At least that's how I had heard it, and I wanted to learn more. Twenty years earlier, I had tentatively tried. In that pre-Internet era, I soberly wrote to the Probate Court and asked for a piece of my history, a copy of my grandfather's birth certificate. I carefully told them the little I knew -- when and where he was born, and the names of his parents. I felt an actual chill when, weeks later, the same letter I had crafted so hopefully came back to me with the words ''no record" scrawled bluntly at the bottom. It was as though he had never existed.
So I went looking for him -- and in many ways found so much more.
The National Underground Railroad Freedom Center is in Cincinnati overlooking the Ohio, a river that was once a line of demarcation between being chattel and being free. It is not a hugely wide river, but its symbolic width is infinite.
Walking into the Freedom Center can be entering an emotional blizzard. It is a bald, unabashed examination of slavery's barbarities, its survivors, and of the exhilarating, extraordinary courage of those who resisted, both black and white. You learn of Henry ''Box" Brown, a slave who curled his 200-pound frame into a wooden crate and had himself shipped from Virginia, finally stepping outside in Pennsylvania to freedom. You read of resilient Quakers who refused to toe the line and suffered savage beatings, imprisonment, financial ruin, and even death to help hundreds of runaways. There are omnipresent tributes to Harriet Tubman, one of the few black women associated with the Underground Railroad. She merited the elite title of ''abductor" by first escaping slavery herself and later returning to the South 19 times to guide more than 300 fugitive slaves out of bondage.
