On the Washington train, a planter objected to the sight of William wearing a fine hat. The hat was a practical part of the costume, but to the planter it violated something — the visual grammar of the system, the way people who were enslaved were supposed to present themselves. The planter’s objection was noted and managed. William kept the hat.
The Susquehanna River crossing, at Havre de Grace in Maryland, produced the scariest moment William later described: the ferry crossing separated him from Ellen. He had been asleep in his car and awakened to find the train partially boarded on the ferry, with Ellen already on the other side. The conductor gave him trouble. Ellen, alone in the invalid’s carriage, had no idea what was happening. She was alone, in costume, in a closed carriage, with no way to know whether the man she depended on had been stopped or was coming.
He came. He got across. They arrived in Baltimore together.
## Baltimore: The Last Gate
Baltimore was the final obstacle. After Baltimore was Philadelphia, and after Philadelphia was Pennsylvania — a free state, where the legal mechanisms of the slaveholder could not legally reach. Not safely, but legally.
At the Baltimore train station, they encountered the final test: an official demanded proof that William “belonged” to the person claiming him. This was the logic of the system turned on itself — a Black man traveling with a white passenger had to be verifiably enslaved before he could proceed. The official was not satisfied by the sling or the poultice or the platform performance. He had the authority to stop them.