolutions. The experience of living through it, from the inside, with no certainty about how any particular incident would resolve, was something different.