The Underground Railroad (11 page)

For once, Cora took the shortcut home. Talking to Caesar would have helped, but he was at the factory. She lay in her bed until supper. From that day on, she took a route to the museum that avoided the Anderson home.

Two weeks
later Mr. Fields decided to give his types a proper tour of the museum. Isis and Betty’s time behind the glass had improved their acting skills. The duo affected a plausible interest as Mr. Fields held forth on the cross-sections of pumpkins and the life rings of venerable white oaks, the cracked-open geodes with their purple crystals like glass teeth, the tiny beetles and ants the scientists had
preserved with a special compound. The girls chuckled at the stuffed wolverine’s frozen smile, the red-tailed hawk caught mid-dive, and the lumbering black bear that charged the window. Predators captured in the moment they went in for the kill.

Cora stared at the wax faces of the white people. Mr. Fields’s types were the only living exhibits. The whites were made of plaster, wire, and paint.
In one window, two pilgrims in thick wool breeches and doublets pointed at Plymouth rock while their fellow voyagers looked on from ships in the mural. Delivered to safety after the hazardous passage to a new beginning. In another window, the museum arranged a harbor scene, where white colonists dressed like Mohawk Indians hurled crates of tea over the side of the ship with exaggerated glee. People
wore different kinds of chains across their lifetimes, but it wasn’t hard to interpret rebellion, even when the rebels wore costumes to deny blame.

The types walked before the displays like paying customers. Two determined explorers posed on a ridge and gazed at the mountains of the west, the mysterious country with its perils and discoveries before them. Who knew what lay out there? They were
masters of their lives, lighting out fearlessly into their futures.

In the final window, a red Indian received a piece of parchment from three white men who stood in noble postures, their hands open in gestures of negotiation.

“What’s that?” Isis asked.

“That’s a real tepee,” Mr. Fields said. “We like to tell a story in each one, to illuminate the American experience. Everyone knows the truth
of the historic encounter, but to see it before you—”

“They sleep in there?” Isis said.

He explained. And with that, the girls returned to their own windows.

“What do you say, Skipper John,” Cora asked her fellow sailor. “Is this the truth of our historic encounter?” She had lately taken to making conversation with the dummy to add some theater for the audience. Paint had flaked from his cheek,
exposing the gray wax beneath.

The stuffed coyotes on their stands did not lie, Cora supposed. And the anthills and the rocks told the truth of themselves. But the white exhibits contained as many inaccuracies and contradictions as Cora’s three habitats. There had been no kidnapped boys swabbing the decks and earning pats on the head from white kidnappers. The enterprising African boy whose fine
leather boots she wore would have been chained belowdecks, swabbing his body in his own filth. Slave work was sometimes spinning thread, yes; most times it was not. No slave had ever keeled over dead at a spinning wheel or been butchered for a tangle. But nobody wanted to speak on the true disposition of the world. And no one wanted to hear it. Certainly not the white monsters on the other side
of the exhibit at that very moment, pushing their greasy snouts against the window, sneering and hooting. Truth was a changing display in a shop window, manipulated by hands when you weren’t looking, alluring and ever out of reach.

The whites came to this land for a fresh start and to escape the tyranny of their masters, just as the freemen had fled theirs. But the ideals they held up for themselves,
they denied others. Cora had heard Michael recite the Declaration of Independence back on the Randall plantation many times, his voice drifting through the village like an angry phantom. She didn’t understand the words, most of them at any rate, but
created equal
was not lost on her. The white men who wrote it didn’t understand it either, if
all men
did not truly mean all men. Not if they snatched
away what belonged to other people, whether it was something you could hold in your hand, like dirt, or something you could not, like freedom. The land she tilled and worked had been Indian land. She knew the white men bragged about the efficiency of the massacres, where they killed women and babies, and strangled their futures in the crib.

Stolen bodies working stolen land. It was an engine
that did not stop, its hungry boiler fed with blood. With the surgeries that Dr. Stevens described, Cora thought, the whites had begun stealing futures in earnest. Cut you open and rip them out, dripping. Because that’s what you do when you take away someone’s babies—steal their future. Torture them as much as you can when they are on this earth, then take away the hope that one day their people will
have it better.

