The Giant of Mississippi — The 7 Foot 8 Enslaved Man Who Made Masters Flee in Fear – Part 4

 One woman had cut her foot badly on a submerged branch. Josiah himself had been awake for three days straight. His massive frame running on willpower and the dried fish he’d rationed carefully. “We need to rest,” Ruth said quietly. “People can’t keep going like this.” Josiah knew she was right. He also knew that rest meant vulnerability.

But there was a decision point here. A place where pushing beyond human limits would result in people collapsing mid-flight and being left behind. He made the call. We rest for 6 hours, then we move again. They found a grove of oak trees on slightly higher ground, built a tiny fire that they surrounded with green wood to minimize smoke, and collapsed into sleep.

Josiah took first watch, his back against an oak trunk, scanning the approaches to their camp with eyes that had learned to function without adequate rest. During his watch, he thought about what came next. Even if they reached the free settlements, safety wasn’t guaranteed. Slave catchers operated in those areas, sometimes kidnapping free black people and selling them south.

The Fugitive Slave Act meant that legally every person in his group could be recaptured and returned to bondage at any moment in any state. But there were communities that protected runaways, churches that hid people, networks that moved escapes further north into territories where enslavement was prohibited and enforcement was less vigorous.

 If they could reach those networks, if they could make it to the free settlements without being caught, they had a chance. 6 hours later, they resumed walking. The landscape was changing. Less water, more solid ground, pine forests replacing cypress swamps. It was easier terrain, but also more dangerous because it was easier for pursuers to move through as well.

 On December 22nd, they encountered the first proof that other groups had been caught. They found abandoned supplies, a bundle of the dried fish Josiah had distributed, dropped, and left behind. Either someone had been running too fast to carry it, or they’d been captured, and it had been discarded by their capttors. Josiah’s group fell silent.

 The unspoken question hung in the cold air. Which group had been caught? Sarah’s Marcus’. How many people were already dead or chained? They kept moving. On December 23rd, 3 days after the escape began, Josiah’s group reached a river crossing where locals had built a crude ferry, two flatboats connected by rope, allowing farmers to move between parishes without the expense of a proper bridge.

The ferry was unmanned, but it was there, and it represented the boundary between the hunting ground and relative safety. Josiah went first, crossing alone to check the far bank. When he confirmed it was clear, he signaled for the others to follow. They crossed in two groups, the makeshift ferry creaking under their weight, but holding.

When the last person stepped onto the far bank, Josiah cut the rope connecting the flatboats, sending them drifting downstream. Another bridge burned, another barrier between them and pursuit. That night, they saw lights in the distance, a settlement, buildings that weren’t part of a plantation, the promise of warmth and food, and people who might help rather than hunt.

Ruth stood beside her brother, looking at those distant lights. “Do you think we made it?” “We’re not dead yet,” Josiah said. “That’s something.” They approached the settlement carefully, sending Thomas ahead as a scout since his smaller frame was less likely to cause alarm. He returned an hour later with news.

 The settlement was called Sant Amont, and it had a community of free people of color who ran a small church and a general store. There were white people, too. But this wasn’t plantation country. People minded their own business. And most importantly, a woman at the church said she knew people who could help travelers heading north. St.

 to Mont Louisiana in December of 1827 was a settlement of perhaps 200 people scattered along the east bank of the Amite River. It existed in the margins between the plantation economy and the free territories further north, too small to sustain large-scale agriculture, too practical to care much about other people’s business, and strategically willing to look the other way when certain travelers passed through in the night.

The woman at the church was named Celeste Brousard, a free woman of color in her 50s who’d bought her freedom 30 years earlier and had been helping runaways ever since. She took one look at Josiah, this giant standing in her doorway with seven exhausted people behind him, and her face split into a smile. “Lord have mercy,” she said.

 I heard they had a giant down at Belf Fontaine, but I thought it was just talk. It’s not talk, Josiah said quietly. Celeste brought them into the church basement, a low ceiling room that Josiah had to duck to enter, and she fed them the first hot meal they’d had in 4 days. Rice with beans and salt pork, cornbread, chory coffee sweetened with molasses.

While they ate, she asked questions. How many of you escaped total? 23. We split into three groups. Where are the others? I don’t know. We were supposed to meet up at a marker point 5 miles north of here, but I don’t know if they made it. Celeste nodded slowly. There’s been talk in the parish. Bel Fontaine’s offering $200 reward for you personally, 50 per head for the others.

He’s got patrollers out searching every settlement between here and Baton Rouge. $200 was enough to make even sympathetic people reconsider their principles. Josiah saw Ruth’s face tighten with fear. “We can move on,” Josiah said. “We won’t bring trouble here.” “You’ll move when you’re strong enough to move,” Celeste said firmly.

