Night Coming Tenderly, Black: Untitled #24 (At Lake Erie)

For artist Dawoud Bey, “one of the persistent myths of the Underground Railroad was that it was largely a white benevolence project, when in fact it was a black self-liberation project.” That misperception motivated Bey to represent the Underground Railroad differently, culminating in a series of twenty-five photographs taken in Northeast Ohio and exhibited at St. John’s Episcopal Church (a stop on the Underground Railroad) in Cleveland in 2017. The photographs include images of documented stops, but predominantly feature anonymous fields and houses that together imagine the journey of fugitive slaves under the darkness of night. Bey envisions these photographs not just as literal representations of nighttime conditions, but also as an exploration of what photographer Roy DeCarava called “a world shaped by blackness”—by the invisibility that has defined the Black American experience.

As the penultimate photograph in the series, this image offers a peek of Lake Erie—the final obstacle en route to freedom in Canada—through foliage on shore, a liminal moment tinged by hope, anticipation, and possible unseen danger. The occluded view becomes a coda for the whole series, which embodies the notion, articulated by critic Seph Rodney, that “the act of escaping one’s enslavement is also an act of imagination.”