THE February issue of Sky & Telescope magazine offered a fascinating bit of folklore to coincide with Black History Month.
Writer Gloria D. Rall analyzed the lyrics of the traditional Negro spiritual, "Follow the Drinking Gourd," to show that "in pre-Civil War America, escaping slaves learned elementary astronomy, journeyed toward the Big Dipper and made their way to freedom."
Ms. Rall writes that the true meaning of the song was not discovered until 1918, because the slaves were taught from childhood to carefully conceal their knowledge of observational astronomy.
The words of the song's first stanza are as follows:
When the Sun comes back
And the first quail calls
Follow the Drinking Gourd
For the old man is a-waiting for to carry
you to freedom
If you follow the Drinking Gourd
The "Drinking Gourd" is masked language for the Big Dipper, Ms. Rall writes. "The song uses the Gourd rather than Polaris [the North Star] because the briefest allusion to the Gourd was a sufficient reminder of what to look for, and slaves would not have created a song that openly named the Little or Big Dippers.
"The song instructs slaves to begin the trip north in winter. 'When the Sun comes back' refers to the months after the December solstice, when the Sun begins to climb higher into the northern sky. The calls of migratory quail, wintering in the southern U.S., would have been heard during this season."
Ms. Rall also identified the "old man" in the verse as an itinerant carpenter named Peg Leg Joe, a "conductor" on the Underground Railroad who helped thousands of slaves escape North in the decades prior to the Civil War.