The Last Runaway

“It took discipline to quieten the mind. Honor often found a kind of peace, but the truth depth of the Inner Light, that feeling that God accompanied her, was harder to reach. She would not expect to find it in the middle of Ohio woods with an old man humming hymns beside her.”

Honor’s surprise at finding “Inner Light” in the Ohio woods indicates how deeply she has come to assume that everything will be different in America, caused by the many changes she encounters between the United States and Britain. That she can access this peace, however, suggests that, to Honor, God’s presence is universal, no matter her location.

“That was all she could take in, or knew how to take in, for she was not familiar enough with Negro features to be able to gauge and compare and describe them. She did not know if he was frightened or angry or resigned. To her he simply looked black.”

Though Honor has been raised to believe that slavery is morally wrong, her first interaction with a Black person reveals that she still holds significant racial prejudice. Though this racism is born of ignorance rather than malice and is far less violent than that of others she encounters in America (such as Donovan), she still views Black people as “other,” a framing that she does not ever fully come to understand as racist.

“[American towns] had been built quickly, and could be destroyed just as quickly, by a fire or the extreme American weather she had heard about, hurricanes and tornadoes and blizzards.”

Honor, used to England’s centuries-old buildings, equates newness with impermanence. When held against the unknown of America’s climate (both literal and political), this strikes her as indicative of danger. This is another of the many ways that Honor analyzes The Differences Between America and England. Her dissatisfaction continues to mark her early journey toward settling in Amerca.

“Funny how nobody wants to go south or east. It’s north and west that hold out some kind of promise.”

Belle’s comments about America’s promise depend on two deeply different ideologies of freedom. Journeys north represent, to enslaved people, freedom from America and its racist violence. Journeys north also represent the ideology of manifest destiny, a notion that led to much additional racist violence, particularly against various Native American tribes. Belle also offers an unintentional ironic foreshadowing to later events in the novel: Virginie and Honor will elude Donovan in the night because they are headed south, in one of these unexpected directions.

“They will not know of [Grace’s] death for six weeks at the earliest. In the meantime thee will receive letters still asking after her. Thee must be prepared for that, upsetting as it is. The gap between letters can be disturbing. Things change before those affected are fully aware.”

Adam’s comments on the disorienting effects of delayed communication contribute to Honor’s sense of feeling unmoored in America; not only is she separated from her family by distance, but she also becomes, in essence, separated from them by time, as well. The susceptibility of letters to not revealing the entire truth parallels the way that Honor often includes overstated optimism in her letters to her family and Biddy. This relationship between letters and truth are further muddled by Honor’s ability to reveal some of her dissatisfaction with her new country in her letters when she can express these feelings nowhere else.

“Of course it should not matter what she wore, as long as it was clean and modest. She should not care. But Honor did care about that inner rim of pale yellow, its reflection lifting her face from the gray of the rest of the bonnet.”

Despite her commitment to many of the values held by the Society of Friends, Honor occasionally struggles to adhere to all the constraints of modesty placed on Quakers. The novel does not necessarily present this as a moral failing of Honor’s, but rather as a sign that, despite their commitment to principles, Quakers are susceptible to human foibles—a susceptibility that will become far more damaging in the context of the Haymakers’ self-preservation.

“Negroes had reason to be wary of whites, where one family could produce two people as different as Donovan and Belle Mills. But as she watched the women so clearly at ease, where they hadn’t been in Cox’s Dry Goods, she felt a pang. I am excluded even from the excluded, she thought.”

Honor here recognizes the racial prejudice that faces even free Black people who live in Oberlin. She continues to show the limits of her perspective, however, turning her moment of recognition of racist injustice into a moment of personal suffering over her lack of close friends or family in Ohio.

“If women were meant to look like doves these days, Belle resembled a buzzard.”

Honor’s note of the ways that Belle fails to adhere to normative beauty standards for women is admiring despite the unflattering comparison. To Honor, Belle’s sharp angles and hard expression denote the toughness that she envies and admires in her friend.

