His final flight, from Mobile to the Union ships anchored offshore, caps his thrilling tale. After nonchalantly walking straight through a Confederate camp and wading barefoot through snake-infested swamps, he reaches an impasse, with Confederate pickets behind him and a broad expanse of water ahead of him.
"It was death to go back and it was death to stay there and freedom was before me," he writes. He pressed forward and, by luck, found a rickety little boat on the shore.
"I Now dreaded the gun, and handcuffs and pistols no more," he writes of his moment of deliverance, when Yankee sailors plucked him from Mobile Bay. "Nor the blewing of horns and the running of hounds; nor the threats of death from the rebel's authority. I could now speak my opinion to men of all grades and colors, and no one to question my right to speak."
Washington made his way to Washington, where he and his wife, whom he took from Fredericksburg, rose to middle-class prosperity. He died in 1918.
Turnage worked, at various times, as a janitor, sign painter, watchman and glass blower in New York. Eventually he moved to Jersey City, New Jersey, where he died in 1916.
By that time, slavery and the war were distant memories. In their all-too-brief narratives, Washington and Turnage, as Blight notes, offer a precious commodity: "unfiltered access to the process and the moment of emancipation."
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