The Underground Railroad (3 page)

The dog poked his head out of the door as if it knew it had been her land and wanted to signal his indifference.

Blake stepped out of the cabin and crossed his arms. He spat.

People moved in the corners
of Cora’s vision: shadows of gossips and scolds. Watching her. Her mother was gone. She’d been moved into the wretch house and no one had come to her aid. Now this man three times her size, a bruiser, had taken her stake.

Cora had been mulling strategy. In later years she could have turned to the Hob women, or Lovey, but this was then. Her grandmother had warned that she would knock open the
head of anyone who messed with her land. That seemed out of proportion to Cora. In a spell, she walked back to Hob and plucked a hatchet off the wall, the hatchet she stared at when she could not sleep. Left by one of the previous residents who came to one bad end or another, lung sickness or peeled open by a whip or shitting their insides out on the floor.

By now word had spread and bystanders
lingered outside the cabins, heads tilted in anticipation. Cora marched past them, bent as if burrowing her body into a gale. No one moved to stop her, so strange was this display. Her first blow brought down the roof of the doghouse, and a squeal from the dog, who had just had his tail half severed. He scrambled to a hidey-hole beneath his owner’s cabin. Her second blow wounded the left side of
the doghouse gravely and her last put it out of its misery.

She stood there, heaving. Both hands on the hatchet. The hatchet wavered in the air, in a tug-of-war with a ghost, but the girl did not falter.

Blake made fists and stepped toward Cora. His boys behind him, tensing. Then he stopped. What happened between those two figures in that moment—the burly young man and the slender girl in white
shift—became a matter of vantage. To those watching by the first line of cabins Blake’s face distorted in surprise and worry, that of a man stumbling into a kingdom of hornets. Those standing by the new cabins saw Cora’s eyes dart to and fro, as if she took the measure of an advancing host, not just one man. An army she was nonetheless prepared to meet. Regardless of perspective, what was important
was the message imparted by one through posture and expression and interpreted by the other: You may get the better of me, but it will cost you.

They stood a few moments until Alice sounded the bell for breakfast. Nobody was going to forgo their mash. When they came in from the fields, Cora cleaned up the mess that had been made of her plot. She rolled over the block of sugar maple, a castoff
from someone’s construction project, and it became her perch whenever she had a spare moment.

If Cora didn’t belong in Hob before Ava’s maneuvering, she did now. Its most infamous occupant, and the most long-term. Eventually the work broke the crippled—it always did—and those in a state of unreason were sold off cheap or took a knife to their own throats. Vacancies were brief. Cora remained.
Hob was her home.

She used the doghouse for firewood. It kept her and the rest of Hob warm one night, but its legend marked her for the rest of her time on the Randall plantation. Blake and his friends started telling tales. Blake recounted how he woke from a nap behind the stables to find Cora standing over him with her hatchet, blubbering. He was a natural mimic and his gestures sold the story.
Once Cora’s chest started to sprout, Edward, the most wicked of Blake’s gang, bragged of how Cora flapped her dress at him while she made lascivious suggestions and threatened to scalp him when he refused her. Young women whispered how they watched her slink away from the cabins on the full moon, to the woods, where she fornicated with donkeys and goats. Those who found this last story less than
credible nonetheless recognized the usefulness of keeping the strange girl outside the circle of respectability.

Not long after it became known that Cora’s womanhood had come into flower, Edward, Pot, and two hands from the southern half dragged her behind the smokehouse. If anyone heard or saw, they did not intervene. The Hob women sewed her up. Blake was gone by then. Perhaps having looked
into her face that day, he had counseled his companions against revenge: It will cost you. But he was gone. He ran off three years after she busted up the doghouse, hiding in the swamp for weeks. It was his mutt’s barking that gave away his location to the patrollers. Cora would have said it served him right, had his punishment not made her shiver to think about.