“‘We do not celebrate the Fourth,’ Adam replied.

‘Really? What, Quakers don’t like to have fun?’

‘We do not wish to celebrate a document that does not include all men as citizens of America.’

‘We went to Oberlin to listen to speeches opposing slavery,’ Honor added.

‘Of course you did. I should’ve guessed Quakers would be more entertained listening to abolitionist than shootin’ guns in the air. Me, I like the guns.’”

Though the rejection of the Fourth of July was a common principle of many abolitionists (as reflected in Frederick Douglass’s speech “What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?”), Belle’s casual claim that she “like[s] the guns” draws upon the novel’s focus on Having Principles Versus Taking Action. Belle, unlike any of the Faithwell Quakers, ultimately puts her own life on the line to help Mrs. Reed escape recapture, while her use of a gun to do so (by killing her brother, Donovan) lends a grim foreshadowing to this conversation.

“What made [Jack] most attractive was that he was attracted to her.”

Honor’s initial interest in Jack introduces the ambivalence for her husband that will characterize their marriage. This leads to struggles when Jack is pulled between Honor’s desire and those of his mother; when her husband does not take her side, Honor cannot access the connection that led her to accept his courtship in the first place.

“As Honor reached for her shawl—redundant in the heat, but a woman always carried one—hanging on a peg on the wall behind her, she glanced down at his ledger.”

The novel regularly discusses Quakers’ preference for simple, modest, and practical clothing. Despite this, Honor’s ingrained selection of a shawl despite the heat indicates that impractical matters of decorum and proper womanliness are nevertheless present in Quaker culture.

“It was very different from Dorset farms, which, being older, had sunk into their natural surroundings, while Ohio farm had been boldly hacked out and stood perched on the surface of the landscape.”

Honor here characterizes time and human inhabitation as something that affects the very landscape of a place. This contributes to Honor’s sense that England is permanent and thus untouched by the political upheaval of the antebellum United States. The novel does not offer a strong rebuttal of this viewpoint, though Honor’s decision to remain in America gives her little chance to reexamine her homeland.

“She should despise [Donovan] for what he did for a living. But she did not. There is a measure of Light in him, she thought, if only I can find it.”

Honor’s confidence in Donovan’s potential goodness is given little logical support in the novel. Characters framed as having moral authority (such as Belle and Mrs. Reed) indeed oppose Honor’s perspective on Donovan’s possibility for redemption. Though Donovan ultimately does not repent for his role in upholding the evils of slavery, Honor’s confidence is framed as the one thing in the novel that puts such a reversal even within his reach, however temporary this proves to be.

“Each time Honor’s life changed, she found she missed what she’d had before: first Bridport, then Belle Mills’s Millinery, now Cox’s Dry Goods.”

Honor here shows a moment of clarity regarding her persistent discontentedness with her circumstances. Though she will continue to struggle with accepting movement forward instead of looking backward, this revelation helps galvanize her into the actions (like her silence and running away) that will eventually teach her to look toward her optimistic future in the West with Jack.

“She had always loved fabric, admiring the weaves and patterns and textures, imagining what she could make. A length of new cloth always held possibilities. Now, though, she understood that much of it was not innocent, unsullied material, but the result of a compromised world. To find fabric without the taint of slavery in it was difficult, as Jack had said; yet if she refused all cotton, she would have to wear only wool in the intense Ohio heat, or go naked.”

Honor’s increased understanding of fabric as not entirely new, but rather as having far-reaching physical origins and political resonances, emphasizes the novel’s focus on the far-flung effects of slavery. The novel thus argues that though distance from places where slavery is legal may diminish the visibility of slavery (in Ohio, Honor sees only those who have escaped or are escaping slavery; in England, she did not see any Black people at all), an economically interconnected world means that there is no escaping the effects of enslaved labor. The novel thus implies that all who permit slavery to continue to exist without fighting against it are complicit in its continuation.