“Ain’t that right, Skipper John?” Cora asked. Sometimes, if Cora turned her head fast, it looked as if the thing were winking at her.

A few nights later, she noticed the lights in number 40 were out, even though it was early in the evening. She asked the other girls. “They were moved to the hospital,” one said. “So they can get better.”

The night before Ridgeway put an end to South Carolina, Cora lingered on the roof of the Griffin Building, trying to see where she had come from. There was an hour until her meeting with Caesar and Sam and she didn’t relish the idea of fretting on her bed, listening to the chirping of the other girls. Last Saturday after school, one of the men who worked in the Griffin, a former tobacco hand named
Martin, told her that the door to the roof was unlocked. Access was easy. If Cora worried about one of the white people who worked on the twelfth floor questioning her when she got off the elevator, Martin told her, she could take the stairs for the final flights.

This was her second twilight visit. The height made her giddy. She wanted to jump up and snatch the gray clouds roiling overhead.
Miss Handler had taught the class about the Great Pyramids in Egypt and the marvels the slaves made with their hands and sweat. Were the pyramids as tall as this building, did the pharaohs sit on top and take the measure of their kingdoms, to see how diminished the world became when you gained the proper distance? On Main Street below workmen erected three- and four-story buildings, taller than the
old line of two-floor establishments. Cora walked by the construction every day. Nothing as big as the Griffin yet, but one day the building would have brothers and sisters, striding over the land. Whenever she let her dreams take her down hopeful avenues, this notion stirred her, that of the town coming into its own.

To the east side of the Griffin were the white people’s houses and their new
projects—the expanded town square, the hospital, and the museum. Cora crossed to the west, where the colored dormitories lay. From this height, the red boxes crept up on the uncleared woods in impressive rows. Is that where she would live one day? A small cottage on a street they hadn’t laid yet? Putting the boy and the girl to sleep upstairs. Cora tried to see the face of the man, conjure the names
of the children. Her imagination failed her. She squinted south toward Randall. What did she expect to see? The night took the south into darkness.

And north? Perhaps she would visit one day.

The breeze made her shiver and she headed for the street. It was safe to go to Sam’s now.

Caesar didn’t know why the station agent wanted to see them. Sam had signaled as he passed the saloon and told
him, “Tonight.” Cora had not returned to the railroad station since her arrival, but the day of her deliverance was so vivid she had no trouble finding the road. The animal noises in the dark forest, the branches snapping and singing, reminded her of their flight, and then of Lovey disappearing into the night.

She walked faster when the light from Sam’s windows fluttered through the branches.
Sam embraced her with his usual enthusiasm, his shirt damp and reeking with spirits. She had been too distracted to notice the house’s disarray on her previous visit, the grimed plates, sawdust, and piles of clothes. To get to the kitchen she had to step over an upturned toolbox, its contents jumbled on the floor, nails fanned like pick-up-sticks. Before she left, she would recommend he contact the
Placement Office for a girl.

Caesar had already arrived and sipped a bottle of ale at the kitchen table. He’d brought one of his bowls for Sam and ran his fingers over its bottom as if testing an imperceptible fissure. Cora had almost forgotten he liked to work with wood. She had not seen much of him lately. He had bought more fancy clothes from the colored emporium, she noted with pleasure,
a dark suit that fit him well. Someone had taught him how to tie a tie, or perhaps that was a token of his time in Virginia, when he had believed the old white woman would free him and he had worked on his appearance.

“Is there a train coming in?” Cora asked.

“In a few days,” Sam said.

Caesar and Cora shifted in their seats.

“I know you don’t want to take it,” Sam said. “It’s no matter.”

“We decided to stay,” Caesar said.

“We wanted to make sure before we told you,” Cora added.

Sam huffed and leaned back in the creaky chair. “It made me happy to see you skipping the trains and making a go of things here,” the station agent said. “But you may reconsider after my story.”

Sam offered them some sweetmeats—he was a faithful customer of Ideal Bakery off Main Street—and revealed his
purpose. “I want to warn you away from Red’s,” Sam said.

