Answer:
I hope it’s clear by now I love facts, especially those that surprise — even shock — us out of our assumptions. Don’t get me wrong. All of us, including scholars in various fields, have so much information to assimilate on a daily basis that it is difficult to avoid shorthand in conversation. The problem arises when we simplify and thereby distort. This is especially true when it comes to the history of slavery.
Most of us know that before the American Civil War there were so-called slave states and free states. Knowing this, our minds fill in the map with logic. If such a line as “Mason-Dixon” existed (actually, there were a series of lines drawn by “compromising” Congresses throughout the first half of the 19th century), slaves must have resided below it and free black people above it, with every man, woman and child in chains trying to escape to the North just as soon as they could — following the proverbial North Star to a new life of unbounded opportunity — while those already up there remained vigilant against being kidnapped back into slavery down in the South.
Then a book comes along — a once-in-a-generation masterpiece of research and analysis — that shakes up our constellation of inherited “facts” to the point that we no longer feel comfortable assuming anything about what was so in the black past, and why it occurred. That’s exactly what the great historian Ira Berlin did in his book, Slaves Without Masters: The Free Negro in the Antebellum South (initially published in 1974, and reissued by the New Press in 2007), a book I read as a graduate student, then returned to recently, to help me understand a puzzling fact in my own family tree.