title: Flight to Ohio: From Slavery to Passing to Freedom
author: Mary Anderson Parks
description: <br />AUTHOR'S NOTE:<br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br />1836 is the year my maternal great-great grandfather arrived in southern Ohio. The 1903 Atlas of Warren County reads at page 91: Thomas Jones was born in Campbell County, Virginia, September 4, 1815 and died October 9, 1900, aged 85 years. When he was twenty-one years old he came to Ohio, a poor boy, with nothing but his hands and an honest purpose. <br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br />My mother began telling me the rumors when I was eight, rumors she mostly denied. She did admit it was true her great-grandfather Thomas Jones walked up to Ohio from Virginia with a colored woman and she didnt understand what that was all about. As a young schoolteacher in rural southern Ohio she received anonymous notes she called hate letters: We know you have colored blood. My sister, ten years older than I, later told me how distraught Mother was when she received the notes. <br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br />Several years ago, with both parents dead, I took a DNA test. I show two percent Subsaharan African and five percent East Asian blood. A slave ancestor from the West or East Indies? Am I the last of my family in whom the heritage with which I inwardly identified all my life is measurable?<br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br />Haunted by the fact I can find no history of Thomas Jones ancestors, by the rumors, by stories from my Jones cousins, but mostly by the pain I saw behind my mothers eyes, I imagined a story that became this book.<br /> (Mary Anderson Parks <i>Flight to Ohio</i>)
zlib_text: **PROLOGUE**
  
  ![](flin_0345495470_oeb_006_r1.jpg)
  
  _The north bank of the Ohio River, near Cincinnati_
  
  APRIL 22, 1824
  
  By the time they had finished making camp for the night, Sheffield Parker was
  exhausted. They'd been pushing hard for over a week, ever since they'd reached
  the boat landing at Brownsville in Cabell County and started traveling across
  country instead of continuing down the Ohio River on a flatboat. A friendly
  white riverboat man had cautioned them about it. He said they'd been safe
  enough, passing down Virginia's western counties, since there were hardly any
  slaves in the area. But from there on downriver they'd have Kentucky on the
  south bank of the Ohio, and several slave catching parties were active on or
  near the river.
  
  "We freedmen," Sheff's uncle Jem had protested.
  
  The boatman glanced at their party, which consisted of Sheff and his mother,
  his sister Dinah and his uncle Jem, and twelve other people from three
  different families. Several of them were children 