 “Right now, you’re all half dead from exhaustion. You rest here for 2 days. I’ll put out word for the other groups to find us if they can. Then we get you connected with people who can move you further north. Over the next 48 hours, the church basement became a temporary refuge. People slept for 12, 14, 16 hours straight. Celeste brought food and tended to injuries, cleaning wounds, providing salve for blistered feet, forcing broth down the throats of the two people who’ developed fevers.

Slowly, strength returned. On Christmas Eve, Marcus’ group arrived, seven people, exhausted but intact. They’d taken a more direct northern route and had nearly been caught twice, evading pursuit by hiding in a tobacco barn and then waiting through a creek for 2 miles to lose the dogs. Their reunion with Josiah’s group was emotional.

 Tears, embraces, confirmation that at least 16 of the original 23 were accounted for. Sarah’s group never came. On December 26th, a free black man named Augustus, who worked as a Teamster, brought news. He’d heard from a contact in Ascension Parish that seven runaways had been captured on December 21st. Three men and four women caught while trying to cross a plantation’s northern boundary.

They’d been returned to Bel Fontaine, where they were being held pending a public example. Josiah felt the news like a blow to the chest. Seven people, Sarah among them almost certainly caught and returned, facing punishments that would be designed to ensure no one else was inspired to run. What kind of example? Ruth asked quietly.

Augustus looked uncomfortable. The kind that involves public whipping, branding, and sale to buyers out of state. Bel Fontaine wants everyone to know what happens when you run. The room went silent. 16 people had made it. Seven had been caught. The mathematics of freedom were written in human cost. Josiah stood abruptly, his head brushing the ceiling beams.

I’m going back. You can’t, Celeste said immediately. Going back means dying. It means getting everyone here caught. I can’t leave them. You already did. The moment you crossed that ferry, you left them. That was the price of getting these 16 people out. You can’t save everyone. Josiah knew she was right.

 The rational part of his mind understood the mathematics, but the part of him that had taken Ruth’s whipping, that had carried her to their cabin while her blood soaked his hands, couldn’t accept leaving Sarah and the others to be brutalized as punishment for his escape. Ruth grabbed his arm. Josiah, listen to me. If you go back, you die.

 And then everything we did, everyone who got out, it means nothing. You want to honor them. You survive. You make it north. You tell the story so people know what happened here. The argument lasted an hour. In the end, pragmatism won. Josiah couldn’t save Sarah’s group without sacrificing the 16 who’d made it. The cost was too high.

The mathematics were inescapable. But he made a promise to himself that night, standing in the church basement while the others slept. Sarah and the others would be remembered. Their names would be spoken. The story of Bel Fontaine Plantation and the escape of 1827 would be told in full, including the cost.

 On December 27th, Celeste made arrangements. The 16 survivors would be split into four groups of four. moving north at intervals over the next two weeks. Each group would have a different route, different guides, different safe houses. The risk was spread. The chances of everyone making it were higher if they weren’t traveling as one conspicuous mass.

Josiah’s group left on December 28th. Celeste had found a farmer willing to transport them, hidden in a wagon filled with cotton bales. A dangerous irony that wasn’t lost on anyone. They would travel to a free settlement near the Arkansas border, where other connections would move them further north toward territories where enslavement was prohibited by law, if not always by practice.

Before they left, Celeste pulled Josiah aside. People are going to talk about you. The giant who led the escape from Bel Fontaine. The man who smashed boats and strung ropes across bayus and stood waist deep in channels holding people steady while they crossed. You’re going to become a story. I’m not a story. I’m just tall.

 You’re more than tall and you know it. You’re proof that the impossible isn’t. You remember that. And you tell people what happened here. The truth. All of it. The ones who made it. and the ones who didn’t. Josiah nodded. Then he climbed into the wagon, ducking his head to fit beneath the cotton bales, and began the next phase of a journey that would take him three more years to complete.

 The public punishment of Sarah’s group took place on January 3rd, 1828 in the yard at Bell Fontaine Plantation. Claude Bel Fontaine had invited witnesses from neighboring parishes, turning the brutality into a spectacle designed to discourage future escapes. Seven people were whipped until they could barely stand. Then they were branded on the cheek with the letter R for runaway.

Then they were sold to a trader heading to the cotton plantations of Mississippi where life expectancy for field laborers was measured in years rather than decades. Sarah died of infection from the branding within 2 weeks. The others disappeared into the machinery of enslavement. Their names lost to history except in the coded records of sales and transfers.

But the escape wasn’t forgotten. Stories spread through the enslaved communities along the Mississippi River, growing with each retelling. The giant who’ pulled cane carts became the giant who’d torn down gates with his bare hands. The man who’d strung rope across channels became the man who’d walked across water.

