From the early 1850s on, William Still, one of the most effective “conductors” of the Underground Railroad, entrusted his records to a Philadelphia graveyard. Whether he snuck out at night-time, hastily rushing to his secret hiding place, as romantics of the “Liberty Line” might imagine, or placed his notes there in broad daylight we may never know for sure. What is known, however, is that Still literally buried his risky memories in a crypt, where they remained hidden throughout some of the most eventful years of U.S. American history.Footnote 1 The Civil War came and went, and it was much later, in the late 1860s, that Still finally recovered his material from the vault that held his treasure “in the very midst of the region of the dead and the land of forgetfulness” (Boyd xxxiv). His purpose then was to commence writing, as he terms it in a letter to his daughter of August 13, 1867, “the History of the U.G.R.R,” and his efforts were finally crowned in 1872 with the publication of The Underground Rail Road: A Record of Facts, Authentic Narratives, Letters, &c (qtd. Hendrick/Hendrick 17).

The story of Still, his records, and his book is revealing, as both the manner in which he employed his secret hiding-place and the reception of his work by contemporaries and subsequent generations are representative of the Underground Railroad and its legacy. On the one hand, the decade-long secrecy surrounding Still’s writings mirrors the subversive spatial matrix commonly associated with the Underground Railroad. The crypt was a perfect choice in this sense, not only as the Greek term “krypte” means “hidden, secret,” but also because a burial ground coincides with an imagery of “entombment” and “rebirth” often found in fugitives’ descriptions of slavery and their escapes. On the other hand, the fairing of Still’s work through time is in many ways characteristic of a long-standing discourse on the Underground Railroad since Reconstruction. While favorably received upon its first publication in 1872, The Underground Rail Road was largely ignored afterwards and rarely reprinted in its entirety,Footnote 2 a process emblematic of some of the turns that engagement with the “Liberty Line” has taken in both the American imagination and in academic scholarship.

For a considerable time, such Underground Railroad scholarship remained under the influence of the post-Civil War reminiscences of white abolitionists such as Levi Coffin (1876), Eber M. Pettit (1879), Laura Haviland (1881), Robert C. Smedley (1883), and, in particular, Wilbur Siebert’s pioneering academic work. While Siebert’s The Underground Railroad from Slavery to Freedom (1898), the first major scholarly study on the subject for which its author had contacted hundreds of former abolitionists, remains a significant source until today, working with Siebert’s material often meant tacitly accepting his idea of the Underground Railroad as a “great and intricate network” of stations run by white abolitionists (62). Thus, as Bordewich points out in Bound for Canaan (2005), “[f]or generations, Americans thought of the Underground Railroad as a mostly monochromatic narrative of high-minded white people condescending to assist terrified and helpless blacks” (4), a view that decisively changed with Larry Gara’s critical work in the early 1960s. In The Liberty Line (1961), Gara attacked both Siebert’s exaggerated idea of an elaborately organized underground network and a scholarly focus on white male protagonists that often ignored the role of the fugitives themselves, free blacks, and women. As his argument was in tune with the changing climate of the 1960s, Gara’s study set up a lasting Underground Railroad skepticism that effected a temporary neglect of the phenomenon as a mere “myth” in scholarly work.Footnote 3

More recent academic engagement with the Underground Railroad, however, tends to be more equilibrated between the extreme poles of Siebert’s “intricate network”-idea and Gara’s vehement skepticism, turning its focus, for instance, onto the biographical and the local.Footnote 4 While denying the notion of a coherent large-scale organization once suggested by Siebert, the general understanding at present is that the Underground Railroad was nevertheless “much more than a picturesque legend” (Bordewich 8). It should be understood, as historian Eric Foner proposes in his recent Gateway to Freedom (2015), “not as a single entity but as an umbrella term for local groups that employed numerous methods to assist fugitives, some public and entirely legal, some flagrant violations of the law” (15). This more balanced perspective and a broadening of scope in Underground Railroad scholarship cannot belie the fact, however, that the overall focus remains largely historiographical, centered on the myth-vs.-reality debate. Underground Railroad scholars of the twenty-first century, although meticulously attending to specific localities and regions, largely continue to be driven by the question Gara poses through the title of his contribution to Miller’s Complete History of American Slavery (2001), namely, “Was there really an underground railroad?” (439).

My approach in this chapter shifts the focus from this predominantly historiographic perspective to a (so far rarely takenFootnote 5) literary one, aiming to demonstrate the relevance of the Underground Railroad, despite its conventionally anthropocentric understanding,Footnote 6 for ecocriticism. For that purpose, I propose to rethink the Underground Railroad ecocritically as a “literary heterotopia.” “Heterotopia” (Foucault) is a particularly productive concept in the context of a foundational African American environmental knowledge and the fugitive slave narrative. On the one hand, forms of an African American environmental knowledge often emerged, as scholarship in African American studies and black geographies implies, in what could be called heterotopic spaces beyond or subversive to the confines of the normalizing spaces of the plantation system. They were tied, for instance, to the semiautonomous provision ground of slave plots (cf. e.g. McKittrick; Wynter), to swamps (Lockley), or to hunting and fishing grounds (Giltner). On the other hand, it is important to note that the kinds of spaces usually depicted in fugitive slave narratives did not readily lend themselves to articulating such forms of environmental knowledge. Generic conventions and abolitionist politics demanded that narratives primarily represent “normal” (not heterotopic) and harmful topographies of enslavement that corroborated the atrocious character of the dreaded system. This, as well as the need for narrators to ‘humanize’ or ‘civilize’ themselves as beings of ‘culture’ rather than ‘nature’ effected a general tendency to disengage the non-human non-discursive material world; it gave the slave narrative what Paul Outka terms an “anti-nature writing tendency” (172). In this sense, the conventional space of the genre left little room to articulate environmental knowledge.

By contrast, I argue, the Underground Railroad functioned as a discursive other-space, a locus in the slave narrative for expressing such knowledge, gained during enslavement. Just as heterotopic spaces under slavery became pockets of freedom that could facilitate the development of environmental knowledge, the literary Underground Railroad with the relative autonomy it meant for writers (due to a necessary air of secrecy) became a “discursive loophole” within an otherwise confining genre that could facilitate the expression of relations to the non-human non-discursive material world. To explore the functioning of this discursive loophole as a literary heterotopia that enabled an articulation of African American environmental knowledge is the aim of this chapter. To this end, I will first outline the heterotopic function and subversive employment of the Underground Railroad in the discourse of the fugitive slave narratives more broadly, by focusing on a range of abolitionist texts and narratives including those by Douglass (1845), H.B. Brown (1849), J. Brown (1855), and Craft (1860). Subsequently, I go on to highlight the potential of reading the Underground Railroad from an ecocritical perspective by demonstrating how narratives such as those by Bayley (1825), Curry (1840), and Bibb (1849), employed this literary heterotopia to express what I call a hermeneutics of freedom and a co-agency of the non-human. My selection of a wide range of (primary) texts in this chapter reflects my aim to trace a broader discursive function of the literary heterotopia of the Underground Railroad, as it suggests how fruitful an ecocritical engagement with the Underground Railroad can be. The genre, I argue, functionalized what was popularly known as Underground Railroad during the antebellum period to carve out its own, often de-anthropocentrized version of that space. Literary Underground Railroad space held the potential for imagining identifications and alliances with the non-human and opened up a way for spatially articulating environmental knowledge, which makes it an important object of (future) study from an environmentally oriented perspective.

