Charleston also produced a moment that sat differently from the tense mechanics of the custom house. At the hotel where “William Johnson” was staying, an enslaved man named Pompey — who worked in the hotel and would never escape — found a moment to speak with William Craft. Understanding what was happening or sensing something in William’s circumstances, Pompey said: “When you gets de freedom, don’t forget to pray for poor Pompey.” It is one of the few moments in the record where an enslaved person appears as a witness to the escape rather than an obstacle or an abstraction.
## The Long Middle: Wilmington to Baltimore
After Charleston they took another steamer north to Wilmington, North Carolina, and from there continued by train through Virginia, passing through Petersburg and Richmond before reaching Washington. The landscape outside the windows changed, though the rules inside remained the same.
On the train from Petersburg, a Virginia gentleman and his daughters took a particular liking to the invalid “Mr. Johnson” — one of the daughters apparently found him quite attractive — and offered a home remedy for rheumatism. The Crafts were surrounded by warmth they could not acknowledge.
In Richmond, a woman on the platform mistook William Craft for her runaway enslaved man, Ned. This was a different kind of terror — not a formal search but the random danger of resemblance. William was not Ned. The woman eventually accepted this, though the moment illuminates how exposed he was in those cars, moving through a world that could reconfigure him as someone else’s property at any point.