She has authored, edited, or coauthored multiple titles on American literary and cultural history, including Collaborators in Literary America 1870-1920; “I Belong in South Carolina.” South Carolina Slave Narratives; (w/ Tom Lutz) These ‘Colored’ United States: African American Essays from the 1920s; (w/ Rhondda R. Thomas) The South Carolina Roots of African American Thought; (w/ Bill Hardwig) Approaches to Teaching Charles W. Chesnutt. In addition to those book projects, she has published in many scholarly journals as well as popular newspapers and public-facing digital media. She has appeared in various media interviews and served as a featured expert in the documentary film, Gina’s Journey: The Search for William Grimes.
Ashton applied the "Page 99 Test" to her new book, A Plausible Man: The True Story of the Escaped Slave Who Inspired Uncle Tom’s Cabin, and reported the following:
From page 99:Visit Susanna Ashton's website.…she started writing Uncle Tom’s Cabin, a novel that was to help instigate the most consequential social revolution of the modern world: the overthrow of modern slavery.A Plausible Man passes the Page 99 Test with surprisingly strong marks. The book tells of John Andrew Jackson, a runaway from South Carolina who, among his many adventures, meets up with Harriet Beecher Stowe, the author of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, along his journey to Canada. Yet this book is also designed to showcase how documents and paperwork both reveal and hide the lives of people who weren’t understood as being in the mainstream of society. So, in each chapter, Jackson’s story is told through documents (a court case, a runaway advertisement, a letter, a receipt, census page), but I try to walk the reader through what those documents hide and how for the history of marginalized people, you have to read in the margins of the documents themselves. The section here on the Underground Railroad is a case in point where it doesn’t have a clean paper trail because it was an illegal movement. As a model for readers, we need to speculate, carefully and in an informed manner, how things unfolded.
To understand what brought Jackson to this place and this moment, we have to view Jackson’s movement up to Brunswick, Portland, and elsewhere in Maine as a story of self-liberation. The danger was always his. The mistakes were his. The courage was his. The success was his. During this stage of his escape, he was assisted by courageous people, both Black and white. But that assistance was never assured and never secure. It was inconstant and always contingent on someone else’s moods, funds, or weather.
Each stop would have been tense. With hindsight, we might be tempted to think of his move through Maine toward Canada as triumphant; it was doubtless filled with some terror. Even with the optimism and tenacity that characterized his way of functioning in the world, he could not have known that he would succeed. After all, every step toward supposedly more assured freedom also took him further and further from everyone he knew and loved.
Jackson took whatever money he had saved and got out of town as fast as he could. Hitching rides on a wagon or simply hiking on the road would be wiser than a stage or train, even if he had money for tickets. Trains, although there were many leading north out of Massachusetts, could and often were inspected by conductors and government agents who could ask uncomfortable questions. There were plenty of rural roads wending their way north out of Salem, and it would have been quieter to endure the frozen and bumpy roads on a wagon when possible and by foot when not than to draw attention with other choices.
As Jackson probably saw it, another escape by ship would have been too risky. Everyone was now on alert for Black people scrambling to get north. Even a sympathetic captain or crew on a vessel heading north might encounter another ship, be boarded by officials, or be inspected upon arrival. He would be foolish to test his luck with another sea voyage. And so he went along the coast, probably directed and occasionally escorted to sympathetic households. While archival traces of his journey hint at or provide small details about his encounters with white people along the way, such meetings weren’t enough. He needed free Black people, people who looked like him.
Remarkedly, the first sentence on the page features what may be the thesis statement of my book, asserting that after Jackson visited Stowe, she started writing a novel that would change the world; it couldn’t have been a coincidence. That introductory section ends, and we move into the heart of the story…accompanying Jackson step-by-step through the very cold and difficult journey into Maine, where he and Stowe came together. I use this section to ready the audience for a story of the Underground Railroad and how it probably didn’t function the way myths would have it. It wasn’t always organized. Freedom seekers were often alone for long stretches of it. And while Jackson was fleeing from Salem, Massachusetts up to Canada, he was not on a well-planned and supported undertaking. He was making a lot of it up as he went along. This is important, too, because white Saviors weren’t the way the UGRR worked. Lots of people, for good and sometimes not so good reasons helped. And most important were usually the free black communities where fugitives could hide. Page 99 of A Plausible Man set up readers to understand the frightening nature of these journeys, even when one was traversing the supposedly friendly north.
--Marshal Zeringue
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