The Underground Railroad (10 page)

Cora and Caesar grew more casual about referring to Randall in public as the months passed. Much of what they said could apply to any former slave who overheard them. A plantation was a plantation; one might think one’s misfortunes distinct, but the true horror lay in their universality. In any event, the music would soon cover
their talk of the underground railroad. Cora hoped the musicians wouldn’t think them rude for their inattention. It was unlikely. Playing their music as freemen and not chattel was probably still a cherished novelty. To attack the melody without the burden of providing one of the sole comforts of their slave village. To practice their art with liberty and joy.

The proctors arranged the socials
to foster healthy relations between colored men and women, and to undo some of the damage to their personalities wrought by slavery. By their reckoning, the music and dancing, the food and punch, all unfolding on the green in the flickering lantern light, were a tonic for the battered soul. For Caesar and Cora it was one of their few opportunities to catch each other up.

Caesar worked in the
machine factory outside town and his changing schedule rarely overlapped with hers. He liked the work. Every week the factory assembled a different machine, determined by the volume of orders. The men arranged themselves before the conveyor belt and each was responsible for attaching his assigned component to the shape moving down the line. At the start of the belt there was nothing, a pile of waiting
parts, and when the last man was finished, the result lay before them, whole. It was unexpectedly fulfilling, Caesar said, to witness the complete product, in contrast to the disembodied toil on Randall.

The work was monotonous but not taxing; the changing products helped with the tedium. The lengthy rest breaks were well distributed throughout the shift, arranged according to a labor theorist
often quoted by the foremen and managers. The other men were fine fellows. Some still bore the marks of plantation behavior, eager to redress perceived slights and acting as if they still lived under the yoke of reduced resources, but these men improved every week, fortified by the possibilities of their new lives.

The former fugitives traded news. Maisie lost a tooth. This week the factory manufactured
locomotive engines—Caesar wondered whether they would one day be used by the underground railroad. The prices at the emporium had gone up again, he observed. This was not news to Cora.

“How is Sam?” Cora asked. It was easier for Caesar to meet with the station agent.

“In his usual temper—cheerful for no reason you can tell. One of the louts at the tavern gave him a black eye. He’s proud of it.
Says he’d always wanted one.”

“And the other?”

He crossed his hands on his thighs. “There’s a train in a few days. If we want to take it.” He said that last part as if he knew her attitude.

“Perhaps the next one.”

“Yes, maybe the next one.”

Three trains had passed through since the pair arrived. The first time they talked for hours over whether it was wiser to depart the dark south immediately
or see what else South Carolina had to offer. By then they had gained a few pounds, earned wages, and begun to forget the daily sting of the plantation. But there had been real debate, with Cora agitating for the train and Caesar arguing for the local potential. Sam was no help—he was fond of his birthplace and an advocate of South Carolina’s evolution on matters of race. He didn’t know how
the experiment would turn out, and he came from a long line of rabble-rousers distrustful of the government, but Sam was hopeful. They stayed. Maybe the next one.

The next one came and went with a shorter discussion. Cora had just finished a splendid meal in her dormitory. Caesar had bought a new shirt. The thought of starving again on the run was not attractive, nor was the prospect of leaving
behind the things they had purchased with their toil. The third train came and went, and now this fourth one would, too.

“Maybe we should stay for good,” Cora said.

Caesar was silent. It was a beautiful night. As he promised, the musicians were very talented and played the rags that had made everyone happy at previous socials. The fiddler came from this or that plantation, the banjo man from
another state: Every day the musicians in the dormitories shared the melodies from their regions and the body of music grew. The audience contributed dances from their own plantations and copied each other in the circles. The breeze cooled them when they broke away to rest and flirt. Then they started in again, laughing and clapping hands.

“Maybe we should stay,” Caesar repeated. It was decided.

The social ended at midnight. The musicians put out a hat for donations, but most people were deep in scrip by Saturday night so it remained empty. Cora said good night to Caesar and was on her way home when she witnessed an incident.

The woman ran through the green near the schoolhouse. She was in her twenties, of slender build, and her hair stuck up wildly. Her blouse was open to her navel,
revealing her breasts. For an instant, Cora was back on Randall and about to be educated in another atrocity.