The Underground Railroad as African American Literary Heterotopia

In “Of Other Spaces,” Foucault introduces his “heterotopology” as “the study, analysis, description, and ‘reading’ […] of these different spaces” (240), and suggests six general principles of heterotopias (cf. 240–244). Some of these appear to correspond with the kind of space imagined in the popular notion of the Underground Railroad still cherished by many Americans, as “a mysterious Underground Railroad with tunnels and hidey-holes” (Foner 11). For example, the “Liberty Line” might be imagined as a space that included several spaces (heterotopic principle III); that involved a system of opening and closing, as fugitives entered into its matrix once they found one of its “operators” (principle V); and that had an obvious overall function—remaining hidden until achieving freedom—with respect to all other spaces (principle VI).

The matter appears in a different light, however, when considering the Underground Railroad as a literary heterotopia, i.e. a heterotopia emerging through the discourse of the antebellum slave narrative in its cultural dynamics and in its play with relations of race and power. In this context, it is essential to take into account the topographies of Southern enslavement against which formerly enslaved narrators set and recount their experiences. While there were, as various scholars have suggested, complex ways in which the enslaved often gained (minimal) forms of agency even if they did not take flight, e.g. through everyday resistance and constant power negotiations with plantation owners, the space portrayed in slave narratives usually stresses confining spatial patterns as part of an “anti-slavery gothic mode” (Newman 57) to serve the political aims of abolitionism. The grand spatial divide of the general “map” fugitives most often draw in their accounts, for example, is that between a free North and a slaveholding Southern “prison house” (even if this does not necessarily correspond with historical assessments that show that flight patterns involved much more diverse forms and directionsFootnote 7). Moreover, slave narratives depict Southern topographies of enslavement as centrally involving a sense of immobility produced by a seemingly ubiquitous hierarchization of spatial patterns. The discourse of the antebellum slave narrative frequently describes a system that, adhering to the dominant racial order, perpetually sought to control movements, directions and placements and thus excessively compartmentalized space into confining units for the enslaved’s body. Consider, for instance, laws such as the following, cited by numerous narratives and abolitionist texts of the period, like Theodore Weld’s American Slavery As It Is (1839):

If more than seven slaves together are found in any road without a white person, twenty lashes apiece; for visiting a plantation without a written pass, ten lashes; for letting loose a boat from where it is made fast, thirty-nine lashes; for having any article for sale without a ticket from his master, ten lashes; for traveling in any other than the most usual and accustomed road, when going alone to any place, forty lashes; for traveling in the night without a pass, forty lashes; for being found in another person’s Negro quarters, forty lashes; for hunting with dogs in the woods, thirty lashes; for being on horseback without the written permission of their master, twenty-five lashes; for riding or going abroad in the night, or riding horses in the daytime, without leave, a slave may be whipped, cropped, or branded in the cheek with the letter R, or otherwise punished, such punishment not extending to life, or so as to render him unfit for labor. (Weld 144)

Such statutes articulate enslavement primarily in terms of a confining and normalizing spatial control. Designed in accordance with the slaveholder’s ultimate goal of controlling his “property,” their punishments are predominantly punishments for the commitment of “spatial” crimes, as the use of verbs like “visiting,” “traveling,” “riding,” or “going abroad” indicates. Space itself becomes corrupted through the production and sanctioning of “crimes” that break with a dominant racial hierarchy, and that furnish a sense of immobility pertaining to man-made as well as non-human natural environs that became one of the earmarks of fugitive slave narratives’ depictions of Southern enslavement.

Coincidental with this immobility, fugitives’ accounts continually emphasize the forced mobility that characterized Southern chattel slavery. After all, the enslaved were “herded” together in units, as extensively described, for instance, in William Wells Brown’s Narrative (1847), or hired out, sent off, or sold away in slave auctions that are depicted in seminal narratives such as Douglass’s (My Bondage 412, 444–447) or Jacobs’s (14–17). Thus, formerly enslaved narrators often underlined that the only kind of “mobility” the black body underwent in normalized spaces of enslavement was an enforced, haunting one that produced trauma and often caused the separation of families. The sole kind of motion officially sanctioned was in itself an articulation of the inertia the enslaved’s body attained in spaces of enslavement, since the fundamental principle, Douglass retrospectively points out, was that “the slave was a fixture; he had no choice, no goal, but was pegged down to one single spot, and must take his root there or nowhere. The idea of removal elsewhere came generally in the form of a threat, and in punishment for a crime” (Life and Times 119).

Moreover, narratives often stress and vividly describe how the (im)mobility which laws officially sought to impose on the enslaved body was, from a practical point of view, enforced through a variety of extra-legal social practices and institutions that ranged from plantation overseers to slave patrols and professional slave-hunters with their bloodhounds. As Benjamin Drew, in his North-Side View of Slavery (1855), concluded from interviews he had conducted with fugitives in Canada, there appeared to be a “strong police [which] must watch the motions of the oppressed” and which “usually answers its atrocious purpose very well” (4). Thus, the background against which fugitives recounted their flights involved a combination of means of visual control with corporeal punishments that functioned together to confine the enslaved body in space, including non-human natural space. Many fugitives presented what emerged as the peculiar institution harnessed natural environs as a “prisonhouse,” a “fortress,” in which nature was made complicit in their enslavement, as its elements were made to correspond with the master’s point of view, spatial patterns and logic of confinement. This was, to borrow a term introduced by Walter Johnson, a “carceral landscape,”Footnote 8 which, I would add, employed an ensemble of spatial as well as visual practices to ensure the slaveholder’s ultimate goal of “maintain[ing] complete authority over his slave” and exerting a “constant vigilance” (Douglass, “Lecture on Slavery” 27). The enslaved, by these combined means, from the perspective of the plantation system depicted in fugitive slave narratives, had to be held in and had to know her/his place, but was not allowed a sense of space.

Against this framework and its aim of an “ideally” complete confinement and functionalization of the enslaved body, the notion of an Underground Railroad, which emerged in slave narratives from the mid-1830s on, held the potential for narrators of inserting their own reinterpretations of spatial and power relations, reinterpretations that had their roots in a “heterotopic thinking” of space under enslavement. It provided narrators with the means of performing and representing a conceptual transformation of spaces of confinement within topographies of enslavement into empowering spaces of (mobile) concealment. Thus, the Underground Railroad, even if the actual number of fugitives may have been relatively low,Footnote 9 had a significant political and cultural impact, as well as a profound “literary” effect for formerly enslaved writers. On the one hand, it was instrumental in aggravating sectional tensions, as slaveholders, especially in the upper South, came to fear a significant loss of “property,” while abolitionists felt reassured of their course of action by the powerful statement of discontentment with slavery each runaway represented. On the other hand, the notion of an Underground Railroad meant the entry of a discursive space to be negotiated in an imaginative task by the escapees themselves, a task which echoed material practices of spatial resistance and heterotopic thinking performed under slavery. No matter the mode of travel chosen by fugitives, narrators retrospectively had to come to terms not only with what freedom actually meant, but also with how the process of gaining freedom was rooted in conceptualizations of a transitory space. The task was also one of turning what had continually developed as heterotopic thinking during enslavement into imagining and claiming a sense of space against the “map” which was the background for recounting their experiences, one of rooting freedom and identity conceptually within spaces of flight.

