# 13 The Peripatetic life of William Grimes, or the unsettled terrors of fugitivity in two gifs
Way back in 2012 or so, I heard about something ridiculous: a dissertation told in a Gif. It made its argument in five seconds. This was a new concept and, of course, a foolish one. But I was intrigued by a couple of quick maps and images I saw disseminated somewhere on the internet and the stories they could tell. I was working on a longer project concerning William Grimes, the author of the first North American fugitive slave’s narrative, initially published in 1825. So, with the help of 2 students, I created two maps which we turned into Gifs. And indeed, although technology has long surpassed these initial humble efforts, I do think I captured something hard to reckon with…..the unsettled nature of William Grimes life and, indeed the unsettled nature of so many enslaved people passed along from white person to white person.
When I teach the memoirs of enslaved people I spend time speaking with students about who enslaved the protagonist at any given moment. Often, students are confused. Was Mr. Covey, they ask, the enslaver of Frederick Douglass? Who owned Solomon Northrop at any given moment? What is Harriet Jacobs actually saying in her opening chapters about who enslaved her parents and who enslaves her? These are good questions and enslaved narrators often spend a great deal of ink trying to explain it to their white audiences. People were sold, of course. But people were also mortgaged, rented, borrowed and informally transferred. Often they had absentee enslavers and their day-to-day survival and sufferings were under the control of often mercurial overseer power. One part of the suffering and torture they endured was the instability of their lives, never knowing to whom they might be transferred at any given time.
I charted out the site of Williams Grimes’ life before his escape and with the assistance of Charis Chapman, came up with the following map - and then Chelsea Kozma helped me turn it into and animation. It clearly demonstrates the chaos of his early years as an enslaved man, forced to move and abandon family and friends at the whim of white enslavers. You don’t need to have read his narrative or now anything about his life to quickly see the movements he made, or at least the ones he charts in his memoir, before his escape from Savannah in 1814 (he smuggled himself about a northern-bound boat).
Even more harrowing, though, is the map of his travels north. Once he was living in New England, he still was an itinerant laborer, who had regular brushes with the law. He was particulary harrassed by vagrancy laws and run out of towns because of his poverty. As he explains it:
“My conduct was good, and the strict laws of Connecticut could find nothing to punish; but the select-men have power to warn any man out of town who has not gained a settlement, which is a difficult thing for a poor man. This was the only course my enemies could take with me. There was certainly no danger of my coming upon the town, which is all the object of the law to prevent. It is very mean and cruel, to drive a man out of town because he is suspected of some crime, or breach of law. If he is guilty, punish him, but not set him adrift on suspicion, or from mere tyranny, because his poverty exposes him to it.”
Grimes settled for some time in New Haven but was recognized by a Yale University Student as a fugitive from Georgia. Terrified of rendition or capture, he fled to Litchfield, CT. Once there he found allies to assist him in arranging for a self-purchase. This infuriating and devastating transaction (which meant he lost the deed to a house and all that he and his family had accumulated and put him deep in debt) was actually what led him to pen his first manuscript in an attempt to recoup some of the money he had been forced to pay for his freedom. It is perhaps no surprise that he wrote:
"If it were not for the stripes on my back which were made while I was a slave, I would in my will, leave my skin a legacy to the government, desiring that it might be taken off and made into parchment, and then bind the constitution of glorious happy and free America. Let the skin of an American slave, bind the charter of American Liberty"
These 2 gifs are speedy and a bit dizzying. But they do convey how the inability to stay still was one part of the abuse both enslaved people in the south endured but also what poor Black fugitives in the North had to live through as well.
Technology has long surpassed these simple gifs but their power, I believe, still holds.
_____________________________________________________________________
To learn more:
See his 1825 memoir. https://docsouth.unc.edu/neh/grimes25/summary.html
See his longer 1855 version here:https://docsouth.unc.edu/neh/grimes55/grimes55.html
See a chapter I wrote about Grimes here: “Slavery, Imprinted: The Life and Times of William Grimes” https://tigerprints.clemson.edu/english_pubs/3/
Or the edition created by William Andrews and Regina Mason https://www.amazon.com/Life-William-Grimes-Runaway-Slave/dp/0195343328
Or see the film about Regina Mason and her Search for Grimes here: https://www.ginasjourney.com/
To learn more about The Runaway Chronicles and what to expect in future installments, check out my preview here. Installments will be posted each week on Mondays
To Cite:
Ashton, Susanna. "The Peripatetic life of William Grimes, or the unsettled terrors of fugitivity in two gifs." The Runaway Chronicles. Squarespace. 08/05/2024. https://susannaashton.com/the-runaway-chronicles/-13-the-peripatetic-life-of-william-grimes-or-the-unsettled-terrors-of-fugitivity-in-two-gifs
Click here to pre-order A Plausible Man. The True Story of the Escaped Slave Who Inspired Uncle Tom’s Cabin