“You scared of the competition?” Caesar joked. There was no question on that front. Sam’s saloon did not serve colored patrons. No, Red’s had exclusive claim to the residents of the dormitories with a hankering for drink and dance. It didn’t hurt that they took scrip.

“More sinister,” Sam said. “I’m not sure what to make of it, to be honest.”
It was a strange story. Caleb, the owner of the Drift, possessed a notoriously sour disposition; Sam had a reputation as the barkeep who enjoyed conversation. “You get to know the real life of a place, working there,” Sam liked to say. One of Sam’s regulars was a doctor by the name of Bertram, a recent hospital hire. He didn’t mix socially with the other northerners, preferring the atmosphere
and salty company at the Drift. He had a thirst for whiskey. “To drown out his sins,” Sam said.

On a typical night, Bertram kept his thoughts close until his third drink, when the whiskey unstoppered him and he rambled animatedly about Massachusetts blizzards, medical-school hazing rituals, or the relative intelligence of Virginia opossum. His discourse the previous evening had turned to female
companionship, Sam said. The doctor was a frequent visitor at Miss Trumball’s establishment, preferring it to the Lanchester House, whose girls had a saturnine disposition in his opinion, as if imported from Maine or other gloom-loving provinces.

“Sam?” Cora said.

“I’m sorry, Cora.” He abridged. Dr. Bertram enumerated some of the virtues of Miss Trumball’s, and then added, “Whatever you do,
man, keep out of Red’s Café, if you have a taste for nigger gals.” Several of his male patients frequented the saloon, carrying on with the female patrons. His patients believed they were being treated for blood ailments. The tonics the hospital administered, however, were merely sugar water. In fact, the niggers were participants in a study of the latent and tertiary stages of syphilis.

“They
think you’re helping them?” Sam asked the doctor. He kept his voice neutral, even as his face got hot.

“It’s important research,” Bertram informed him. “Discover how a disease spreads, the trajectory of infection, and we approach a cure.” Red’s was the only colored saloon in the town proper; the proprietor got a break on the rent for a watchful eye. The syphilis program was one of many studies
and experiments under way at the colored wing of the hospital. Did Sam know that the Igbo tribe of the African continent is predisposed to nervous disorders? Suicide and black moods? The doctor recounted the story of forty slaves, shackled together on a ship, who jumped overboard en masse rather than live in bondage. The kind of mind that could conceive of and execute such a fantastic course! What
if we performed adjustments to the niggers’ breeding patterns and removed those of melancholic tendency? Managed other attitudes, such as sexual aggression and violent natures? We could protect our women and daughters from their jungle urges, which Dr. Bertram understood to be a particular fear of southern white men.

The doctor leaned in. Had Sam read the newspaper today?

Sam shook his head
and topped off the man’s drink.

Still, the barkeep must have seen the editorials over the years, the doctor insisted, expressing anxiety over this very topic. America has imported and bred so many Africans that in many states the whites are outnumbered. For that reason alone, emancipation is impossible. With strategic sterilization—first the women but both sexes in time—we could free them from
bondage without fear that they’d butcher us in our sleep. The architects of the Jamaica uprisings had been of Beninese and Congolese extraction, willful and cunning. What if we tempered those bloodlines carefully over time? The data collected on the colored pilgrims and their descendants over years and decades, the doctor said, will prove one of the boldest scientific enterprises in history. Controlled
sterilization, research into communicable diseases, the perfection of new surgical techniques on the socially unfit—was it any wonder the best medical talents in the country were flocking to South Carolina?

A group of rowdies stumbled in and crowded Bertram to the end of the bar. Sam was occupied. The doctor drank quietly for a time and then slipped out. “You two are not the sort that goes to
Red’s,” Sam said, “but I wanted you to know.”

“Red’s,” Cora said. “This is more than the saloon, Sam. We have to tell them they’re being lied to. They’re sick.”

Caesar was in agreement.

“Will they believe you over their white doctors?” Sam asked. “With what proof? There is no authority to turn to for redress—the town is paying for it all. And then there are all the other towns where colored
pilgrims have been installed in the same system. This is not the only place with a new hospital.”

