What William knew and managed throughout the journey was that the plan depended on categories — on the visual and social grammar of slavery — that he could exploit but couldn’t fully control. He could dress and behave in ways that fit the role of the enslaved attendant; he could not control whether a former acquaintance would recognize him, whether a planter on the train would find his hat objectionable, whether the conductor at Havre de Grace would be moved by his explanation. He was, throughout, working with probabilities and improvisations in a context where the consequence of failure was not getting a lower grade but being returned to Georgia in chains.
## Philadelphia to Boston: The Shape of Northern Freedom
The free states of the antebellum North were not what the word free implies. They were states in which slavery was legally prohibited, which meant that people could not be bought and sold within their borders and that no person born in those states was legally classified as property. But they were not states in which Black people had anything approaching the legal standing that white people had.
In Pennsylvania, where the Crafts arrived on Christmas Day 1848, Black men could not vote. In Massachusetts, where they settled in 1849, Black children attended segregated schools in many cities. The free Black community that received the Crafts in Boston — the community concentrated on the north slope of Beacon Hill, in the neighborhood that would later be called the West End — had built its own institutions precisely because the white-run institutions largely excluded them. The Black churches, the mutual aid societies, the abolitionist networks, the literary societies: these were products of exclusion as well as community formation.