The Underground Railroad (19 page)

“JESUS,
carry me home, home to that land…”

Jasper wouldn’t stop singing. Ridgeway shouted from the head of their little caravan for him to shut his mouth, and sometimes they halted so Boseman could climb into the wagon and clout the runaway on the head. Jasper sucked the scars on his fingers for a short interval, then resumed his crooning. Quietly at first so that only Cora could hear. But soon
he’d be singing again, to his lost family, to his god, to everyone they passed on the trail. He’d have to be disciplined again.

Cora recognized some of the hymns. She suspected he made up many of them; the rhymes were crooked. She wouldn’t have minded it so much if Jasper had a better voice, but Jesus had not blessed him in that department. Or with looks—he had a lopsided frog face and oddly
thin arms for a field hand—or with luck. Luck least of all.

He and Cora had that in common.

They picked up Jasper three days out of North Carolina. Jasper was a delivery. He absconded from the Florida cane fields and made it to Tennessee before a tinker caught him stealing food from his pantry. After a few weeks the deputy located his owner, but the tinker had no means of transport. Ridgeway
and Boseman were drinking in a tavern around the corner from the jail while little Homer waited with Cora and the wagon. The town clerk approached the famous slave catcher, brokered an arrangement, and Ridgeway now had the nigger chained in the wagon. He hadn’t reckoned the man for a songbird.

The rain tapped on the canopy. Cora enjoyed the breeze and then felt ashamed for enjoying something.
They stopped to eat when the rain let up. Boseman slapped Jasper, chuckled, and unchained the two fugitives from the wagon floor. He offered his customary vulgar promise as he knelt before Cora, sniffing. Jasper’s and Cora’s wrists and ankles remained manacled. It was the longest she had ever been in chains.

Crows glided over. The world was scorched and harrowed as far as they could see, a sea
of ash and char from the flat planes of the fields up to the hills and mountains. Black trees tilted, stunted black arms pointing as if to a distant place untouched by flame. They rode past the blackened bones of houses and barns without number, chimneys sticking up like grave markers, the husked stone walls of ravaged mills and granaries. Scorched fences marked where cattle had grazed; it was not
possible the animals survived.

After two days of riding through it, they were covered in black grime. Ridgeway said it made him feel at home, the blacksmith’s son.

This is what Cora saw: Nowhere to hide. No refuge between those black stalks, even if she weren’t fettered. Even if she had an opportunity.

An old white man in a gray coat trotted by on a dun horse. Like the other travelers they
passed on the black road, he slowed in curiosity. Two adult slaves were common enough. But the colored boy in the black suit driving the wagon and his queer smile discomfited strangers. The younger white man with the red derby wore a necklace adorned with pieces of shriveled leather. When they figured out these were human ears, he bared a line of intermittent teeth browned by tobacco. The older white
man in command discouraged all conversation with his glowering. The traveler moved on, around the bend where the road limped between the denuded hills.

Homer unfolded a moth-eaten quilt for them to sit on and distributed their portions on tin plates. The slave catcher allowed his prisoners an equal share of the food, a custom dating to his earliest days in the job. It reduced complaints and he
billed the client. At the edge of the blackened field they ate the salt pork and the beans Boseman had prepared, the dry flies screeching in waves.

Rain agitated the smell of the fire, making the air bitter. Smoke flavored every bite of food, each sip of water. Jasper sang, “Jump up, the redeemer said! Jump up, jump up if you want to see His face!”

“Hallelujah!” Boseman shouted. “Fat little
Jesus baby!” His words echoed and he did a dance, splashing dark water.

“He’s not eating,” Cora said. Jasper had foregone the last few meals, screwing his mouth shut and crossing his arms.

“Then it doesn’t eat,” Ridgeway said. He waited for her to say something, having grown used to her chirping at his remarks. They were on to each other. She kept silent to interrupt their pattern.

Homer scampered
over and gobbled down Jasper’s portion. He sensed Cora staring at him and grinned without looking up.

The driver of the wagon was an odd little imp. Ten years old, Chester’s age, but imbued with the melancholy grace of an elderly house slave, the sum of practiced gestures. He was fastidious about his fine black suit and stovepipe hat, extracting lint from the fabric and glaring at it as if it
were a poison spider before flicking it. Homer rarely spoke apart from his hectoring of the horses. Of racial affinity or sympathy, he gave no indication. Cora and Jasper might as well have been invisible most of the time, smaller than lint.

