When I was sixteen,
I traveled from Vermont
to Schoolcraft, Michigan
with my sister and her family.
I taught youngsters
in the city’s first public school.

I met a Quaker who helped
slaves who fled from the South.
After I married Dr. Nathan Thomas
in 1840, our small white home
became a station
for the Underground Railroad.

Black women told me
that their masters abused
and raped them.
Shocked by this cruelty,
I vowed to spare no effort
to give the fugitives relief.

For twenty years,
I made beds, cooked stew,
and bandaged wounds
for fifteen hundred former slaves.
We hid them in the attic
when their white bosses came.

I told my black brothers and sisters
that they would find
safety, friends, and jobs
when they reached Canada,
migrating north
like blue herons.

My four children
hugged our fugitives
and drew them pictures
of snug cabins,
blue skies, and yellow suns,
people with smiles of welcome.

*This poem is based on Pamela Brown Thomas’s brief memoir, A Station on the Underground Railroad (1892).

Janet Ruth Heller is the past president of the Michigan College English Association and a past president of the Society for the Study of Midwestern Literature. She has a Ph.D. in English Language and Literature from the University of Chicago. She has published four poetry books: Nature’s Olympics (Wipf and Stock, 2021), Exodus (WordTech Editions, 2014), Folk Concert: Changing Times (Anaphora Literary Press, 2012), and Traffic Stop (Finishing Line Press, 2011), among others.