Two men grabbed the woman and, as gently as they could, stopped her flailing. A crowd gathered. One girl went to fetch the proctors from over by the schoolhouse. Cora shouldered her way in. The woman blubbered incoherently and then said suddenly, “My babies, they’re taking away my babies!”

The onlookers sighed at the familiar refrain. They had heard it so many times in plantation life, the lament of the mother over her tormented offspring. Cora remembered Caesar’s words about the men at the factory who were haunted by the plantation, carrying it here despite the miles. It lived in them. It still lived in all of them, waiting to abuse and taunt when chance presented itself.

The
woman calmed down somewhat and was led back to the dormitory at the very rear of the line. Despite the comfort brought by their decision to stay, it was a long night for Cora as her thoughts returned to the woman’s screams, and the ghosts she called her own.

“Will I be able to say goodbye? To the Andersons and the children?” Cora asked.

Miss Lucy was sure that could be arranged. The family was fond of her, she said.

“Did I do a bad job?” Cora thought she had made a fine adjustment to the more delicate rhythms of domestic work. She ran her thumb across the pads of her fingers. They were so soft now.

“You did a splendid job, Bessie,” Miss Lucy said.
“That’s why when this new placement came up, we thought of you. It was my idea and Miss Handler seconded it. The museum needs a special kind of girl,” she said, “and not many of the residents have adapted as well as you have. You should take it as a compliment.”

Cora was reassured but lingered in the doorway.

“Anything else, Bessie?” Miss Lucy asked, squaring her papers.

Two days after the
incident at the social, Cora was still troubled. She asked after the screaming woman.

Miss Lucy nodded in sympathy. “You’re referring to Gertrude,” she said. “I know it was upsetting. She’s fine. They’re keeping her in bed for a few days until she’s herself again.” Miss Lucy explained that there was a nurse on hand checking on her. “That’s why we reserved that dormitory for residents with nervous
disorders. It doesn’t make sense for them to mix with the larger population. In number 40, they can get the care they require.”

“I didn’t know 40 was special,” Cora said. “It’s your Hob.”

“I’m sorry?” Miss Lucy asked, but Cora didn’t elaborate. “They’re only there for a short time,” the white woman added. “We’re optimistic.”

Cora didn’t know what
optimistic
meant. She asked the other girls
that night if they were familiar with the word. None of them had heard it before. She decided that it meant
trying
.

The walk to the museum was the same route she took to the Andersons’, until she turned right at the courthouse. The prospect of leaving the family made her sorrowful. She had little contact with the father, as he left the house early and his office window was one of those in the
Griffin that stayed lit the latest. Cotton had made him a slave, too. But Mrs. Anderson had been a patient employer, especially after her doctor’s prescriptions, and the children were pleasant. Maisie was ten. By that age on the Randall plantation all the joy was ground out. One day a pickaninny was happy and the next the light was gone from them; in between they had been introduced to a new reality
of bondage. Maisie was spoiled, doubtless, but there were worse things than being spoiled if you were colored. The little girl made Cora wonder what her own children might be like one day.

She’d seen the Museum of Natural Wonders many times on her strolls but never knew what the squat limestone building was for. It occupied an entire block. Statues of lions guarded the long flat steps, seeming
to gaze thirstily at the large fountain. Once Cora walked into its influence, the sound of the splashing water dampened the street noise, lifting her into the auspices of the museum.

Inside, she was taken through a door that was off-limits to the public and led into a maze of hallways. Through half-opened doors, Cora glimpsed curious activities. A man put a needle and thread to a dead badger.
Another held up yellow stones to a bright light. In a room full of long wooden tables and apparatus she saw her first microscopes. They squatted on the tables like black frogs. Then she was introduced to Mr. Field, the curator of Living History.

“You’ll do perfectly,” he said, scrutinizing her as the men in the rooms had scrutinized the projects on their worktables. His speech at all times was
quick and energetic, without a trace of the south. She later discovered that Mr. Fields had been hired from a museum in Boston to update the local practices. “Been eating better since you came, I see,” he said. “To be expected, but you’ll do fine.”

“I start cleaning in here first, Mr. Fields?” Cora had decided on the way over that in her new position she would avoid the cadences of plantation
speech the best she could.