Homer’s duties encompassed driving the team, sundry maintenance, and what Ridgeway termed “bookkeeping.” Homer maintained the business accounts and recorded
Ridgeway’s stories in a small notebook he kept in his coat pocket. What made this or that utterance from the slave catcher worthy of inclusion, Cora could not discern. The boy preserved worldly truism and matter-of-fact observations about the weather with equal zeal.

Prompted by Cora one night, Ridgeway maintained that he’d never owned a slave in his life, save for the fourteen hours Homer was
his property. Why not? she asked. “What for?” he said. Ridgeway was riding through the outskirts of Atlanta—he’d just delivered a husband and wife to their owner, all the way from New York—when he came upon a butcher trying to square a gambling debt. His wife’s family had given them the boy’s mother as a wedding gift. The butcher had sold her during his previous stretch of bad luck. Now it was the
boy’s turn. He painted a crude sign to hang around the boy’s neck advertising the offer.

The boy’s strange sensibility moved Ridgeway. Homer’s shining eyes, set in his round pudgy face, were at once feral and serene. A kindred spirit. Ridgeway bought him for five dollars and drew up emancipation papers the next day. Homer remained at his side despite Ridgeway’s halfhearted attempts to shoo him
away. The butcher had held no strong opinions on the subject of colored education and had permitted the boy to study with the children of some freemen. Out of boredom, Ridgeway helped him with his letters. Homer pretended he was of Italian extraction when it suited him and let his questioners sit with their bewilderment. His unconventional attire evolved over time; his disposition remained unchanged.

“If he’s free, why don’t he go?”

“Where?” Ridgeway asked. “He’s seen enough to know a black boy has no future, free papers or no. Not in this country. Some disreputable character would snatch him and put him on the block lickety-split. With me, he can learn about the world. Find purpose.”

Each night, with meticulous care, Homer opened his satchel and removed a set of manacles. He locked himself
to the driver’s seat, put the key in his pocket, and closed his eyes.

Ridgeway caught Cora looking. “He says it’s the only way he can sleep.”

Homer snored like a rich old man every night.

BOSEMAN,
for his part, had been riding with Ridgeway for three years. He was a rambler out of South Carolina and found his way to slave catching after a hardscrabble sequence: dockhand, collection agent,
gravedigger. Boseman was not the most intelligent fellow but had a knack for anticipating Ridgeway’s wishes in a manner equal parts indispensable and eerie. Ridgeway’s gang numbered five when Boseman joined, but his employees drifted off one by one. The reason was not immediately clear to Cora.

The previous owner of the ear necklace had been an Indian named Strong. Strong had promoted himself
as a tracker, but the only creature he sniffed out reliably was whiskey. Boseman won the accessory in a wrestling contest, and when Strong disputed the terms of their match, Boseman clobbered the red man with a shovel. Strong lost his hearing and ditched the gang to work in a tannery in Canada, or so the rumor went. Even though the ears were dried and shriveled, they drew flies when it was hot. Boseman
loved his souvenir, however, and the revulsion on a new client’s face was too delectable. The flies hadn’t harassed the Indian when he owned it, as Ridgeway reminded him from time to time.

Boseman stared at the hills between bites and had an uncharacteristically wistful air. He walked off to urinate and when he came back said, “My daddy passed through here, I think. He said it was forest then.
When he came back, it had all been cleared by settlers.”

“Now it’s doubly cleared,” Ridgeway responded. “It’s true what you say. This road was a horse path. Next time you need to make a road, Boseman, make sure you have ten thousand starving Cherokee on hand to clear it for you. Saves time.”

“Where did they go?” Cora asked. After her nights with Martin, she had a sense of when white men were
on the brink of a story. It gave her time to consider her options.

Ridgeway was an ardent reader of gazettes. The fugitive bulletins made them a requirement in his line of work—Homer maintained a thorough collection—and current affairs generally upheld his theories about society and the human animal. The type of individuals in his employ had made him accustomed to explaining the most elementary
facts and history. He could hardly expect a slave girl to know the significance of their environs.