They had already dragged the big table from the kitchen and covered it with food for Jockey’s celebration. At one end a trapper skinned his raccoons and at the other Florence scraped dirt from a mound of sweet potatoes. The fire under the big cauldron cracked and whistled. The soup roiled within the black pot, bits of cabbage chasing around the hog’s head that bobbed up and down, the eye roving
in the gray foam. Little Chester ran up and tried to grab a handful of cowpeas, but Alice swatted him away with her ladle.

“Nothing today, Cora?” Alice said.

“Too early,” Cora said.

Alice made a brief show of disappointment and returned to supper.

That’s what a lie looks like, Cora thought, and marked it. It was just as well her garden had refused. On Jockey’s last birthday she had donated
two heads of cabbage, which were graciously received. Cora made the mistake of turning back as she departed the kitchen and caught Alice tossing the heads into the slop bucket. She staggered into the sunlight. Did the woman think her food tainted? Is that how Alice had got rid of everything Cora had contributed these past five years, treated every turnip knob and bunch of sour greens? Had it started
with Cora, or Mabel, or her grandmother? There was no point in confronting the woman. Alice had been beloved of Randall, and now James Randall, who had grown tall on her mincemeat pies. There was an order of misery, misery tucked inside miseries, and you were meant to keep track.

The Randall brothers. Since he was a young boy, James could be placated by a treat from Alice’s kitchen, the sugar
apple that cut short a fit or tantrum. His younger brother, Terrance, was a different sort. The cook still had a knot next to her ear where Master Terrance expressed his displeasure over one of her broths. He had been ten years old. The signs had been there since he could walk, and he perfected the more distasteful aspects of his personality as he lurched into manhood and assumed his responsibilities.
James had a nautilus disposition, burrowing into his private appetites, but Terrance inflicted every fleeting and deep-seated fancy on all in his power. As was his right.

Around Cora, pots clanged and pickaninnies squealed over the delights to come. From the southern half: nothing. The Randall brothers had flipped a coin years ago to determine stewardship of each half of the plantation and in
doing so made this day possible. Feasts like this didn’t happen in Terrance’s domain, for the younger brother was stingy with slave amusements. The Randall sons managed their inheritances according to their temperaments. James contented himself with the security of a fashionable crop, the slow, inevitable accumulations of his estate. Land and niggers to tend it were a surety beyond what any bank
could offer. Terrance took a more active hand, ever scheming for ways to increase the loads sent to New Orleans. He wrung out every possible dollar. When black blood was money, the savvy businessman knew to open the vein.

The boy Chester and his friends grabbed Cora, startling her. But it was only children. Time for the races. Cora always arranged the children at the starting line, aiming their
feet, calming the skittish ones, and graduating some to the older kids’ race if need be. This year she kicked up Chester one slot. He was a stray, like her, his parents sold off before he could walk. Cora looked after him. Burr-headed and red-eyed. He’d shot up the last six months, the rows triggering something in his lithe body. Connelly said he had the makings of a top picker, a rare compliment
from him.

“You run fast,” Cora said.

He crossed his arms and cocked his head: You don’t need to tell me anything. Chester was half a man, even if he didn’t know it. He wouldn’t race next year, Cora saw, but loll at the sidelines, joking with his friends, devising mischief.

The young slaves and the old slaves gathered on the sidelines of the horse path. Women who had lost their children drifted
over little by little, to mortify themselves with possibilities and never-would-bes. Huddles of men swapped cider jugs and felt their humiliations slip away. Hob women rarely participated in the feasts, but Nag hustled about in her helpful way, rounding up little ones from their distractions.

Lovey stood at the finish as the judge. Everyone but the children knew that she always proclaimed her
darlings the winner, when she could get away with it. Jockey also presided at the finish, in his rickety maple armchair, the one he used to watch the stars most nights. On his birthdays he dragged it up and down the alley, to give proper attention to the amusements held in his name. The runners went to Jockey after they were done with their races, and he dropped a piece of ginger cake onto their
palms, no matter what they placed.

Chester panted, hands on his knees. He had flagged at the end.

“Almost had it,” Cora said.