“Cleaning? Oh, no. You know what we do here—” He stopped. “Have you been here before?” He explained the business of museums. In this one, the focus was on American history—for a young nation, there was so much to educate the public about. The untamed flora and fauna of the North American continent, the minerals and other splendors of the world beneath their feet. Some
people never left the counties where they were born, he said. Like a railroad, the museum permitted them to see the rest of the country beyond their small experience, from Florida to Maine to the western frontier. And to see its people. “People like you,” Mr. Fields said.

Cora worked in three rooms. That first day, gray drapes covered the large glass windows that separated them from the public.
The next morning the drapes were gone and the crowds arrived.

The first room was Scenes from Darkest Africa. A hut dominated the exhibit, its walls wooden poles lashed together under a peaked thatch roof. Cora retreated into its shadows when she needed a break from the faces. There was a cooking fire, the flames represented by shards of red glass; a small, roughly made bench; and assorted tools,
gourds, and shells. Three large black birds hung from the ceiling on a wire. The intended effect was that of a flock circling over the activity of the natives. They reminded Cora of the buzzards that chewed the flesh of the plantation dead when they were put on display.

The soothing blue walls of Life on the Slave Ship evoked the Atlantic sky. Here Cora stalked a section of a frigate’s deck,
around the mast, various small barrels, and coils of rope. Her African costume was a colorful wrap; her sailor outfit made her look like a street rascal, with a tunic, trousers, and leather boots. The story of the African boy went that after he came aboard, he helped out on deck with various small tasks, a kind of apprentice. Cora tucked her hair under the red cap. A statue of a sailor leaned against
the gunwale, spyglass pointed. The eyes, mouth, and skin color were painted on its wax head in disturbing hues.

Typical Day on the Plantation allowed her to sit at a spinning wheel and rest her feet, the seat as sure as her old block of sugar maple. Chickens stuffed with sawdust pecked at the ground; from time to time Cora tossed imaginary seed at them. She had numerous suspicions about the accuracy
of the African and ship scenes but was an authority in this room. She shared her critique. Mr. Fields did concede that spinning wheels were not often used outdoors, at the foot of a slave’s cabin, but countered that while authenticity was their watchword, the dimensions of the room forced certain concessions. Would that he could fit an entire field of cotton in the display and had the budget
for a dozen actors to work it. One day perhaps.

Cora’s criticism did not extend to Typical Day’s wardrobe, which was made of coarse, authentic negro cloth. She burned with shame twice a day when she stripped and got into her costume.

Mr. Fields had the budget for three actors, or types as he referred to them. Also recruited from Miss Handler’s schoolhouse, Isis and Betty were similar in age
and build to Cora. They shared costumes. On their breaks, the three discussed the merits and disadvantages of their new positions. Mr. Fields let them be, after a day or two of adjustments. Betty liked that he never showed his temper, as opposed to the family she had just worked for, who were generally nice but there was always the possibility of a misunderstanding or a bad mood that was none of her
doing. Isis enjoyed not having to speak. She hailed from a small farm where she was often left to her own devices, save on those nights when the master needed company and she was forced to drink the cup of vice. Cora missed the white stores and their abundant shelves, but she still had her evening walks home, and her game with the changing window displays.

On the other hand, ignoring the museum
visitors was a prodigious undertaking. The children banged on the glass and pointed at the types in a disrespectful fashion, startling them as they pretended to fuss with sailor’s knots. The patrons sometimes yelled things at their pantomimes, comments that the girls couldn’t make out but that gave every indication of rude suggestions. The types rotated through the exhibits every hour to ease the
monotony of pretending to swab the deck, carve hunting tools, and fondle the wooden yams. If Mr. Fields had one constant instruction, it was that they not sit so much, but he didn’t press it. They teased Skipper John, as they nicknamed the dummy sailor, from their stools as they fiddled with the hemp rope.

THE
exhibits opened the same day as the hospital, part of a celebration trumpeting the
town’s recent accomplishments. The new mayor had been elected on the progress ticket and wanted to ensure that the residents associated him with his predecessor’s forward-looking initiatives, which had been implemented while he was still a property lawyer in the Griffin Building. Cora did not attend the festivities, although she saw the glorious fireworks that night from the dormitory window and
got to see the hospital up close when her checkup came around. As the colored residents settled into South Carolina life, the doctors monitored their physical well-being with as much dedication as the proctors who took measure of their emotional adjustments. Some day, Miss Lucy told Cora one afternoon while they walked the green, all the numbers and figures and notes would make a great contribution
to their understanding of colored life.

