44 pages • 1 hour read
Barbara SmuckerUnderground To Canada
Fiction | Novel | Middle Grade | Published in 1978A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Chapters 13-16Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 13 Summary
Julilly and Liza continue their journey into the Appalachian mountains. They ration the food their Quaker helper gave them and eat wild berries. Using the compass for directions, they continue to travel by night and rest in caves in the mountainside during the day. Increasingly hungry and weak, the girls decide to use some of the money from the Quaker to try to buy food from a farm. When Julilly approaches a small farmhouse, the farmer points her gun at Julilly and threatens her. Julilly and Liza run away and find a cattle farm nearby. While discussing how they should approach the owners, they are startled by the farmer, a German Mennonite immigrant, who invites them into his home. Inside, a woman helps Julilly and Liza bathe and gives them clean clothes and food. She instructs the girls to go high into the mountains to avoid the slave hunters. The girls are stunned by the family’s kindness.
Chapter 14 Summary
Liza and Julilly find the mountain paths frightening to travel at night. When a massive storm comes, the girls create a burrow shelter under a large rock and huddle under it. The next morning, they decide to continue walking since navigating by night is too difficult. Eventually they reach flatter land, where there are more farms and roads. Julilly approaches an elderly Black man walking down the road; he gives her some food and directions to Covington where a free Black man named Jeb Brown will help them. The girls quickly realize that their helper is enslaved and feel guilty for taking his food. For the next two nights, the girls follow the railroad tracks north, walking at night to avoid being seen.
The girls are thrilled to reach the Ohio River and find Jeb Brown’s home. Jeb and his wife, Ella, welcome them in and inform them that their friends Lester and Adam had already been there. The girls are astonished and delighted that their friends escaped after jumping from Sims’s wagon and hiding in a swamp. Jeb explains that the Underground Railroad is not a literal railroad, but a connection of safehouses owned by people who help enslaved people escaping to freedom. From their house, Julilly and Liza will go to their next stop on the railroad, Levi Coffin’s house.
Chapter 15 Summary
In the night, the Browns’ dog, Pal, is uneasy and Jeb warns that slave hunters could be approaching. Ella tells the girls to gather their things and climb on the roof to hide. The girls lie flat on the roof and hear the sheriff and another man ride up on horseback, demanding to search the house for the four escaped slaves from the Riley plantation. As they search, Julilly and Liza hear banging and prepare to jump off the roof if they need to. Finally, the sheriff and his companion leave but promise Jeb Brown that they will be back again.
Jeb gives the hoot-owl signal across the river and hears it in reply. He informs the girls that he must get them across the Ohio River tonight, and someone will meet them on the other side. Julilly and Liza board Jeb’s rowboat, and they cross the river. On the other side, a white man greets them and helps them hide under blankets in his wagon. He tells them that they should reach Levi Coffin’s house the following morning.
Chapter 16 Summary
Julilly and Liza reach Levi Coffin’s home in Cincinnati. The girls meet other escaped slaves, and Aunt Katie serves them a warm meal. Soon after their arrival they hear Levi Coffin come inside with a strange man, Sheriff Donnelly, who accuses him of being a “thief” of enslaved people. Aunt Katie quickly hides Julilly and Liza inside the bed, putting pillows and blankets over them. The men knock at the door of the bedroom, where Aunt Katie greets them and offers them tea. The girls are relieved when Sheriff Donnelly leaves. Levi and Katie agree that they must move the girls into Canada as soon as possible. Julilly is determined to reach Canada and is amazed at the number of people who have helped her and Liza. Katie delights the girls by giving them new sweaters that were knit by the women in her Quaker sewing circle.
Chapters 13-16 Analysis
These chapters portray Liza and Julilly traversing the Underground Railroad, and Smucker offers numerous historical details to enrich her chapters with realism. For instance, she shows how the railroad was a loosely connected network of safehouses maintained by Americans and Canadians from a variety of communities, namely Quakers, Mennonites, and free Black men and women. These houses and helpers were essential for the survival of escaping people and their success in reaching Canada. Ella Brown, the free Black woman who helps Liza and Julilly, describes the metaphor to the girls, helping them and the reader understand it better: “Colored and white folks work together on it. Our homes, where we hide you slaves, are the ‘railway stations.’ The roads you follow are the ‘tracks.’ You runaway slaves are the ‘freight.’” (104).
Smucker’s descriptions of each helper make them come to life as individuals. She describes a German Mennonite farmer as “no Sims or Riley kind of farmer. He had a fresh, home-made look. There was nothing mean about his blue eyes and the straight, pale eyebrows on top of them” (90). Meanwhile, the Mennonite women wore “long skirts” and “moved about busy with their work; their light, pale hair pulled back tightly into tidy buns” (91). Smucker heightens the realism of these passages by including two specific historical figures, Levi Coffin and Catherine Coffin, or “Auntie Katie,” as characters. Just as they did in real life, Levi and Catherine hide the girls in their home and offer them food, clothes, and passage to Canada. This representation of these real figures encourages the reader to read more about their efforts in helping people like the characters Liza and Julilly.
She also points to the ongoing tension between these antislavery groups and slaveowners. For example, local sheriffs interrogate and search the homes of Jeb Brown and Levi Coffin, insult and threaten them, and call their efforts a “devilish business” (114). These tense scenes show the social and political divide around slavery and remind the reader of the constant threat of capture and punishment for both escaping people and their railroad helpers.
In describing the railroad and its conductors, Smucker explores the role kindness and cooperation play on the Underground Railroad. For Liza and Julilly, their experiences in the homes of conductors are the first instances of kindness from white people, and that kindness makes a strong impression on them. After being fed, washed, and clothed by the Mennonite family, the girls were stunned by their positive experience:
Julilly and Liza didn’t even know how to express their gratitude to this kind lady. They couldn’t even talk about it to each other. Human kindness from the villagers of Felsheim had negated a little of the human cruelty that had made them slaves. It was hard to know how to accept these offerings from white folks (94).
Julilly and Liza appreciate each helper’s contributions and realize that some of them sacrificed what little they had to give. When a Black man gives them food and directions, they are saddened to realize that he is enslaved himself: “‘He’s a slave too,’ Julilly cried. ‘He’ll be hungry today. He gave us all his food.’ She held the bread gently in both her hands” (97). Over the course of Liza and Julilly’s journey, people’s generosity helps give Julilly faith that they will make it to their destination and freedom. She says, “We keep bein’ lifted up and put on board. Massa Ross started it way back there in Mississippi” (116). By showing the girls’ disbelief at people’s kindness, Smucker emphasizes the cruelty and deprivation they experienced as slaves and demonstrates that their worldview is changing through new experiences.