They sat on what was once Cherokee land, he said, the land of their red fathers, until the president decided otherwise and ordered them removed. Settlers needed the land, and if the Indians hadn’t learned by then that the white man’s treaties were entirely worthless, Ridgeway said, they deserved
what they got. Some of his friends had been with the army at that time. They rounded up the Indians in camps, the women and children and whatever they could carry on their backs, and marched them west of the Mississippi. The Trail of Tears and Death, as one Cherokee sage put it later, not without cause, not without that Indian flair for rhetoric. Disease and malnutrition, not to mention the biting
winter that year, which Ridgeway himself remembered without fondness, claimed thousands. When they got to Oklahoma there were still more white people waiting for them, squatting on the land the Indians had been promised in the latest worthless treaty. Slow learners, the bunch. But here they were on this road today. The trip to Missouri was much more comfortable than it had been previously, tamped
by little red feet.

“Progress,” Ridgeway said. “My cousin got lucky and won some Indian land in the lottery, in the north part of Tennessee. Grows corn.”

Cora cocked her head at the desolation. “Lucky,” she said.

On their way in, Ridgeway told them that a lightning strike must have started the fire. The smoke filled the sky for hundreds of miles, tinting the sunset into gorgeous contusions
of crimson and purple. This was Tennessee announcing itself: fantastic beasts twisting in a volcano. For the first time, she crossed into another state without using the underground railroad. The tunnels had protected her. The station master Lumbly had said that each state was a state of possibility, with its own customs. The red sky made her dread the rules of this next territory. As they rode toward
the smoke, the sunsets inspired Jasper to share a suite of hymns whose central theme was the wrath of God and the mortifications awaiting the wicked. Boseman made frequent trips to the wagon.

The town at the edge of the fire line was overrun with escapees. “Runaways,” Cora declared and Homer turned in his seat to wink. The white families swarmed in a camp off the main street, inconsolable and
abject, the meager possessions they were able to save piled around their feet. Figures staggered through the street with demented expressions, wild-eyed, their clothes singed, rags tied around burns. Cora was well-accustomed to the screams of colored babies in torment, hungry, in pain, confused by the mania of those charged to protect them. Hearing the screams of so many little white babies was new.
Her sympathies lay with the colored babies.

Empty shelves greeted Ridgeway and Boseman in the general store. The shopkeeper told Ridgeway that homesteaders had started the fire while trying to clear some scrub. The fire escaped them and ravaged the land with bottomless hunger until the rains came finally. Three million acres, the shopkeeper said. The government promised relief but no one could
say when it would arrive. The biggest disaster in as long as anyone could remember.

The original residents had a more thorough list of wildfires and floods and tornadoes, Cora thought when Ridgeway shared the shopkeeper’s words. But they were not here to contribute their knowledge. She didn’t know which tribe had called this territory home, but knew it had been Indian land. What land hadn’t been
theirs? She had never learned history proper, but sometimes one’s eyes are teacher enough.

“They must have done something to make God angry,” Boseman said.

“Just a spark that got away is all,” Ridgeway said.

They lingered by the road after their lunchtime meal, the white men smoking pipes by the horses and reminiscing an escapade. For all his talk of how long he had hunted her, Ridgeway displayed
no urgency about delivering Cora to Terrance Randall. Not that she hurried toward that reunion. Cora stutter-stepped into the burned field. She’d learned to walk with irons. It was hard to believe it had taken this long. Cora had always pitied the downcast co
ffl
es marching in their pathetic line past the Randall place. Now look at her. The lesson was unclear. In one respect she had been spared
an injury for many years. In another, misfortune had merely bided time: There was no escape. Sores puckered on her skin beneath the iron. The white men paid her no mind as she walked to the black trees.

By then she had run a few times. When they stopped for supplies, Boseman was distracted by a funeral procession rounding the corner and she made it a couple of yards before a boy tripped her.
They added a neck collar, iron links dropping to her wrists like moss. It gave her the posture of a beggar or praying mantis. She ran when the men stopped to relieve themselves at the side of the trail and made it a little farther that time. She ran once at dusk, by a stream, the water making a promise of movement. The slick stones sent her tumbling into the water, and Ridgeway thrashed her. She stopped
running.