Can I See Your I. D.? by Chris Barton Read Free Book Online Page B

more privacy. Your new hosts had you carried there in a sedan chair. When Mrs. Worrall caught up with you—Dr. Wilkinson must have sent word to her—you were entertaining a more reasonably sized crowd in their drawing room.
    As you wordlessly discoursed in all things Caraboo, these people knelt before you, wanted to touch you, drove you dangerously close to a fit of laughter that would have given yourself away. At the sight of Mrs. Worrall, however, you were the one falling to your knees, begging forgiveness for running away.
    She forgave you. You managed to keep up the charade for another day. But as your fame spreads, in person and through the newspapers, how much longer can it be before someone pieces “Princess Caraboo” together with the person you were before the day you wandered into Almondsbury? For all the kindness she has shown, doesn’t Mrs. Worrall deserve to be the first to know the truth?
    You approach Mrs. Worrall’s dressing room. She invites you in, and you lock the door behind you. And you tell her...
    Nothing.
    You just can’t.
    Not while you still have a choice.
    WHAT HAPPENED NEXT?
    MARY BAKER HAD only one more day as “Princess Caraboo” before testimony from her former Bristol landlady and the dull young man she’d traveled with exposed her as a fraud. She cooperated—mostly—with an investigation by rightfully skeptical journalist John Matthew Gutch, who published a full account of her life that August. By then she’d left for a short-lived, unsuccessful bid for American fame. Back in England, she made her living selling leeches to hospitals until she died in 1864.

SLAVE OWNER?
    ELLEN CRAFT

FRIDAY, DECEMBER 22, 1848
CHARLESTON, SOUTH CAROLINA
    At twenty-two, you cannot read or write.
    A week ago in Macon, Georgia, before this plan came into the heads of you and your husband and consumed you like fever, that did not matter. Of course you couldn’t read or write, Ellen—no matter how lightskinned, you were a slave. Anyone who taught you to put pen to paper or make out the words on a page would have been breaking the law. Ellen Craft could not read or write, and that was that. The same went for your William.
    But here near the wharf in Charleston, your illiteracy is another matter entirely. What is expected of you could not be more different than it was a week ago. In the eyes of those around you, you are not a seamstress or a slave. You are not even a Negro, not even a woman at all.
    You are “Mr. Johnson”—a Southern gentleman. Which is to say, a white Southern gentleman. And a white Southern gentleman who cannot read or write would stick out like a field slave who cannot find the opening of a cotton sack.
    Needless to say, you and your accompanying “slave”—William—do not wish to stick out. At least, not in that way. That’s why the plan the two of you cooked up includes a thorough disguise. Along with your trousers, top hat, green spectacles, and handkerchief tied beneath your apparently aching jaw, you’re sporting a sling for your poor, rheumatic writing arm.
    Such a young man, and in such sad shape—not much more than an invalid, really. How fortunate that William is here to attend to you, to assist you on your thousand-mile journey to seek help for your rheumatism from your physician uncle in Philadelphia, a city that just happens to be located in the free state of Pennsylvania.
    Your masquerade has held up this past day and a half, from Macon to Savannah by train, and then by steamboat to Charleston. Now you just need to get your steamer tickets for the Charleston-to-Philadelphia leg, and you’ll be out of the South—and out of slavery—for good.
    But there is a hitch in your plan: Now that winter is here, you learn, the steamboat doesn’t run that direct route. You’ll need to follow a patchwork path by steamer and rail. Fine—you wouldn’t have gotten this far if