A gunshot echoed over starlit forest near the town of Marine on St. Croix, Minnesota. It was late October, already frigid, and chasers had pushed our group of ten fugitives to the edge of a lake. For a moment, we’d hesitated, shouts drawing closer as the black water winked, but the shot drove us all straight in. My legs went numb; Elyse, a high-school sophomore, exclaimed, “My God! ” Submerged to the waist, I waded through marsh grass and lamplight toward our conductor, who silently indicated the opposite bank. The Drinking Gourd shone overhead with exaggerated clarity. This was my third Underground Railroad Reënactment.
An hour had elapsed by the time we crossed the lake: seven teens, two elementary-school teachers, one “abolitionist,” and me. I had no idea where we were, only that it was about two hundred miles from Canada, where Justin Trudeau had just won reëlection after a blackface scandal, and forty from the waters of Lake Minnetonka, in which Prince orders Apollonia to “purify” herself in “Purple Rain.” As we stepped ashore, I thought of my enslaved forebears, wondering what they might make of our strange tribute.
“That’s what you’re concerned about, your ChapStick?” Elyse chided Max, a blond boy in a blue hat and checkered Vans. His lip balm was ruined—as was my notebook—but the baby doll he’d sworn to carry North was dry. (Elyse dubbed him Mother Max.) The whispers stopped with the arrival of our conductor, who led us on a rough path uphill. I was still smarting from a branch to the forehead when he stopped to deliver the night’s sixth lecture: “My name is Henry David Thoreau. This is Walden Pond.”
For more than three decades, students have reënacted escapes on the Underground Railroad at schools, camps, churches, museums, and juvenile-correction centers across the United States. Millions have undergone an experience that can range from a board game to an immersive nightlong ordeal, complete with horseback-riding paddy rollers and an armed Harriet Tubman. One group’s living-history lesson is another’s exercise in leadership training, anti-racist therapy, or even behavioral reform. Many believe that Underground Railroad Reënactments, or U.G.R.R.s, have the power to morally transform American youth.
You might call it the fugitive cure. Though it’s left an impression on everyone from Lena Dunham to Disney’s former chairman Michael Eisner, the U.G.R.R. began in Minnesota, with a small organization currently known as the Kambui Education Initiative. Last fall, I flew to Minneapolis for the group’s final reënactment of the year. It took place at Wilder Forest, a thousand-acre recreation area now home to the charter school River Grove. A forty-minute drive from the city, past horse farms and slivers of lake, it’s rustic enough to pass for the nineteenth century, when St. Paul’s real Underground Railroad spirited the captives of summering slaveholders through woods not far from these.