They worked it out over the kitchen table. Was it possible that not only the doctors but everyone who ministered to the colored population was involved in this incredible scheme? Steering the colored pilgrims down this or that path, buying them from estates and the block in order to conduct this
experiment? All those white hands working in concert, committing their facts and figures down on blue paper. After Cora’s discussion with Dr. Stevens, Miss Lucy had stopped her one morning on her way to the museum. Had Cora given any thought to the hospital’s birth control program? Perhaps Cora could talk to some of the other girls about it, in words they could understand. It would be very appreciated,
the white woman said. There were all sorts of new positions opening up in town, opportunities for people who had proven their worth.

Cora thought back to the night she and Caesar decided to stay, the screaming woman who wandered into the green when the social came to an end. “They’re taking away my babies.” The woman wasn’t lamenting an old plantation injustice but a crime perpetrated here in
South Carolina. The doctors were stealing her babies from her, not her former masters.

“They wanted to know what part of Africa my parents hailed from,” Caesar said. “How was I to know? He said I had the nose of a Beninese.”

“Nothing like flattery before they geld a fellow,” Sam said.

“I have to tell Meg,” Caesar said. “Some of her friends spend evenings at Red’s. I know they have a few men
they see there.”

“Who’s Meg?” Cora said.

“She’s a friend I’ve been spending time with.”

“I saw you walk down Main Street the other day,” Sam said. “She’s very striking.”

“It was a nice afternoon,” Caesar said. He took a sip of his beer, focusing on the black bottle and avoiding Cora’s eyes.

They made little progress on a course of action, struggling with the problem of whom to turn to and
the possible reaction from the other colored residents. Perhaps they would prefer not to know, Caesar said. What were these rumors compared to what they had been freed from? What sort of calculation would their neighbors make, weighing all the promises of their new circumstances against the allegations and the truth of their own pasts? According to the law, most of them were still property, their
names on pieces of paper in cabinets kept by the United States Government. For the moment, warning people was all they could do.

Cora and Caesar were almost to town when he said, “Meg works for one of those Washington Street families. One of those big houses you see?”

Cora said, “I’m glad you have friends.”

“You sure?”

“Were we wrong to stay?” Cora asked.

“Maybe this is where we were supposed
to get off,” Caesar said. “Maybe not. What would Lovey say?”

Cora had no answer. They didn’t speak again.

SHE
slept poorly. In the eighty bunks the women snored and shifted under their sheets. They had gone to bed believing themselves free from white people’s control and commands about what they should do and be. That they managed their own affairs. But the women were still being herded and
domesticated. Not pure merchandise as formerly but livestock: bred, neutered. Penned in dormitories that were like coops or hutches.

In the morning, Cora went to her assigned work with the rest of the girls. As she and the other types were about to get dressed, Isis asked if she could switch rooms with Cora. She was feeling poorly and wanted to rest at the spinning wheel. “If I could just get
off my feet for a bit.”

After six weeks at the museum, Cora hit upon a rotation that suited her personality. If she started in Typical Day on the Plantation, she could get her two plantation shifts finished just after the midday meal. Cora hated the ludicrous slave display and preferred to get it over as soon as possible. The progression from Plantation to Slave Ship to Darkest Africa generated
a soothing logic. It was like going back in time, an unwinding of America. Ending her day in Scenes from Darkest Africa never failed to cast her into a river of calm, the simple theater becoming more than theater, a genuine refuge. But Cora agreed to Isis’s request. She would end the day a slave.

In the fields, she was ever under the merciless eye of the overseer or boss. “Bend your backs!” “Work
that row!” At the Andersons’, when Maisie was at school or with her playmates and little Raymond was asleep, Cora worked unmolested and unwatched. It was a small treasure in the middle of the day. Her recent installation in the exhibition returned her to the furrows of Georgia, the dumb, open-jawed stares of the patrons stealing her back to a state of display.

One day she decided to retaliate
against a red-haired white woman who scowled at the sight of Cora’s duties “at sea.” Perhaps the woman had wed a seaman of incorrigible appetites and hated the reminder—Cora didn’t know the source of her animus, or care. The woman irked her. Cora stared into her eyes, unwavering and fierce, until the woman broke, fairly running from the glass toward the agricultural section.