Two cases, both widely celebrated as Underground Railroad stories in their time, are particularly revealing examples of how this task was performed, as they illustrate how the Underground Railroad became a literary heterotopia that allowed for a representation of reinterpreting confinement into empowering concealment. A first case is that of Henry “Box” Brown, whose means of escape from slavery in Virginia in March 1849 instantly made him a celebrity, first in the U.S. and then in Britain. His Narrative of Henry Box Brown (1849; a British edition appeared in 1851) is somewhat atypical, as its author, having been treated comparatively well, admits to only giving the “beautiful side” of slavery, having left “for other pens far abler than mine […] the labor of an exposer of the enormities of slavery” (Brown, Narrative 11). Hence, after a relatively brief, generically obligatory description of slavery’s atrocities, the text focuses instead on Brown’s means of escape, becoming an Underground Railroad story par excellence. The narrative extensively describes how Brown, inspired by what he views as a god-given vision, thinks up a plan to convey himself to freedom in a crate. He employs a carpenter to furnish this device, and receives help from a sympathetic white man, Samuel A. Smith, who “packs” him into the box and has him shipped for $86 by Adams Express Company to Philadelphia (cf. 59–62).

Throughout the portrayal of this journey, Brown, on the one hand, repeatedly refers to his ordeal as one of traumatic confinement by recounting the hardships of travelling in what he first terms a “portable prison” (Narrative v), then “a moving tomb” (vii), a “narrow prison,” and a “darkened home of three feet by two” (60). On the other hand, however, after Brown’s eventual safe arrival in Philadelphia, and standing “erect before my equal fellow men; no longer a crouching slave” (63), his reinterpretation gains the overtones of self-empowerment through self-confinement. His previous rhetoric that emphasized the trauma of confinement changes to a celebratory one that highlights the power of concealment, which is also conveyed through Brown’s changed use of personal pronouns, especially in the British version of his narrative. Only enduring spatial confinement in “my box,” he retrospectively argues, i.e. only deliberately thinking heterotopically and employing space in this specific, personal way by concealing his body heterotopically out of the spatial matrix that enslaved him enables freedom (Life 54, 56, my emphasis). As merging into his alternate other-space becomes the cause for a celebratory “song” about “my fete in the box,” Brown demonstrates an appropriation of his confinement as concealment within a self-created, transitory heterotopia that facilitated “my resurrection from the grave of slavery” (60, 57, my emphasis).

Another telling instance where Underground Railroad space enables a heterotopic reinterpretation of confinement that emerges from heterotopic thinking during enslavement can be found in the narrative of William and Ellen Craft, a text that is noteworthy for describing the flight of more than one (typically male) enslaved individual. The couple, in comparison to Brown, travelled not only a much greater distance, approximately Running a Thousand Miles for Freedom (1860), as the title of their pamphlet suggests, but also employed a different but by no means less original scheme of escape. Their narrative, which is “not intended as a full history of the life of my wife, nor of myself, but is merely an account of our escape,” presents its Underground Railroad story as a tale of disguise (iii-iv). Ellen, the nearly white (unacknowledged) daughter of her master, dresses up as William’s ‘master,’ and takes a four-day journey with her ‘slave’ from Macon, Georgia to Philadelphia, which is hailed as a Bunyanesque “great city” (70). It is the intimate knowledge of the spatial system surrounding them and, ironically, the fact that in accordance with the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 “slaveholders have the privilege of taking their slaves to any part of the country they think proper,” that leads to their eventual success (29). Only by becoming a master/slave-couple are William and Ellen able to make their way into free territory. Through crossdressing and devices such as “poultices” for the “right hand in a sling” to avoid signing paperwork (36, 34), the Crafts’ Underground Railroad experience, which technically employs overt transportation in trains and steamers, effectively undermines the spatial matrix they are confined by. The space the couple carve out for themselves is a heterotopia that employs both the body and systemic heterotopias (trains, ships) for its own purpose. Their Underground Railroad thus reveals in paradigmatic ways its consciously realized heterotopic qualities, as the story emphasizes how their space of resistance is ultimately rooted in language, performance and their “concealing” bodies themselves, which attain the function of heterotopic signatures subversively cutting through the social and spatial texture of Southern enslavement.

Taken together, such cases attest to the slave narrative’s reinterpretation of confinement into concealment through the notion of the Underground Railroad, as they hint at the roots of this reinterpretation in resistance practices and heterotopic thinking during enslavement. In numerous instances, fugitives’ bodies themselves are depicted as acting heterotopically within carceral landscapes and topographies of enslavement, thus offering the means of escape by complying with the relations and obliging to the rules of the very spatial and racial system they seek to transcend. By entering into a box (obliging to the “rules of shipment”) or by entering into pre-defined roles (complying with the racial logics of topographies of enslavement), fugitives retrospectively demonstrate how confinement could be subversively employed and become a means of concealed, heterotopic resistance.Footnote 10 If, as Douglass wrote, the slave “must take his root there or nowhere,” i.e. if an enslaved individual had to know their place during slavery but was not allowed a sense of space, the notion of an Underground Railroad provided fugitives with a means of (re-)imagining a heterotopic form of concealment through which identity could be rooted in space (Life and Times 119). In this sense, the Underground Railroad gave formerly enslaved narrators’ an opportunity to remind readers of their resistance and agency even under slavery and of their skills of re-conceptualizing themselves in their spatial relations; it enabled highlighting a subversive use of space by showing how the formerly enslaved body could self-consciously be transformed into a sign of empowerment and resistance.

Beyond offering formerly enslaved writers a way to demonstrate a skillful resistance through heterotopic thinking developed under slavery and to gain a new sense of space, the literary heterotopia of the Underground Railroad had another important strategic function within antebellum culture. As a literary heterotopia, a “realized utopia” in the Foucauldian sense (“Of Other Spaces” 239) that emerged through the African American word, it subversively interacted with a wider popular discourse on the Underground Railroad. To understand this additional facet of the slave narrative’s Underground Railroad heterotopia, one has to take into account what the “Liberty Line” meant more broadly culturally in the decades leading up to the Civil War, especially to abolitionists.