The careful preparation and strategic planning became miraculous intervention, divine assistance, proof that resistance was possible even against impossible odds. White Planters tried to suppress the stories, but you can’t suppress hope once it’s taken root. Belfontaine plantation saw four more escape attempts in 1828.

None successful, but all inspired by Josiah’s example. Other plantations in St. James Parish experienced similar upticks in resistance. Work slowdowns, accidents that destroyed equipment, fires of mysterious origin. Virgil Cass lost his position as overseer after the escape. He’d been responsible for security, and 16 people escaping on his watch was unforgivable.

He found work at a smaller plantation in Iberville Parish and drank himself to death by 1832. Claude Bel Fontaine never recovered financially from the loss. Between the escaped workers, the damaged sugar mill, and the $3,000 he had to refund to Samuel Hendris for failure to deliver the purchased property.

 The plantation’s profit margin collapsed. He sold Bel Fontaine in 1830 and moved to New Orleans where he died in obscurity a decade later. Samuel Hris returned to Philadelphia empty-handed and sued Belontaine for breach of contract. The case dragged through courts for 5 years before being dismissed. He never attempted to purchase another curiosity for exhibition.

 As for Josiah himself, his trail becomes harder to follow after he left St. Amont. There are fragmentary records, a bill of sale for passage on a riverboat to Cairo, Illinois, dated February 1828, listing a tall negro man among the passengers. An oral history collected in the 1930s from a woman in Indiana whose grandmother claimed to have sheltered a giant in her barn during the 1820s.

A newspaper mentioned from Detroit in 1830 describing an unusually tall black man working on the docks. The most credible account comes from a Quaker abolitionist named Benjamin Lundy who kept detailed records of the people he helped move along the Underground Railroad. In his journal from April 1831, Lundy describes meeting a man of extraordinary height at least 8 feet who’d escaped bondage in Louisiana and made his way through five states to reach Canada.

He was quiet, thoughtful, and carried with him a profound grief for those he’d left behind. When asked what he intended to do with his freedom, he said he would work to earn money to purchase the freedom of others, particularly those who’d been recaptured after his escape. I told him such redemptions were nearly impossible.

He replied that impossible only meant no one had succeeded yet. There’s no definitive record of what happened to Josiah after crossing into Canada. He disappears from the documented history, becoming instead a figure of folklore. The Louisiana giant who led his people through the swamps, who stood in the river mist, guiding others to freedom, who proved that size and strength could be weapons against a system designed to crush both.

But sometimes in the oral histories of families descended from those who escaped Bel Fontaine, you’ll find a detail that rings too specific to be pure invention. A mention of rope woven from Spanish moss. A description of someone standing waist deep in water, holding steady while others crossed.

 A name whispered with reverence. Josiah who showed us the way out. Ruth made it to Canada. She’s listed in the 1831 Census of Ontario as Ruth Freeman, Seamstress. Living in a community of formerly enslaved people who’d built a new settlement in the wilderness. She married, had children, and lived to the age of 73. In interviews late in her life, she would tell stories about her brother, careful not to reveal too much, careful to protect people still living in bondage, but always ending with the same line.

He was the gentlest person I ever knew and the strongest. Not just in body, in everything that matters. Thomas, the man who’d lost his fingers to the sugar mill, made it as far as Ohio before being recaptured in 1829. He was sold to a plantation in Alabama and died there in 1836. His death certificate lists the cause as general dabbility, the catchall term used when enslaved people simply gave up. 16 people made it to freedom.

 Seven were caught and sold away. The mathematics of the Belf Fontaine escape remained brutal. A 2:1 ratio of liberation to recapture. But in a system designed to make escape impossible, 2:1 was a miracle. The shed where Josiah slept still stood on what had been Bell Fontaine plantation land until Hurricane Betsy tore through Louisiana in 1965 and finally knocked it down.

 Local historians who’d been documenting the old sugar plantations took photographs before the demolition. The door frame had been rebuilt six times over the years, each iteration slightly taller than the last, as if the structure itself was trying to accommodate a ghost. In the 1980s, archaeologists surveying the site found iron rings welded to what had been the frame of a cane cart, the harness they’d made for Josiah.

The metal had rusted nearly through, but the rings were intact, hanging on by threads of corroded iron, too stubborn to let go entirely. And sometimes on December nights, when mist rises from the bayus and the cypress trees stand like sentinels in the darkness, locals swear they can see a tall figure moving through the water.

 Chains around his neck transformed into tools of liberation, leading a line of shadows towards something the living can’t quite see, but the dead remember perfectly. The story persists because it has to. Because 23 people decided that freedom was worth risking everything because 16 of them made it. Because seven of them didn’t.

 And someone has to remember. Subscribe if you want the next deep dive.