Forbidden Fruit by Betty DeRamus

identified with the Blackburns on a level
     almost too deep for words, realizing they, too, could easily wind up in jail or on
     a South-bound ship. Detroit was free territory, but the number of advertisements for
     fugitive slaves in the Detroit Gazette had climbed during the early 1820s, a constant reminder of the fate that might await
     fugitives. Also, in April 1827, a law to regulate blacks and mulattos and to punish
     persons who kidnapped them had been enacted. Under this law, every black or mulatto
     who came into the territory after January 1, 1828, was supposed to post a bond with
     the clerk of the county court for five hundred dollars. Few, if any, blacks posted
     this bond, but the law made it possible to force out of the territory any black person
     considered undesirable. No wonder a steady and angry hum of protests rose from the
     section of the courtroom occupied by blacks during the Blackburn hearings.
    On the evening of June 15, 1833, several black Detroiters decided to take matters
     into their own hands. They met at the home of Benjamin Willoughby, a real estate speculator,
     financier and owner of a lumber business, who probably came to Detroit from Kentucky
     between 1817 and 1830. He had worked as a laborer and acquired some money, often lending
     it to others. At his home, participants hatched a plot to free the Blackburns; the
     plan put Willoughby’s own property and even life at risk.
    Sheriff Wilson allowed Mrs. Caroline French and Mrs. Tabitha Lightfoot into the jail
     to visit Rutha Blackburn. The trio remained together until near dusk. Caroline French
     was the wife of George French, and Tabitha Lightfoot was married to Madison Lightfoot:
     both men were either porters or waiters at Detroit’s Steamboat Hotel at the corner
     of Randolph and Woodbridge streets near the Detroit River. The men held positions
     that gave them access to the city’s power brokers. Madison Lightfoot had married Tabitha
     Smith at St. Paul’s Protestant Episcopal Church in 1831, the same year that the Blackburns
     arrived in Detroit. Caroline French had powerful connections as well. Her father was
     Cornelius Leonard Lenox, who had come to Detroit from Newton, Massachusetts, with
     Governor William Hull and bought a farm from the family of John Askin, an English
     loyalist who made a fortune that he partly abandoned when he moved to Canada and began
     living on the banks of the Detroit River. According to historian Arthur LaBrew, Caroline
     French also was the cousin of Boston activist Charles Lenox Remond, the first African-American
     to appear as a regular lecturer for the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society and the
     man who, in 1842, appeared before the legislative committee of the Massachusetts House
     of Representatives to support people protesting segregation in travel accommodations.
     By the following year, the segregation had stopped. With all this history sitting
     on her shoulders, Caroline French was prepared to become the city’s first black heroine.
     She changed clothes with Rutha Blackburn, who walked out of the jail with Tabitha
     Lightfoot. The three women wept as they parted. Friends then whisked the disguised
     Rutha Blackburn across the Detroit River to Canada.
    While taking breakfast to the prisoners, the deputy sheriff discovered the switch.
     He rushed over to the Steamboat Hotel to inform George French and Madison Lightfoot
     of the trick their wives had played. They were “a parcel of hell cats,” the deputy
     sheriff said. The two men denied knowing anything about it. When Sheriff Wilson heard
     about Rutha Blackburn’s escape, he threatened to send Caroline French to Kentucky
     as a substitute. It was no empty threat.
    People in Louisville would have crowded the public square for a chance to watch Mrs.
     French sold as Rutha’s stand-in. Had such a sale taken place, it might have resembled
     a nineteenth-century lynching with thousands of spectators yelling for blood or at
     least