As we know, abolitionism was by no means unanimously supportive of Underground Railroad activities, which were after all both risky endeavors and open violations of the law.Footnote 11 However, despite the controversies the Underground Railroad sparked, abolitionist circles eventually turned out to be more than willing to gain momentum through this part of antislavery work as well, as a broader Northern public increasingly came to employ a celebratory rhetoric with respect to the “Liberty Line.” In the decades marked by a rapid spread of “Vigilance Committees” across the North from the mid-1840s on, and by the pivotal Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, the Underground Railroad grew into an influential concept. No matter where and when the term “Underground Railroad” actually emerged,Footnote 12 it quickly gained discursive currency throughout the 1840s in a variety of ways. To begin with, there was a tendency, in some of the “Committees,” to broadcast their achievements as part of what became mystified as an elaborate network aiding fugitives in their escapes. At the same time, a myth of the Underground Railroad seems to have catered to the sentimental and sensationalist tastes of a broader antebellum public, which may be sensed from its widespread presence in abolitionist songs and visual representations of the time,Footnote 13 literary works from Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852) to Thoreau’s “A Plea for Captain John Brown” (1859), or the legendary status of figures such as “General” Tubman, “Father” Robert Purvis, or “King” Jermain Loguen (cf. Foner 14). Moreover, major abolitionist works such as Weld’s American Slavery As It Is, Drew’s Northside View of Slavery, or Redpath’s The Roving Editor (1859), contributed continuously to the popularity of the idea, as did the printing press in general, in which the phrase “Underground Railroad” soon became ubiquitous. Hence perfectly understood in antebellum America, and although the Underground Railroad may factually have been characterized by a “minimum of central direction and a maximum of grassroots involvement” (Bordewich 5), its discourse became a powerful reality.

While the concept thus “fired the public imagination” (Gara, Liberty Line 114), the perspective from which fugitives’ related to the Underground Railroad through their narratives was markedly different. Although some willingly gave up information on the modes of their escapes and were broadcasted as Underground Railroad heroes (e.g. Box Brown or the Crafts), there prevailed at once a general anonymity and necessary obscuration with respect to this part of the experience of the formerly enslaved. What emerged in fugitives’ texts was a twofold movement: while often giving some information about their modes and means of flight, therein reinterpreting enslaving confinement into liberating concealment, the fugitive slave narrative at the same time created a characteristic silence around the Underground Railroad. The genre’s discourse came to oscillate between veiling and unveiling, hiding and revealing, thereby strategically creating the Underground Railroad as truly heterotopic space, i.e. as simultaneously “utopic” and “realized.”

Marking one pole within this spectrum, fugitive slave narratives consciously and consistently covered up their Underground Railroad space, cutting it off from clear referents by leaving out the names of persons and places involved and remaining vague in their descriptions. Henry Watson, a runaway from Virginia, is exemplary in denying information “lest I should block up the way, or affect the business of the under-ground railroad” (40); Thomas Smallwood, while promising in the title of his 1851 Narrative to give “an account of the underground railroad,” leaves his portrayal by and large intangible (20); and William Wells Brown, in his description of William Still in The Black Man (1863), refrains from saying “how many persons passed through his [Still’s] hands” (211). As expendable as this list is, it would be false to assume that all white abolitionists carelessly published their “honorable” deedsFootnote 14 while all black narrators were constantly cautious in terms of leaving out explicit references to underground activities. As a tendency, however, the pattern of veiling the Underground Railroad as a strategic space certainly prevailed in fugitives’ narratives. Notwithstanding the pressures they would face in this respect from a public that was craving for more information, and as patronized as the process of writing and publishing may have been, writers of slave narratives often managed to throw a veil over “their” Underground Railroad.

They did so with a purpose beyond simply averting immediately impending dangers too much openness bore, and with far-reaching strategic implications (that are also highly relevant for an ecocritical perspective, as will be seen below). For while veiling and thus rendering Underground Railroad space almost utopic in its intangibility, slave narratives simultaneously deliberately sought to co-create the Underground Railroad as a discursive space that ought to be conceived as real as possible. This corresponding process of unveiling lies at the heart of the representation of the Underground Railroad in many narratives of the 1840s and 1850s, for instance those by Frederick Douglass (1845) and John Brown (1855). The latter, having escaped from bondage in Georgia, recalls encountering a “friend [who] gave me a full account of the Underground Railroad” and the name of one of its members,

and precise instructions to find out his residence; but, for obvious reasons, I do not think it prudent to mention his name, or that of the town in which he lived; nay, perhaps lives now. His was the first station of the Underground line, in that part of the country, and it was absolutely necessary for me to reach it that night. (John Brown 154–155)

Brown employs a characteristic mode of veiling the “Underground line,” as he omits references to both helper and place. Simultaneously, however, his narrative engages the public discourse of the Underground Railroad by both embracing a typical “railroading” vocabulary (“Chapter XVII. I AM BOOKED TO CANADA, EXPRESS, BY THE UNDERGROUND RAILROAD” (163)) and by adding that “I have been permitted to add, in another chapter, a brief history of it [Underground Railroad], penned by the Editor of my Narrative” (154).

With “the Editor,” an abolitionist, the attached “Chapter XXI. THE UNDERGROUND RAILROAD,” employs precisely the kind of figure often responsible for creating the Underground Railroad as a legendary space in a broader public discourse. The chapter, not falling short of what may be expected, inscribes into Brown’s work a popular version of the “Liberty Line” as a “complicated machinery of vigilance committees, spies, pilots, conveyances, and signals” (217), and conjures up the powerful image of an Underground Railroad, which

[…] may be said properly to commence at what is technically known as Mason and Dixon’s line; that is at the junction of the Slave States with the Free States: and to terminate at the southern frontier of Canada. Its course is by no means regular, for it has to encounter the Alleghany range of mountains and several considerable rivers, including the Ohio. Lake Erie too lies in its track, nor is it altogether independent of forests. In spite, however, of all these, and numerous minor obstacles, the line has been constructed with admirable skill, as they can testify whose circumstances have compelled them to avail themselves of this mode of transit. Travelling by it cannot strictly be said to be either pleasant or altogether safe; yet the traffic is greatly on the increase. It is exclusively a passenger traffic; the trains are all express, and strange to add, run all one way, namely, from South towards the North: there are no return tickets. (Editor’s comment in Brown 210–211)

By incorporating the editor’s chapter, which creates the potent myth of an actual railroad (“track,” “traffic,” “express”) and uses the idea of a one-way northbound line (“no return tickets”), the strategy of Brown’s text as a whole is altered. His narrative, at the intersection between an abolitionist’s and a formerly enslaved’s voice, merges both veiling and unveiling. It denies the Underground Railroad as a concrete, real space, while allowing and fueling its qualities as an imaginary space, strategically functionalizing its mythic potential.

Douglass’s text, the most famous antebellum fugitive slave narrative, is likewise revealing in this respect, even though it appears, at first glance, to be driven exclusively by an impulse of veiling. In fact, Douglass at one point formulates what is perhaps the most outspoken antebellum critique of giving explicit accounts of the Underground Railroad. He complains:

I have never approved of the very public manner in which some of our western friends have conducted what they call the underground railroad, but which, I think, by their own declarations, has been made most emphatically the upperground railroad. I honor those good men and women for their noble daring, and applaud them for willingly subjecting themselves to bloody persecution, by openly avowing their participation in the escape of slaves. I, however, can see very little good resulting from such a course, either to themselves or the slaves escaping; while, upon the other hand, I see and feel assured that those open declarations are a positive evil to the slaves remaining, who are seeking to escape. (Douglass, Narrative 65–6, emphasis in original)

Thus, Douglass, who was himself actively engaged in Underground Railroad work from the 1840s on, emphasizes that it is unwise to divulge too much information about the workings of the underground.Footnote 15 Too dangerous would be, in his view, the possibility that “others would thereby be involved in the most embarrassing difficulties” (64).