From the front, the hospital was a smart, sprawling single-floor complex that seemed as long as the Griffin Building was tall. It was stark and unadorned in its construction in a way Cora had never seen before, as if to announce its efficiency in its very walls. The colored entrance was around the side but apart from that was identical to the white entrance,
in the original design and not an afterthought, as was so often the case.

The colored wing was having a busy morning when Cora gave her name to the receptionist. A group of men, some of whom she recognized from socials and afternoons on the green, filled the adjacent room while they waited for their blood treatments. She hadn’t heard of blood trouble before arriving in South Carolina, but it
afflicted a great number of the men in the dormitories and was the source of tremendous effort on the part of the town doctors. The specialists had their own section it seemed, the patients disappearing down a long hall when their name was called.

She saw a different physician this time, one more pleasant than Dr. Campbell. His name was Stevens. He was a northerner, with black curls that verged
on womanish, an effect he tempered with his carefully tended beard. Dr. Stevens seemed young for a doctor. Cora took his precociousness as a tribute to his talents. As she moved through the examination, Cora got the impression she was being conveyed on a belt, like one of Caesar’s products, tended down the line with care and diligence.

The physical examination was not as extensive as the first.
He consulted the records from her previous visit and added his own notes on blue paper. In between he asked her about dormitory life. “Sounds efficient,” Dr. Stevens said. He declared the museum work “an intriguing public service.”

After she dressed, Dr. Stevens pulled over a wooden stool. His manner remained light as he said, “You’ve had intimate relations. Have you considered birth control?”

He smiled. South Carolina was in the midst of a large public health program, Dr. Stevens explained, to educate folks about a new surgical technique wherein the tubes inside a woman were severed to prevent the growth of a baby. The procedure was simple, permanent, and without risk. The new hospital was specially equipped, and Dr. Stevens himself had studied under the man who pioneered the technique,
which had been perfected on the colored inmates of a Boston asylum. Teaching the surgery to local doctors and offering its gift to the colored population was part of the reason he was hired.

“What if I don’t want to?”

“The choice is yours, of course,” the doctor said. “As of this week, it is mandatory for some in the state. Colored women who have already birthed more than two children, in the
name of population control. Imbeciles and the otherwise mentally unfit, for obvious reasons. Habitual criminals. But that doesn’t apply to you, Bessie. Those are women who already have enough burdens. This is just a chance for you to take control over your own destiny.”

She wasn’t his first recalcitrant patient. Dr. Stevens put the matter aside without losing his warm demeanor. Her proctor had
more information about the program, he told Cora, and was available to talk about any concern.

She walked down the hospital corridor briskly, hungry for air. Cora had become too accustomed to escaping unscathed from encounters with white authority. The directness of his questions and his subsequent elaborations threw her. To compare what had happened the night of the smokehouse with what passed
between a man and his wife who were in love. Dr. Stevens’s speech made them the same. Her stomach twisted at the idea. Then there was the matter of
mandatory
, which sounded as if the women, these Hob women with different faces, had no say. Like they were property that the doctors could do with as they pleased. Mrs. Anderson suffered black moods. Did that make her unfit? Was her doctor offering
her the same proposal? No.

As she turned these thoughts over, she found herself in front of the Andersons’ house. Her feet took over when her mind was elsewhere. Perhaps underneath, Cora was thinking about children. Maisie would be at school, but Raymond might be home. She had been too busy the last two weeks to make a proper goodbye.

The girl who opened the door looked at Cora with suspicion,
even after she explained who she was.

“I thought her name was Bessie,” the girl said. She was skinny and small, but she held on to the door as if more than happy to throw her weight against it to keep out intruders. “You said you was Cora.”

Cora cursed the doctor’s distraction. She explained that her master named her Bessie, but in the quarter everyone called her Cora because she looked so much
like her mother.

“Mrs. Anderson is not at home,” the girl said. “And the children are playing with they friends. You best come back when she’s home.” She shut the door.