“But since she had come to America, Honor was finding it harder and harder not to lie and conceal.”

Even though Honor learns that physical distance from enslaved people does not mean that her life has not encountered the effects of slavery, her proximity to slavery leads her to realize that her morals fall in conflict with one another. Though Honor dislikes lying, for example, as it opposes the values of Quakers, she recognizes that lying is a lesser evil than allowing someone to be remanded into slavery.

“‘You ever want to give it up and come with me, I’d stop what I was doin’. I could do somethin’ else. Work the railroad, maybe.’ [Donovan’s] words were halting, as if he were embarrassed to say them.”

Donovan’s offer to cease hunting enslaved people for Honor offers a small piece of optimism for his potential redemption. His framing that Honor must choose him before he changes his life, however, underscores his ambivalence toward the morals of ceasing this work. Donovan’s racism (and violent jealousy) ultimately proves greater than his potential willingness to cease his pro-slavery work.

“She had never been in a Negro’s house before and did not know what to expect.”

Despite her growing relationship with Mrs. Reed, Honor’s observation reveals the racist ideologies that she continues to hold. She insists on seeing Black people as a monolith, indicating her inability to see them as equally complex and heterogeneous like her own Quaker community (or like white groups more broadly). Her ability to both hold this opinion and believe so firmly in aiding abolitionist efforts indicates the novel’s insistence on the pervasiveness of racist ideologies in the antebellum era.

“‘Honor, you know I’ll turn him in. That’s what I do.’

Honor sighed. ‘I know. But he will die otherwise. It is better that he lives, even in slavery.’”

Earlier in the novel, when Jack argues for colonization, Honor wonders if he has ever asked a Black person their opinion on colonization. When she asks Mrs. Reed about this topic, Mrs. Reed scoffs that this is an absurd idea held by white people exclusively. Here, however, when Honor is the one with the idea about what a Black person wants (to live enslaved rather than die having escaped enslavement), she is certain of her own logic. As the man has already died, she has no opportunity to be proven either right or wrong.

“I cannot bear this any longer, Honor thought. Nothing I say will make any difference to what people think. My words mean nothing to them.”

After months of not speaking, Honor realizes that there are limits both to words and to the refusal to speak words, addressing The Power of Silence. She thus turns to action to demonstrate her frustration with her inefficacy in her own life and marriage; she runs away with Virginie, electing for the first time to forge her own path instead of attaching her future to someone else’s.

“‘Nature ain’t out to enslave me. Might kill me, with the cold or illness or bears, but that ain’t likely. No it’s that’—she pointed toward the road—‘that’s the danger. People’s the danger.’”

Virginie’s lack of fear of the dangers of the natural world at night shows that the ambivalence of nature is less frightening for someone who has faced the indescribable evil of chattel slavery than it is for Honor, who only knows about slavery as a theoretical institution. Her comment that though nature might kill her, this is a less frightening prospect than enslavement, suggests that Honor’s earlier argument (that the Black man in the woods would be better off alive and enslaved than dead) is not necessarily correct.

“Perhaps, Honor thought one day, it is not that Americans are so wedded to individual expression, but that we British are too judgmental.”

The birth of her American daughter offers Honor a more generous look at The Differences Between America and England. That this thought arises from her recognition that rocking chairs are helpful to her personally indicates the ways in which Honor is still trapped inside her own perspective, a limitation that follows her throughout the novel.

“I think deep down, most southerners have always known slavery ain’t right, but they build up layers of ideas to justify what they were doin’. Those layers just solidified over the years. Hard to break out of that thinking, to find the guts to say ‘This is wrong.’”

Belle here rejects the logic, espoused by many pro-slavery parties in the antebellum era, that Southerners do not recognize anything immoral in slavery. As the white character who sacrifices the most for abolitionist efforts (and as a woman originally born in Kentucky, where slavery was legal), the novel frames Belle as the authority on this opinion, offering a condemnation against those who asserted that they did not know of slavery’s evil.