Read with respect to the creation of a literary heterotopia, however, Douglass’s text is not merely an instance of critique of the production of an “upperground” railroad, but also a crucial example of the twofold process that furnishes a strategic Underground Railroad space through veiling and unveiling. That is to say, not although but because Douglass does not give concrete information despite being pressured on this point,Footnote 16 his text produces the Underground Railroad as even more powerful. The creation of a non-referentiality of the Underground Railroad in itself, Douglass implies, is to become the means of making its power even more real:

I would keep the merciless slaveholder profoundly ignorant of the means of flight adopted by the slave. I would leave him to imagine himself surrounded by myriads of invisible tormentors, ever ready to snatch from his infernal grasp his trembling prey. Let him be left to feel his way in the dark; let darkness commensurate with his crime hover over him; and let him feel that at every step he takes, in pursuit of the flying bondman, he is running the frightful risk of having his hot brains dashed out by an invisible agency. Let us render the tyrant no aid; let us not hold the light by which he can trace the footprints of our flying brother. (Douglass, Narrative 66)

In the sense of a reversed gaze, one turned back onto the slaveholder who has to feel “at every step he takes” the power of the Underground Railroad, Douglass plays with the two great fears of the slaveholding South: insurrections and the loss of slave property. Thereby, he co-creates Underground Railroad space as a heterotopia, a “realized utopia,” through the slave narrative. The Underground Railroad is to remain intangible and non-referential; it must indeed be utopic and veiled in “darkness” in this sense. Yet, it must do so precisely in order to enact, through the discourse of the slave narrative and the popular concept of the Underground Railroad, the reality that may effectuate a power that strikes back at the slaveholder, who has to feel “the frightful risk of having his hot brains dashed out by an invisible agency” (Narrative 66). The literary heterotopia of the Underground Railroad thus offered more than a means of demonstrating an ability of heterotopic thinking and spatial resistance, reinterpreting confinement into empowering concealment, and gaining a sense of empowerment through space. Its true strategic potential resided precisely in the production of a “realized utopia” that ultimately relied on the material existence of the formerly enslaved’s word itself. As a discourse that simultaneously veiled the referents due to which it existed and unveiled a mythic space to which such referents belonged, the slave narrative created a reversed gaze on the slaveholding system using itself as the ultimate proof of a heterotopia of the Underground Railroad. What weighed down Underground Railroad space in reality and made it more than anything else a heterotopia was the fugitive’s word.

Hermeneutics of Freedom and Co-Agency of the Non-Human

Identifying the Underground Railroad as a literary heterotopia in this way opens up the possibility of reconsidering this space through its characteristic function: where it begins, what it includes, and how far it extends. While scholarly definitions commonly emphasize one function in particular, namely aid and (interracial) collaboration,Footnote 17 the question of a spatially understood Underground Railroad potentially shifts from an (anthropocentric) who rendered assistance to how and where collaboration was enacted. This is not to suggest that literary Underground Railroad space does not represent the forms of human assistance conventionally associated with the term. It includes the more or less well-organized networks of “agents,” “stationmasters,” and “conductors,” but also the more spontaneous help provided by free blacks, which was perhaps the most effective form of assistance and the crucial part of the story that historians have painstakingly recovered over the past decades.Footnote 18 In this respect, narratives often portray a gradual opening up of the Underground Railroad, as help was encountered rather spontaneously underway. Craft, for instance, coincidentally receives assistance from abolition-minded train passengers, who give him “a good deal of information” (78), and Douglass has his first contact with the Underground Railroad network of New York City through the spontaneous help of a sailor, who refers him to David Ruggles (cf. My Bondage 340). In addition to such modes of help given in a space in which “[p]ractically every clump of Negro settlers in the free states was an underground depot by definition” (Furnas 214), one has to take into account the references to and work of prominent African American Underground Railroad conductors. In this category, we find, for example, William Still, John Malvin, W.M. Mitchell, or the Rev. Jermain Wesley Loguen, and those who did the most daring work of all, namely heroic figures such as Harriet Tubman or the so-called “Knights of Liberty,” who ventured back into Southern slaveholding territory to save family members and others from their fate in bondage (cf. Buckmaster 106–126).

Apart from these forms of human collaboration, which are all part of a literary Underground Railroad, however, reading the Underground Railroad as a literary heterotopia defined by a function of collaboration suggests yet another form of assistance that formerly enslaved narrators portrayed as vital to their flight experiences, namely non-human assistance. In this respect, the literary heterotopia of the Underground Railroad came to function as a space of collaboration that was more than a “container” for human agents as it included non-human co-agencies as well. Rather than depicting non-human non-discursive materialities in terms of spaces to move through, slave narratives often present flight spaces as Underground Railroad spaces to interact with. Where the non-referentiality that resulted from the delineated strategy of veiling and unveiling made the space of a human Underground Railroad non-representable, slave narratives could fill in another, representable space of a non-human Underground Railroad that enabled an articulation of environmental knowledge. The production of the Underground Railroad as an African American literary heterotopia in the fugitive slave narrative therefore entailed more than the described processes of veiling and unveiling. It also involved imagining an alternative Underground Railroad space through which narrators continually emphasized that the Underground Railroad—to them—was more than a network of human sympathizers and held the potential for articulating environmental knowledge.

This environmental knowledge expressed in conjunction with the literary heterotopia of the Underground Railroad did not emerge out of thin air or without foundation. It was not something that formerly enslaved writers suddenly or inadvertently thought up after they had attained freedom when they sat down to compose their texts. Instead, my observation is that the Underground Railroad heterotopia acted as a “loophole” in the genre in the sense that it allowed for the articulation of diverse forms of environmental knowledge that had been developed all along. In other words, the alignments and identifications with non-human nature that found expression through the literary heterotopia of the Underground Railroad reflect practices and forms of environmental knowledge acquired under slavery. Such knowledge could include, for example, geographical (local, regional or sometimes more cosmopolitan), agricultural or botanical knowledge, or wisdom about flora and fauna acquired through hunting, fishing, or gardening. Often, therefore, this knowledge was connected to heterotopic spaces beyond or at least subversive to the plantation order, gained, for instance, from “laying out” (i.e. being absent for shorter periods) or marooning in swamps, from the (permitted) cultivation of slave plots, or from (largely prohibited) movement between plantations. It could be used in various ways, as studies such as those by Giltner (2006), Montrie (2008), or Glave (2010) suggest, whether in planning and successfully executing flights or for somewhat ameliorating conditions under slavery. Accordingly, these forms of environmental knowledge are a testament to how the topographies of enslavement (as powerfully as they were as spatial backdrop in slave narratives) failed. They provide evidence, as Montrie suggests, of how “[s]laves redefined the landscape around them for their own purposes and by permission or through truancy […] escaped to woods, swamps, ponds, and streams where they could restore a sense of self and even cultivate a collective identity that was essential to continued defiance of masters” (41). As African American environmental knowledge is therefore in its emergence tied to resistance strategies, forms of agency and heterotopic thinking during enslavement, the place of its articulation in the slave narrative is fitting in the sense that it is, as my readings so far have suggests, no less subversive. The literary heterotopia of the Underground Railroad as discursive other-space epistemologically connects with but also reflects the subversive strategies of a knowledge developed (often) in those other-spaces of slavery that could not easily be represented directly through the generically required topographies of enslavement of the fugitive slave narrative. It offered a way to incorporate and transmit an environmental knowledge rooted in African American resistance to enslavement.

