John Parker’s Double Life
Mid-1860s
It was well after midnight when John Parker crept up to the back of a slave owner’s house in Kentucky and slipped through the kitchen door. As his eyes adjusted to the gloom, he saw the light of a candle shining out from underneath a bedroom door. He cocked his head to listen for snoring. It seemed like a simple enough mission. All he needed to do was sneak undetected into that bedroom, steal an infant, and then find a way to make his exit without being detected and shot. Mindful of the squeaky floorboards, he took another carefully placed step into the room. Such rescue attempts assuaged Parker’s rage at once being enslaved himself.
John P. Parker had grown up an angry child. At eight years old, having just been separated from his mother and forced to walk from Norfolk, Virginia, to Richmond in a chain gang of slaves, his anger was directed at anything in nature that, unlike him, was free. After Richmond he was sold to a slave trader and suffered the indignity of being shackled to others in a four-hundred-slave caravan on a grueling eight-hundred-mile march to Alabama.
When John was sold, he worked as a house servant for an Alabama doctor, whose sons taught him to read. As he grew older, John Parker became a determined, hardworking, intelligent young man. He was apprenticed at a foundry and mastered iron molding. Having been unsuccessful at escaping, Parker convinced a new owner to let him work out his freedom. After a two-year period, he saved the requisite $1,800 and became free at age eighteen. In 1848 he married and settled in Ripley, Ohio, a bustling river port fifty miles east of Cincinnati. Parker could look out over the north bank of the Ohio River to the slave state of Kentucky from his front yard.
John Parker owned his home on 300 Front Street. He and his partner opened an iron foundry and blacksmith shop in Ripley, where he employed both black and white workers. He was seen as a well-regarded, upstanding citizen. During the day Parker ran his business. At night, however, he became a slave runner. Many evenings while his family slept, Parker would walk out his front door and pursue his clandestine work as an agent and conductor on the Underground Railroad.
When confronted, Parker adamantly denied aiding fugitive slaves: Such foolishness would put him and his family at risk. During one of his many forays into Kentucky, however, he noticed a poster with a thousand-dollar reward for his capture, dead or alive. Apparently regional slave catchers had their suspicions. Parker refused to be intimidated. Though of large stature, he armed himself and acquired the habit of walking down the middle of the street, day or night, so that he would not be abducted into an alley. Fear of being kidnapped was a harsh reality for free blacks—especially so for Parker, with a price on his head.
In the mid-1860s a white employee at Parker’s foundry, Jim Shroufe, baited him, challenging that if Parker was so brazen, he should prove it by stealing some of Shroufe’s father’s slaves in Kentucky. Jim Shroufe was a paid patroller one mile east of Dover, just one and a half miles west of Ripley. Parker outwardly ignored the man, but secretly took the dare.
That very night, John Parker rowed quietly across the Ohio River to Shroufe’s Kentucky home directly across from the west end of Ripley. He tied off his boat and stealthily made his way up the steep, tree-lined bank below Shroufe’s house. This first attempt, however, wasn’t meant to be. In the darkness, following a form down a dirt road, he soon saw that he was mistakenly following a white man. He feared that it might be one of Shroufe’s other sons, John, who was a slave patroller east of Dover, Kentucky, and not someone Parker wanted to run into. Parker narrowly escaped this unwanted encounter and, for the moment, aborted the rescue mission.
Three nights later, Parker was able to identify himself to one of Shroufe’s slaves and reveal his plans. The man wanted to escape but explained he had a small family and could not leave without his wife and baby. Parker knew from experience that babies were especially problematic but agreed to take them all the following week. Just as they were finalizing their plans, however, a slave patroller appeared out of nowhere and attacked Parker with a club. Parker threw dirt in his assailant’s eyes and made a run for the river, rowing home while the slave took off for his cabin. The following day at work, Jim Shroufe did not seem to have any knowledge of the incident.
The following week, John Parker rowed across the river in the dark of night, silently dipping his oars, propelling himself closer to possibly losing his own freedom. He hid the boat from the prying eyes of the patrollers and took off to find the young family.
Parker soon learned that Mr. Shroufe had been growing suspicious of his slaves’ actions. Shroufe and his wife were keeping the couple’s baby in their own bedroom at night to prevent the slave family from running away. A gun and a candle were on a chair next to their bed.