The boy said, “Almost,” and went for his piece of ginger cake.

Cora patted the old man’s arm after the last race. You never could tell how much he saw with those milky eyes of his. “How old are you, Jockey?”

“Oh, let me see.” He drifted off.

She was sure he had claimed
a hundred and one years at his last party. He was only half that, which meant he was the oldest slave anyone on the two Randall plantations had ever met. Once you got that old, you might as well be ninety-eight or a hundred and eight. Nothing left for the world to show you but the latest incarnations of cruelty.

Sixteen or seventeen. That’s where Cora put her age. One year since Connelly ordered
her to take a husband. Two years since Pot and his friends had seasoned her. They had not repeated their violation, and no worthy man paid her notice after that day, given the cabin she called home and the stories of her lunacy. Six years since her mother left.

Jockey had a good birthday plan, Cora thought. Jockey awoke on a surprise Sunday to announce his celebration and that was that. Sometimes
it was in the midst of the spring rains, other times after harvest. He skipped some years or forgot or decided according to some personal accounting of grievance that the plantation was undeserving. No one minded his caprices. It was enough that he was the oldest colored man they had ever met, that he had survived every torment big and small white men had concocted and implemented. His eyes were
clouded, his leg lame, his ruined hand permanently curled as if still clenched around a spade, but he was alive.

The white men left him alone now. Old man Randall said nothing about his birthdays, and neither did James when he took over. Connelly, the overseer, made himself scarce every Sunday, when he summoned whatever slave gal he’d made his wife that month. The white men were silent. As if
they’d given up or decided that a small freedom was the worst punishment of all, presenting the bounty of true freedom into painful relief.

One day Jockey was bound to choose the correct day of his birth. If he lived long enough. If that was true, then if Cora picked a day for her birthday every now and then she might hit upon hers as well. In fact, today might be her birthday. What did you get
for that, for knowing the day you were born into the white man’s world? It didn’t seem like the thing to remember. More like to forget.

“Cora.”

Most of the northern half had moved to the kitchen to get fed but Caesar dallied. Here he was. She’d never had occasion to speak to the man since he arrived at the plantation. New slaves were quickly warned against the Hob women. It saved time.

“Can
I talk with you?” he asked.

James Randall had bought him and three other slaves from a traveling agent after the fever deaths a year and a half ago. Two women to work the laundry, and Caesar and Prince to join the field gangs. She had seen him whittling, worrying blocks of pine with his curved carving knives. He didn’t mix with the more bothersome element on the plantation, and she knew that
he sometimes went off with Frances, one of the housemaids. Were they still laying together? Lovey would know. She was a girl, but Lovey kept track of man-and-woman business, the impending arrangements.

Cora felt proper. “What can I do for you, Caesar?”

He didn’t bother to see if anyone was in earshot. He knew there was no one because he had planned. “I’m going back north,” he said. “Soon. Running
away. I want you to come.”

Cora tried to think of who put him up to this prank. “You going north and I’m going to eat,” she said.

Caesar held her arm, gently and insistent. His body was lean and strong, like any field hand his age, but he carried his strength lightly. His face was round, with a flat button nose—she had a quick memory of dimples when he laughed. Why had she kept that in her head?

“I don’t want you to tell on me,” he said. “Have to trust you on that. But I’m going soon, and I want you. For good luck.”

Then she understood him. It was not a trick being played on her. It was a trick he was playing on himself. The boy was simple. The smell of the raccoon meat brought her back to the celebration and she pulled her arm away. “I ain’t trying to get killed by Connelly, or patrollers,
or snakes.”

Cora was still squinting over his idiocy when she got her first bowl of the soup. White man trying to kill you slow every day, and sometimes trying to kill you fast. Why make it easy for him? That was one kind of work you could say no to.

She found Lovey, but did not ask her what the girls whispered about Caesar and Frances. If he was serious about his plan, Frances was a widow.

It was the most any young man had talked to her since she moved to Hob.