One way in which fugitive slave narratives link environmental knowledge developed under slavery with the literary heterotopia of the Underground Railroad is by portraying reflections on non-human non-discursive material environments during enslavement as opening up the possibility and motivation for flight in the first place. Narrators often suggest that such environments incited processes of reading freedom in and conceptualizing freedom through a discourse of nature; they initiated what could be called a “hermeneutics of freedom.” Freedom, a concept and discourse by definition central to the fugitive slave narrative, became even more prominent from the 1840s on, as formerly enslaved writers increasingly came to articulate their right to freedom in terms of a natural right.Footnote 19 While narrators had previously often portrayed the immediate motivation for taking flight to lie in excessive punishments, imminent family separations, or being sold away or cheated out of buying themselves, there is a tendency in texts of the last two decades before the Civil War to emphasize the importance of freedom as a fundamental right given “by nature.” Freedom as inherent, natural right became a vital theme not only in the narratives themselves, but also, as numerous sources suggest, in discourse among the enslaved. “Of course, no slave would dare to say, in the presence of a white man, that he wished for freedom,” James Curry conceded in his 1840 Narrative, only to point out: “But among themselves, it is their constant theme. No slaves think they are made to be slaves” (28).Footnote 20

The increasing prevalence of the idea that freedom was given by nature coincided with the emergence of forms of expression that literally rooted this idea in a discourse and depictions of nature. Melvin Dixon, in the first chapter of Ride Out the Wilderness, emphasizes the particular role of wilderness in this respect, and links moments of slaves’ (self-)interpretations through the natural world with religious conversion: “Nature offered examples of the harmony of life similar to those in traditional religious thought; for enslaved Africans the wilderness in America simply offered another covenant between man and God” (23).Footnote 21 Even as Dixon substantiates this argument with evidence from slave songs and narratives, one could expand his idea regarding the antebellum slave narrative both in terms of his emphasis on “the wilderness, the lonesome valley and the mountain” (16), and respecting (an absence of) religious dimensions. There certainly is religious conversion in some narratives of the 1840s and 1850s, but others do not stress this aspect in their acts of reading freedom through a discourse of “nature.” Moreover, while various articulations of freedom through depicting the non-human material world employ settings of wilderness, e.g. when Bibb recalls envying the freedom of “the fishes of the water, the fowls of the air, the wild beasts of the forest (Narrative 30), or Northup the liberty of the “birds singing in the trees” (57), there are also instances in which other kinds of environments become the catalysts of a hermeneutics of freedom.Footnote 22 Douglass, for instance, in My Bondage and My Freedom (1855), views even the plantation itself as “a scene of almost Eden-like beauty” that could initiate an articulation of freedom through ‘nature’ (67).

Whether in the nearby woods, on the shores of rivers (Bibb) and bays (Douglass), or even in plantation settings, non-human natural environs frequently turn into places that could incite thought-provoking reflections on liberty and a questioning of one’s own position as enslaved. Taken together, such moments highlight the link between an environmental knowledge acquired under slavery and the literary heterotopia of the Underground Railroad as they mark a first way in which elements of the non-human natural world became connected to an Underground Railroad experience in the plot developments of fugitive slave narratives. As a variety of texts suggest, entering the Underground Railroad first became possible through understanding a kind of freedom at display in this world. Revealing in this way that consciously reading in the “book of nature” had the potential of inciting reflections that led to the recognition that the natural order is freedom and that thereby conceptually initiated a fugitive’s Underground Railroad space stresses the significance of a hermeneutics of freedom as part of a foundational African American environmental knowledge. Moreover, the fact that freedom as such was “a constant theme” among the enslaved (Curry 28), and the strong links between concepts of freedom and a discourse of nature in the slave narrative imply a broader collective experience. Although most scenes depict individuals engaged in reading nature, the highly efficient communicative patterns within enslaved communities, which often had trans-regional ties, e.g. through river workers or seamen (cf. Buchanan (2004); Bolster (1997)), support the assumption that this facet of an African American environmental knowledge in particular had an important communal dimension as well.

A hermeneutics of freedom that hints at the ways in which environmental knowledge was gained during enslavement is typically involved in portrayals of acts that first define freedom before taking flight. Depictions of experiences during escapes, by contrast, are frequently endowed with a more explicit vision of the non-human as a collaborator and co-agent that could reflect diverse facets of antebellum African American environmental knowledge. In this respect, narrators often stress that the non-human itself rendered assistance and became part of the Underground Railroad.

This is not to suggest that the non-human non-discursive materialities involved in spaces of flight generated a discourse of nature marked by positive connotations. On the contrary, and although there was the potential to read freedom in the ‘book of nature’ and the possibility of collaboration with the non-human, literary representations of spaces of flight are often depicted as challenging or, in Dixon’s reading, as a “zone of trial and deliverance” (13). In many ways, spaces of flight were presented as an extension of the topographies of enslavement and as ripe with dangers. There were, for instance, the obstacles and threats inherent to the environs fugitives entered, where beasts such as the “howling wolves in the Red River Swamp” were constantly lurking (Bibb, Narrative 131), torrential rivers had to be crossed, and where the practical problems of surviving without sufficient nutrition or means of orientation had to be mastered. In this sense, depictions frequently involved a menacing non-human nature that was complemented by yet another form of threat, apart from moving through oftentimes harsh territory, which was perceived as infinitely more haunting. Jermaine Loguen, for example, refers to this second facet when he writes: “I had broken from the sunny South, and fought a passage through storms and tempests, which made the forests crash and the mountains moan—difficulties, new, awful, and unexpected, but not so dreaded as my white enemies who were comfortably sheltered among them” (339). The real danger, and the most dreaded part of a fugitive’s space as an extension of the topographies of enslavement was therefore, as Loguen and others suggest, a corrupted human one, namely the gangs of man-hunters and their bloodhounds. The manner in which the latter were specifically trained for slave chasesFootnote 23 highlights how the human and the non-human dimensions of threat could merge. The bloodhound became an emblem of both the enforced complicity of the non-human that characterizes topographies of enslavement, and of the extension of this process into spaces of flight.

In spite of these dangers and obstacles, however, which were often anticipated by fugitives before taking flight (and which do not necessarily hinder the expression of environmental knowledge, which could be a means of survival), there is at the same time a strong sense of collaboration with the non-human. This aspect at points becomes central to the slave narrative’s depiction of spaces of flight and functionally turns such spaces into Underground Railroad space. In this respect, literary Underground Railroad space denotes more than what Dixon traces in his metaphorical reading of fugitives as engaging in a “zone of trial and deliverance” (13). Beyond recognizing that a “test of the wilderness […] required a code of situational ethics” that was mirrored in fugitives’ relations to wilderness (25), reading their relations to the non-human world through the lens of Underground Railroad space shows material, epistemological, and ethical engagements with that space. Fugitive slave narratives did not simply conceptualize spaces of flight anthropocentrically as a “container” or as a “mirror” in which to act out or make visible a “situational ethics,” but turned the literary Underground Railroad into a locus that enabled articulating an environmental knowledge and ethos acquired under slavery that emerges from the non-human non-discursive materiality of that situation. The three examples I want to turn to for illustration, highlight what I believe are some of the most important aspects of the Underground Railroad from an ecocritical perspective, as they show some of the forms, practical values, and ethical dimensions of African American environmental knowledge expressed through this literary space.

