Some very interesting things happened that year when I started wearing my bandana. One was the strange and fascinating story about slave named Tice Davids that I kept hearing. The story was told with pride in the slave quarters but with dread in the big house. The story was that Tice Davids was a slave that had run away from his master in Kentucky. He had planned on crossing the Ohio River by Ripley and his master was close behind him. So Tice jumped into the river and started to swim. His master hunted for a boat but kept watching Tice while he swam. When his master got a boat and started to close in on him, Tice was close enough to the shore to start running. His master docked the boat and started after Tice but he was nowhere to be found. He just disappeared into thin air. His master explained this mystery by saying that he must have gone on the "Underground Railroad!"
I wondered what was the Underground Railroad. There was talk about a new steam train. Could there be one that ran underground too? I later learned that it was a secret system to help slaves run away. The runaways were called passengers. The places where they hid along the way were called stations. And the people who led them were called conductors.