The slave mother and father told Parker about the problem and insisted they would not leave without their baby. The only solution was for Parker to sneak into the Shroufes’ bedroom and snatch the baby right out from under their noses. The slave mother, who worked in the main house, described the layout of the L-shaped, two-story brick home. Parker instructed the nervous parents to be ready to flee as soon as he returned with their baby. He removed his shoes so he could move quietly about the house and gave them to the man for safekeeping.
As Parker entered through the kitchen door at the back of the house, he saw two rooms. He let his eyes adjust to the sliver of candlelight coming from the bedroom and eased barefoot across the rough plank floorboards. Carefully, he tried the latch on the bedroom door. On his third attempt, the door creaked slowly open. It sounded very loud, but the heavy breathing inside assured him that the Shroufes were fast asleep. After surveying the room, Parker noticed that Mr. Shroufe was lying nearest the door. The candle on the chair illuminated not one but two pistols.
Parker surmised that the baby was on the woman’s side of the bed. As he lowered himself to the floor and crawled forward, the bedroom door swung shut behind him. Undaunted, he reached up for the bundle on the bed, pulling what he hoped was the baby toward him. The bed creaked loudly. Parker felt sure he had been discovered. He grabbed the baby and bolted for the door.
A chair crashed to the floor behind him, extinguishing the candle. The startled Mr. Shroufe felt around in the darkness for his weapons. Parker raced out the kitchen door, clutching the child. Together with the baby’s parents, he ran toward the river. As they ran past the slave quarters, the parents yelled that they needed to go back to their log cabin for something. Parker kept running, calling back that if they wanted to see the baby again, they had better follow him.
The couple ran after him down to the Ohio River—a distance of about a thousand feet. There was another boat at the landing, and they pushed it adrift so that it could not be used in a chase. They scrambled into Parker’s skiff as he began rowing earnestly across the Ohio River in the dark. Shroufe’s voice could be heard from the dock angrily calling after them as bullets whined over their heads.
John Parker rowed upriver instead of directly across to his house. When they landed, Parker asked for his shoes. Unbelievably, the man claimed not to have had time to go back and get them. An infuriated Parker knew that his shoes could identify him. If convicted of assisting with a slave escape, he could have all his possessions confiscated and receive a prison sentence of up to twenty years. However, he had time only to concentrate on the task at hand, which was to make this newly rescued family disappear.
Parker took the fugitives to an abolitionist lawyer friend who would forward them on. With that done, Parker then ran to his house, undressed, jumped into bed, and waited.
Before he’d hardly had time to catch his breath, there was a pounding at his front door and angry voices demanding to see him. Parker came to the bedroom window in his nightshirt, seemingly irritated to have been awoken. Jim Shroufe was surprised to see Parker at home. Still he accused him of stealing his father’s slaves, including the baby. Parker acted like Shroufe was out of his mind and purposely took his time getting dressed. He did not usually allow slave hunters to search his home, but this time he needed to give the fugitives a head start. After an exhaustive search, Jim Shroufe and his father, pistols in hand, were sorely disappointed not to find their slaves.
The next day a triumphant Jim Shroufe showed up at work carrying Parker’s shoes. Parker, fortunate to have another pair of shoes, claimed never to have seen them before. Shroufe went to every shoe merchant in town, hoping to snare Parker, but no one gave Parker up. The defeated, disgruntled employee never came back to work at Parker’s iron foundry again. He knew as well as Parker did that the man, woman, and baby were well into their 250-mile journey to Canada.
John P. Parker and his wife, Miranda, had six children. Within two generations the Parkers went from being enslaved to being college educated. Parker owned a foundry, a blacksmith shop, and a machine shop, and was one of few black men before 1900 to receive patents for his inventions (including a portable screw tobacco press and a clod-smashing machine). For nearly fifteen years he had courageously put his life on the line in the name of freedom, successfully bringing at least one thousand men, women, and children to freedom’s shore. It was his way of dealing with his “eternal hatred of the institution” of slavery. The angry little boy had grown into a man who devoted his life to liberating the oppressed and preventing the strong from destroying the weak.
Upon John Parker’s death in 1900, the Cincinnati Commercial Tribune wrote this tribute to the Ripley, Ohio, man who ran a successful business by day and operated as a conductor on the Underground Railroad at night: “A more fearless creature never lived. He gloried in danger. . . . He would go boldly over into the enemy’s camp and filch the fugitives to freedom.”