He represents the hundreds of thousands of people who did not escape. The people who heard about the Craft escape, or others like it, and did not have the specific combination of conditions that made such an escape possible for the Crafts: a light-skinned wife, a skilled husband with savings and access to materials, a Christmas holiday that gave them passes, the temperament and nerve to execute a four-day performance without breaking. Most enslaved people had none of these. Many had some of them but not all. The specific circumstances that made the Craft escape possible were rare.
Pompey knew this, presumably. He was asking William to remember him in the specific way that someone asks to be remembered when they believe they will not see the person again — when they understand that the person is going somewhere that they themselves cannot go. The prayer request is a request for a kind of continuity, a thread of acknowledgment across the distance that freedom would put between them.
Whether William prayed for Pompey is not recorded. The narrative preserves the exchange. That is perhaps what was possible.
The woman who mistook William for her runaway slave Ned — in Richmond, on the Petersburg train — is also a figure who illuminates something beyond the specific incident. She had a person named Ned who had run. She was looking for him. She saw a Black man on a train and made a reasonable, if wrong, identification. The incident demonstrates the specific vulnerability of being visibly Black and traveling in the antebellum South: any Black man was a potential match for any enslaver’s fugitive. The claim didn’t require certainty; it required assertion.