An example that illustrates how the hostile aspects of spaces of flight converged with a form of co-agency of the non-human that turns such spaces into Underground Railroad space may be found in the Narrative of James Curry (1840). In one passage describing his flight from Person County, North Carolina, Curry writes:

In that afternoon I was attacked by a wild beast. I knew not what it was. I thought, surely I am beset this day, but unlike the men, more ferocious than wild beasts, I succeeded in driving him away, and that night crossed a branch of the Potomac. Just before I reached the town of Dumfries, I came across an old horse in a field with a bell on his neck. I had been warned by a colored man, a few nights before, to beware of Dumfries. I was worn out with running, and I took the bell off the horse’s neck, took the bell collar for a whip, and putting a hickory bark round his head for a bridle, I jumped on his back, and thus mounted, I rode through Dumfries. The bull-dogs lay along the street, ready to seize the poor night traveller, but, being on horseback, they did not molest me. I have no doubt that I should have been taken up, if I had been on foot. When I got through the town, I dismounted, and said to my horse, ‘go back to your master, I did not mean to injure him, and hope we will get you again, but you have done me a great deal of good.’ And then I hastened on, and got as far from him as I could before morning. (36–7)

The beginning of the excerpt is in many ways exemplary of a hostile space of flight, as Curry refers to both non-human as well as even greater human threats. Non-human animals are central to this passage and Curry’s articulation of environmental knowledge. He presents three types of (relations to) non-human animals: first, we find a “wild beast” that attacks the protagonist in the wilderness. While this non-human animal serves his narrative to stress that the slave patrols are “more ferocious than wild beasts,” suggesting the immorality of the slave system and its in-humaneness, its more-than-beastly nature, it also enables Curry to separate himself from a “beast” and, by extension, from a ‘beastly nature’ ascribed to black men (36). Moreover, his survival hints at skills and a knowledge of the wilderness acquired earlier on and serves to emphasize his strength and status as a human who masters the wilderness. Second, there are the domesticated non-human animals, namely the “bull-dogs” (36). In this respect, it is important to note that, although the bloodhound was, as mentioned above, emblematic of slave chases, dogs were also part of enslaved African Americans’ daily lives and could be companions. As Giltner suggests, dogs “helped slaves drastically improve their chances of supporting themselves and their families,” and could be, in the case of hunting dogs, “a rare part of slave life that was controlled and cared for almost exclusively by the slave” (26). Although Curry’s narrative does not give explicit information about his relation to dogs in particular, the way in which he proceeds to deal with the “bull-dogs”—his implied notion that they will not attack him if he is on horseback—suggests an intimate (environmental) knowledge about canines.

Third, and centrally, the passage features a non-human animal that becomes Curry’s companion, a co-agent of his flight. Thereby functionally transforming flight space into Underground Railroad space,Footnote 24 the text not only expresses environmental knowledge, but also enables the articulation of an ethics with respect to the non-human natural world. Not only does Curry know how to ride on horseback, is expert enough to employ the “old horse” by using “a hickory bark round his head for a bridle,” but he uses his wisdom about a relation between two different kinds of non-human animals to succeed in crossing the town (Curry 36). The horse alone would not be of much use. On the contrary, only the runaway’s knowledge of how to employ the animal’s service in relation to Dumfries makes him a companion and co-agent and provides a means of deceiving that part of non-human nature that has been thoroughly corrupted and harnessed by slavery, the bloodhounds. Curry, at this point, spatially cuts through a Southern topography in ways functionally not unlike those described by the Crafts, as he reclaims himself through space by relying on the assistance of a non-human animal. Moreover, he clearly acknowledges the significance of this process, thanking the horse for having “done me a great deal of good” (37). Thus, while Curry’s space of flight may be read in terms of Dixon’s “situational ethics”—stealing is implicitly recognized as morally wrong (“I did not mean to injure him [the owner]”) but justified (“but you have done me a great deal of good”)—the example also attests in various ways to an African American environmental knowledge gained under slavery. Curry uses a heterotopic literary Underground Railroad not only to expand that space to tell his own story, but also to articulate environmental knowledge and ethical relations to both human and non-human nature.

Another instance that suggests, in a parabolic way, the potential often ascribed to a collaboration with the non-human non-discursive material world during flights may be found in Solomon Bayley’s Narrative of Some Remarkable Incidents (1825). Having fled from slavery in Delaware, Bayley describes how, after coming to a Virginian place called “Anderson’s Cross-Roads,” he “met with the greatest trial I ever met with in all my distress” (120). Pursued by two locals into the woods, Bayley eventually hides in a “thin place” where

I felt very strange: I said to myself I never felt so in all my distress: I said something was going to happen to me today. So I studied about my feelings until I fell to sleep, and when I awoke, there had come two birds near to me; and seeing the little strange looking birds, it roused up all my senses; and a thought came quick into my mind that these birds were sent to caution me to be away out of this naked place [i.e. thin place]; that there was danger at hand. And as I was about to start, it came into my mind with great energy and force, ‘If you move out of this circle this day, you will be taken;’ for I saw the birds went all around me: I asked myself what this meant, and the impression grew stronger, that I must stay in the circle which the birds made. (121)

Even though Bayley’s description, from this point on, involves a fair amount of superstition and seems less “practically” significant than Curry’s, the passage is equally important for drawing attention to elements of an African American environmental knowledge. While it suggests a concrete potential for resistance that lay in employing the non-human non-discursive material world (literally) as underground space, Bayley’s text also proposes the strength that could be drawn from entering into spiritual relations with non-human nature as another important aspect of environmental knowledge. We may not actually believe that “these birds were sent to caution me,” yet the effects of such a belief and the assumption that “I must stay in the circle which the birds made” hint at a significant epistemological relation to nature that endows its elements with spiritual meaning and that is connected to a hermeneutics of freedom (121). Bayley, after all, indeed manages to remain undiscovered by these means in a hair-breadth moment in which one of the men “stopped and looked right down on me, as I thought, and I looked right up into his eyes” (123). The “thin place” marked by Bayley’s reading of nature (“the circle”) becomes one that enables a heterotopic concealment and resistance that is just as effective as Henry Brown’s box. Moreover, the process of retrospectively recognizing and ascribing meaning to this potential of the non-human world as part of the Underground Railroad reveals Bayley’s ethics. The way in which he places such a moment at the center of attention, reading it as the “greatest trial” of his story and stressing the involvement of “two great powers [which] have met here this day; the power of darkness, and the power of God” (123), lends weight to the general importance attributed to the non-human as collaborative underground in fugitives’ experiences. Through this scene and its religious overtones and parabolic manner, Bayley’s narrative not only highlights that it was collaborating with a natural space (and not merely the aid of human helpers or acting out a particular ethics within that space) that bore the potential to overcome enslavement, but also hints at the spiritual elements of an African American environmental knowledge.

