This past weekend I took a trip with a fellow urbanite up into the piedmont above Baltimore, to the area of Southern Pennsylvania where many a servant of the famously cruel colony of Maryland once fled.

In the late 1600s and early to mid 1700s, to escape from servitude from the Carolinas meant heading up into Cherokee country into the Appalachians, and then eventually following the Cumberland watershed down into the Kentucky and Tennessee Basin.

To escape from Virginia one went into West Virginia to access the Ohio watershed and also, the dark and bloody ground of Kentucky. The tribes that kept this area off limits to whites in return for guns and powder from the Governor included the Madoc and Mandoag.

Escaped New England and New York servants skulked in the uplands of the Hudson watershed, their back to great lakes, great tribes and ruthless French agents, or they sought the upper reaches of the Allegheny River [source of the Ohio] in Northern Pennsylvania and dared the savage Delaware, Iroquois and Shawnee who traded the scalps of escaped indentures for guns, ball and powder.

If one escaped from Central and Eastern Maryland the direct path to the Ohio out the narrow mountainous neck of Western Maryland would take him over the Long War Way [Appalachian Trail], in the path of raiding Cherokee and Iroquois, no secure place to plant a homestead. Rather than risk the annual war parties here, the servant fleeing his Baltimore area masters was prone to strike up into the highlands just above his pit of misery and brave the attentions of the Delaware and Susquehanna tribes who served the Quaker slave masters of Philadelphia and band together in the area now home to the towns of Hanover, Harrisburg, Gettysburg and Lancaster. From there the way west to the Ohio Country would eventually be opened up by West Virginians like Wetzel, as well as Pennsylvanians like Boone who first went to the Carolinas down the Shenandoah Valley and then up into Kentucky.

Likewise, today, when working class whites have had enough with their cruel treatment on the vast welfare plantation of Baltimore, they journey upland, and over the Pennsylvania border. There, this past Sunday, I met Nero the Pict in person, just on the other side of Yo Adrian’s Invisible Wall, and he lent me the following books to assist in my research:

1. A June 1956 Survey of the faculty and students of Frederick Douglas High School in Baltimore. The very lair of drug gangs, race purgers and violent youth who set this city on fire last April, is depicted in its pre-welfare plantation days as a place that a modern American could scarcely believe for its starched collar civility and upward reaching intellectual energy. Nero said, “Looking at this is enough to make you cry, that this has been turned into what is there now.” The book is essentially a dedication to the educated mind of hard working black students being groomed to pull themselves up out of poverty via hard work and study.

2. Journal of the Lancaster County Historical Society, Spring 1961, which describes a battle between white Pennsylvania residents and white Maryland kidnappers raiding into Pennsylvania for black slaves in 1851.

3. The Civil War Era in Cumberland, Maryland and nearby Keyser, West Virginia, also intended to assist me in writing a novel set in that little known town, which has recently become “Harm City West,” as it is now a receptacle of federal prisoners and drug rehab patients who are building a criminal colony in the mountains of Western Maryland.

Thank you, Nero.