I Did Not Want to Go: An Enslaved Woman's Leap into the Capital's Conscience

The woman known as Anna awakened at daybreak in November 1815 and jumped from a third floor window of a Washington, D.C., tavern. Anna's facial features in this illustration are shadowy, yet her dark, tightly curled hair and the contrast of her skin against the simple white cotton muslin dress make her racial identity unmistakable. Her anguished leap put Anna's picture and story in one of the earliest anti-slavery writings of the new United States. Indirectly, she launched court cases, started the American Colonization Society, inspired congressional speeches, permitted her tavern-prison to burn to the ground, and put her jailer out of business. Anyone who saw the awkward yet arresting illustration of the falling woman could not forget Anna—or what she represented. But all Anna understood when she scrambled over the garret window ledge was simply that she "did not want to go."

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Anna never knew what she started when she jumped out the window and survived to talk about it. She likewise did not know that many of us view the haunting image of her "frantic act" as the embodiment of the systematic destruction of enslaved families, a practice that would continue for another fifty years. Because the illustration and its accompanying narrative tap into the timeless and universal sorrow of forced separation, we find ourselves with Anna at the garret window. We imagine her anguish as everything and everyone are ripped away from her. We share the despair of a wife and mother who will not ever know what happened to her family. We open the window and feel the cold dawn air on our face, knowing that soon we are to be chained to the rest of the coffle for the long forced march south. We look at Anna's future through her eyes: a bleak chasm, filled only with endless days of unrelenting toil, abuse, and misery. We gaze down with her on the empty, cobblestoned street below. The world is motionless, silent, and indifferent. And like her, we don't want to go.