A third text that highlights how environmental knowledge is expressed through a co-agency of the non-human is Henry Bibb’s Narrative of the Life and Adventures (1849), perhaps the representative of the genre that like no other captures the multiple dimensions of collaboration involved in an African American literary heterotopia of the Underground Railroad. In many ways a typical antebellum slave narrative with its focus on issues such as family separations, corporeal punishments, and religion,Footnote 25 Bibb’s text is nevertheless remarkable with respect to its vivid depiction of multiple flights and the explicitness and detail in which it describes a broad range of terrains and regions. The author-narrator’s going back and forth between slave and free territory in order to save his family lets him learn “the art of running away to perfection” (Bibb, Narrative 15), and turns his account, as Gerhardt has pointed out, into a text that “correlates the formulation of an African American cultural identity with detailed reflections about nature” (13).Footnote 26

Moreover, Bibb’s Narrative uncovers and exemplifies various facets of the slave narrative’s Underground Railroad space. His depictions range from moments inciting a hermeneutics of freedom via a discourse of “nature,” e.g. in a memorable scene on the shores of the Ohio River (29–30), to representations of what was conventionally understood as the Underground Railroad and acts of spontaneous help (cf. 51–57). Most importantly, however, Bibb’s topographical descriptions rarely remain without an emphasis on the role of the non-human, as they expose flight movements as shaped by non-human non-discursive materialities that sometimes come to function as collaborative Underground Railroad space. Whether regarding prairies, the woods, or swamplands, Bibb’s text never conceptualizes spaces of flight as mere containers to merely move through. Instead, he constantly stresses the potential of human/non-human collaboration that the specific elements of different kinds of regions, places, and environments had to offer, thereby expressing various forms of environmental knowledge. With respect to a sense of shared agency and collaboration pertaining to Underground Railroad space, Bibb becomes most explicit in a chapter entitled “Adventure on the Prairie,” when he describes his flight on a horse:

[T]he horse carried me safely across at the proper place. After I got out a mile or so from the river, I came into a large prairie, which I think must have been twenty or thirty miles in width, and the road run across it about in the direction that I wanted to go. I laid whip to the horse, and I think he must have carried me not less than forty miles that night, or before sun rise the next morning. I then stopped him in a spot of high grass in an old field, and took off the bridle. I thanked God, and thanked the horse for what he had done for me, and wished him a safe journey back home. (Narrative 162–163)

The scene, which shows parallels to the passage from Curry’s text,Footnote 27 attests once more to an environmental knowledge gained under slavery, its practical usefulness, and its ethical implications, as non-human aid becomes a means of escape and resistance. On the one hand, we see again the very practical, material dimension of assistance often provided by a specific setting. Although Bibb’s first attempts to catch one of the horses “running at large in a field” are in vain (161), he eventually succeeds in securing a “noble beast” in the “barn-yard” of a plantation (162).Footnote 28 Thus spatially cutting his way through a Southern middle landscape, Bibb finds practical aid when fashioning himself a bridle “cut [from] a grape vine” (161), and collaborates with a non-human co-agent. As in Curry’s case, this only becomes possible under the condition that he has gained a certain wisdom about equine animals. Both texts thereby make clear via their Underground Railroad space that horses in particular were not just the pride of plantation owners (cf. Douglass, Narrative 20–21) or harnessed as elements of torture instruments in the antebellum South (cf. Roper 47), but were instead regarded as potential companions by enslaved African Americans. Accordingly, as his companion “seemed willing,” Bibb rigorously employs the potential the space he encounters has to offer by hurrying across a prairie on horseback and crossing a “large stream of water,” in which “finally the water came over his [the horse’s] back and he swam over” (162). Bibb presents an explicit example of environmentally rendered assistance that stresses how his means of escape emerge out of a specific setting but also require previously gained environmental knowledge; he roots his resistance in a non-human co-agent belonging to the very materiality of such a space while demonstrating his own skills.

On the other hand, the moment also reveals Bibb’s ethics in the ways in which he consciously appreciates this form of collaboration by “thanking” the horse and “wish[ing] him a safe journey back home” (163). In addition to his use of personal pronouns (“his”/“him”) and his explicit empathy with his companion (“I know the poor horse must have felt stiff, and tired from his speedy jaunt” (163)), it is especially the last sentence of the above-quoted passage that emphasizes Bibb’s ethical understanding of the assistance rendered by a co-agency of the non-human. Here, he acknowledges both the non-human animal’s belonging (“home”) and his companion’s personhood, by “thanking” him (163). More than merely representing his human performance in a “test of wilderness” (Dixon 26–27), the passage therefore suggests that Bibb’s relation to the more-than-human world, like Curry’s and Bayley’s, is not restricted to selfishly employing and exploiting nature in the way the slave system systematically did. Instead, as Bayley highlights a spiritual element that could provide a material refuge while Curry’s and Bibb’s equine scenes stress non-human animals’ role as highly valued co-agents, their environmental knowledge is marked by a sense of care for and interaction with the non-human. Their de-anthropocentrized versions of a literary Underground Railroad space that extends beyond human networks of assistance express both epistemological and ethical relations to the non-human non-discursive material world African Americans developed during enslavement.

While the cases of Curry, Bayley, and Bibb highlight why a turn to the Underground Railroad can be fruitful for ecocritics (and will hopefully provide a starting point for further research), I want to conclude with a reminder of the more general potential that “heterotopia” as a concept may have for African American studies as well as environmentally oriented perspectives. Perhaps, the most significant advantage of the concept despite its Foucauldian fuzziness is that it enables rethinking space as simultaneously environmental and social. While the latter was central in Foucault’s own work (in fact, his definition depended on it), environmentally oriented scholarship may fruitfully use heterotopia precisely for its strength in that area, but expand its parameters to examine and describe how a (human) social “other-ness” of heterotopic spaces interacts with forms of environmental “other-ness.” For an African American (antebellum) context, at least, heterotopia has shown itself a highly significant concept, first, because forms of an African American environmental knowledge historically often emerged in heterotopias subversive to normalizing and racializing (plantation) spaces, and involved heterotopic thinking as a form of resistance. Second, and this has been my specific focus in this chapter, the Underground Railroad can be read as a literary heterotopia of the fugitive slave narrative that became a vital means of “claiming (through) space” in a twofold sense. On the one hand, it enabled fugitives’ reclaiming themselves through space, by presenting and performing reinterpretations of relations between space and body, and by subversively playing with an antebellum popular discourse of the “Liberty Line.” On the other hand, this subversive play provided a means of claiming space in the sense of imagining a heterotopic Underground Railroad that could become a locus for articulating African American environmental knowledge, for example, through a hermeneutics of freedom or by depicting co-agencies of the non-human. Read in this way, I believe, the Underground Railroad is significant from both an ecocritical and an African American literary historical perspective, because it attained the function of a discursive loophole for an African American environmental knowledge and imagination.