Cecelia and Fanny: The Remarkable Friendship Between an Escaped Slave and Her Former Mistress

Chapter 5. Cecelia: A Family in Freedom

Cecelia: A Family in Freedom During that fateful spring of 1846, the slave Cecelia emerged on the other side of the Niagara River as the free woman Cecelia Jane Reynolds. How and why she picked those middle and last names is a mystery. Perhaps it was the name of someone significant from her past. Or maybe the name of someone who had helped her reach Canada. Whatever the source, choosing a name of one’s own was a matter of great moment for newly free slaves. Taking on a new name symbolized the taking on of a new identity as a free person. It both marked the individual’s passage out of bondage and jabbed a metaphorical finger in the eye of the institution that kept Africans enslaved and misnamed. Many former slaves replaced their first names, which their masters had given them and which often sounded ironic or derogatory. Names like Caesar, Pompey, Cuffee, Charity, Fortune, and others were thrown aside in favor of simple and common American names like Joe, Jim, or Sarah. Cecelia kept her first name—perhaps because her mother, not her master, had given it to her. But like most slaves she had been known in bondage only by that first name. By choosing a surname, Cecelia—like thousands of others—began crafting a new identity for herself in freedom. Many former slaves chose names with obvious significance, such as Freeman or Newman, but more frequently they took familiar Anglo-American surnames. After the Civil War, this ritual of naming oneself was carried out by millions of former slaves. Some looked to their own personal and family histories, taking as surname that of the earliest master who could be recalled. Others adopted the names of individuals who had Chapter 5 75  Cecelia and Fanny 76 played prominent roles in the destruction of slavery, such as Grant, Lincoln, or Stevens. In all cases, they reserved the right to choose their own names—resenting, resisting, and rebuffing white interference . “A new name,” wrote the eminent historian of slavery Ira Berlin, “reversed the enslavement process and confirmed the free black’s newly won liberty.”1 When Cecelia crossed the Niagara River, she became part of a stream of African American refugees from slavery that flowed into Canada between the end of the War of 1812 and the passage of the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 in the United States. That legislation, jeopardizing as it did the freedom of many blacks living in the Northern states, turned a steady stream into a flood, probably more than tripling the number of blacks resident in Canada West (presentday Ontario) during the decade of the 1850s. Robin Winks, widely regarded as an authority on blacks in Canada, estimates that there were thirty thousand fugitives or descendants of fugitives residing in Canada West in 1860. There were probably somewhat fewer than ten thousand when Cecelia made her way from Niagara.2 Cecelia hardly fit the typical profile of a runaway slave. A statistical portrait of runaways based on more than two thousand advertisements in Southern newspapers found that the typical runaway slave was usually young and male: eight out of every ten runaway slaves were male, and three quarters of them were in their teens and twenties. Of those relative few who made it to Canada, at least before 1850, the majority also were male. Young males ran more frequently because many of them were unmarried or, if married, childless. They had fewer family attachments and thus felt less constrained by kinship ties.3 Cecelia, of course, was unmarried and childless when she decided to make her break, but she did opt to leave behind in Kentucky her mother and her younger brother. Opportunity—in the form of her proximity to the Canadian border—probably played the largest role in Cecelia’s decision to flee bondage. Unlike Cecelia, many fugitives stopped running just after they crossed the border. Most lacked money and could not afford to push on farther. Moreover, Winks wrote, since many of the early run- 77 A Family in Freedom aways had been employed as farmers when slaves, they did not want to go too far into the interior, where they would face unfamiliar planting conditions. Amherstburg, just opposite Detroit, became the most important of these early black farming communities, as former slaves from Kentucky and Virginia pioneered the cultivation of tobacco in...