They lit the torches for the wrestling matches. Someone had unearthed a stash of corn whiskey and cider, which circulated in due course and fed the spectators’ enthusiasm. By now, the husbands who lived on other plantations had come for their Sunday-night visits. Walking miles, time enough to fantasize. Some wives were happier
at the prospect of marital relations than others.

Lovey giggled. “I’d wrestle with him,” she said, nodding at Major.

Major looked up as if he heard her. He was turning out to be a prime buck. Worked hard and rarely forced the bosses to raise the whip. He was respectful to Lovey because of her age and it wouldn’t surprise if Connelly arranged a match one day. The young man and his opponent twisted
in the grass. Take it out on each other if you cannot take it out on the ones who deserve it. The children peeked between their elders, making bets they had nothing to back up with. They pulled weeds and worked in trash gangs now, but one day the field work would make them as big as the men grappling and pinning each other to the grass. Get him, get that boy, teach him what he needs to learn.

When the music started and the dancing commenced, they appreciated the extent of their gratitude for Jockey. Once again he picked the right day for a birthday. He had been attuned to a shared tension, a communal apprehension beyond the routine facts of their bondage. It had built up. The last few hours had dispelled much of the ill feeling. They could face the morning toil and the following mornings
and the long days with their spirits replenished, however meagerly, by a fond night to look back on and the next birthday feast to look forward to. By making a circle of themselves that separated the human spirits within from the degradation without.

Noble picked up a tambourine and tapped it. He was a fast picker in the rows and a joyful instigator outside of them; he brought both kinds of dexterity
to this night. Clap hands, crook elbows, shake hips. There are instruments and human players but sometimes a fiddle or a drum makes instruments of those who play them, and all are put in servitude to the song. So it was when George and Wesley picked up their fiddle and banjo on days of carousing. Jockey sat in his maple chair, tapping his bare feet on the dirt. The slaves moved forward and
danced.

Cora did not move. She was wary of how sometimes when the music tugged, you might suddenly be next to a man and you didn’t know what he might do. All the bodies in motion, given license. To pull on you, take both of your hands, even if they were doing it with a nice thought. One time on Jockey’s birthday, Wesley treated them to a song he knew from his days up north, a new sound none of
them had heard before. Cora had dared to step out among the dancers and close her eyes and twirl and when she opened them Edward was there, his eyes alight. Even with Edward and Pot dead—Edward strung up after shorting the scale by loading his sack with stones and Pot in the ground after a rat bite turned him black and purple—she shrank from the idea of loosening her leash on herself. George sawed
with his fiddle, the notes swirling up into night like sparks gusted from a fire. No one approached to pull her into the lively madness.

THE
music stopped. The circle broke. Sometimes a slave will be lost in a brief eddy of liberation. In the sway of a sudden reverie among the furrows or while untangling the mysteries of an early-morning dream. In the middle of a song on a warm Sunday night.
Then it comes, always—the overseer’s cry, the call to work, the shadow of the master, the reminder that she is only a human being for a tiny moment across the eternity of her servitude.

The Randall brothers had emerged from the great house and were among them.

The slaves stepped aside, making calculations of what distance represented the right proportion of fear and respect. Godfrey, James’s
houseboy, held up a lantern. According to Old Abraham, James favored the mother, stout as a barrel and just as firm in countenance, and Terrance took after the father, tall and owl-faced, perpetually on the verge of swooping down on prey. In addition to the land, they inherited their father’s tailor, who arrived once a month in his rickety carriage with his samples of linen and cotton. The brothers
dressed alike when they were children and continued to do so in manhood. Their white trousers and shirts were as clean as the laundry girls’ hands could make them, and the orange glow made the men look like ghosts emerging from the dark.

“Master James,” Jockey said. His good hand gripped the arm of his chair as if to rise, but he did not stir. “Master Terrance.”

“Don’t let us disturb you,” Terrance
said. “My brother and I were discussing business and heard the music. I told him, Now that is the most god-awful racket I’d ever heard.”