The Underground Railroad (21 page)

Nonetheless. She told Ridgeway, “No.”

“Of course not—it’s nothing. Better weep for one of those burned cornfields, or this steer swimming in our soup. You do what’s required to survive.” He wiped his lips. “It’s true, though, your complaint. We come up with all sorts of fancy talk to hide things. Like in the newspapers nowadays, all the smart men talking about Manifest Destiny. Like it’s a new
idea. You don’t know what I’m talking about, do you?” Ridgeway asked.

Cora sat back. “More words to pretty things up.”

“It means taking what is yours, your property, whatever you deem it to be. And everyone else taking their assigned places to allow you to take it. Whether it’s red men or Africans, giving up themselves, giving of themselves, so that we can have what’s rightfully ours. The French
setting aside their territorial claims. The British and the Spanish slinking away.

“My father liked his Indian talk about the Great Spirit,” Ridgeway said. “All these years later, I prefer the American spirit, the one that called us from the Old World to the New, to conquer and build and civilize. And destroy that what needs to be destroyed. To lift up the lesser races. If not lift up, subjugate.
And if not subjugate, exterminate. Our destiny by divine prescription—the American imperative.”

“I need to visit the outhouse,” Cora said.

The corners of his mouth sank. He gestured for her to walk in front. The steps to the back alley were slippery with vomit and he grabbed her elbow to steady her. Closing the outhouse door, shutting him out, was the purest pleasure she’d had in a long while.

Ridgeway continued his address undeterred. “Take your mother,” the slave catcher said. “Mabel. Stolen from her master by misguided whites and colored individuals in a criminal conspiracy. I kept an eye out all this time, turned Boston and New York upside down, all the colored settlements. Syracuse. Northampton. She’s up in Canada, laughing at the Randalls and me. I take it as a personal injury.
That’s why I bought you that dress. To help me picture her wrapped like a present for her master.”

He hated her mother as much as she did. That, and the fact they both had eyes in their head, meant they had two things in common.

Ridgeway paused—a drunk wanted to use the privy. He shooed him away. “You absconded for ten months,” he said. “Insult enough. You and your mother are a line that needs
to be extinguished. A week together, chained up, and you sass me without end, on your way to a bloody homecoming. The abolitionist lobby loves to trot out your kind, to give speeches to white people who have no idea how the world works.”

The slave catcher was wrong. If she’d made it north she would have disappeared into a life outside their terms. Like her mother. One thing the woman had passed
on to her.

“We do our part,” Ridgeway said, “slave and slave catcher. Master and colored boss. The new arrivals streaming into the harbors and the politicians and sheriffs and newspapermen and the mothers raising strong sons. People like you and your mother are the best of your race. The weak of your tribe have been weeded out, they die in the slave ships, die of our European pox, in the fields
working our cotton and indigo. You need to be strong to survive the labor and to make us greater. We fatten hogs, not because it pleases us but because we need hogs to survive. But we can’t have you too clever. We can’t have you so fit you outrun us.”

She finished her business and picked out a fugitive bulletin from the stack of paper to wipe herself. Then she waited. A pitiful respite, but it
was hers.

“You heard my name when you were a pickaninny,” he said. “The name of punishment, dogging every fugitive step and every thought of running away. For every slave I bring home, twenty others abandon their full-moon schemes. I’m a notion of order. The slave that disappears—it’s a notion, too. Of hope. Undoing what I do so that a slave the next plantation over gets an idea that it can run,
too. If we allow that, we accept the flaw in the imperative. And I refuse.”

The music from next door was slow now. Couples coming together to hold each other, to sway and twist. That was real conversation, dancing slow with another person, not all these words. She knew that, even though she had never danced like that with another person and had refused Caesar when he asked. The only person to
ever extend a hand to her and say, Come closer. Maybe everything the slave catcher said was true, Cora thought, every justification, and the sons of Ham were cursed and the slave master performed the Lord’s will. And maybe he was just a man talking to an outhouse door, waiting for someone to wipe her ass.

CORA
and Ridgeway returned to the wagon to find Homer rubbing his small thumbs on the
reins and Boseman sipping whiskey from a bottle. “This town is sick with it,” Boseman said, slurring. “I can smell it.” The younger man led the way out of town. He shared his disappointments. The shave and bath had gone well; with a fresh face the man looked almost innocent. But he had not been able to perform like a man at the brothel. “The madam was sweating like a pig and I knew they had the fever,
her and her whores.” Ridgeway let him decide how far was far enough to camp.

She had been asleep for a short time when Boseman crept in and put his hand over her mouth. She was ready.

Boseman put his fingers to his lips. Cora nodded as much as his grip permitted: She would not cry out. She could make a fuss now and wake Ridgeway; Boseman would give him some excuse and that would be the end of
it. But she had thought about this moment for days, of when Boseman let his carnal desires get the best of him. It was the most drunk he’d been since North Carolina. He complimented her dress when they stopped for the night. She steeled herself. If she could persuade him to unshackle her, a dark night like this was made for running.

Homer snored loudly. Boseman slipped her chains from the wagon
ring, careful not to let the links sound against each other. He undid her ankles and cinched her wrist chains to silence them. He descended first and helped Cora out. She could just make out the road a few yards away. Dark enough.

Ridgeway knocked him to the ground with a growl and started kicking him. Boseman started his defense and Ridgeway kicked him in the mouth. She almost ran. She almost
did. But the quickness of the violence, the blade of it, arrested her. Ridgeway scared her. When Homer came to the back of the wagon with a lantern and revealed Ridgeway’s face, the slave catcher was staring at her with untempered fury. She’d had her chance and missed it and at the look on his face was relieved.

“What are you going to do now, Ridgeway?” Boseman wept. He was leaning against the
wagon wheel for support. He looked at the blood on his hands. His necklace had snapped and the ears made it look like the dirt was listening. “Crazy Ridgeway, does as he pleases. I’m the last one left. Only Homer left to beat on when I’m gone,” he said. “I think he’ll like it.”

Homer chuckled. He got Cora’s ankle chains from the wagon. Ridgeway rubbed his knuckles, breathing heavily.

“It is
a nice dress,” Boseman said. He pulled out a tooth.

“There’ll be more teeth if any of you fellows move,” the man said. The three of them stepped into the light.

The speaker was the young negro from town, the one who nodded at her. He didn’t look at her now, monitoring Ridgeway. His wire spectacles reflected the lantern’s glow, as if the flame burned inside him. His pistol wavered between the
two white men like a dowser’s stick.

A second man held a rifle. He was tall and well-muscled, dressed in thick work clothes that struck her as a costume. He had a wide face and his long red-brown hair was combed up into a fan like a lion’s mane. The man’s posture said that he did not enjoy taking orders, and the insolence in his eyes was not slave insolence, an impotent pose, but a hard fact.
The third man waved a bowie knife. His body shook with nerves, his quick breathing the night sound between his companion’s talk. Cora recognized his bearing. It was that of a runaway, one unsure of the latest turn in the escape. She’d seen it in Caesar, in the bodies of the new arrivals to the dormitories, and knew she’d exhibited it many times. He extended the trembling knife in Homer’s direction.

She had never seen colored men hold guns. The image shocked her, a new idea too big to fit into her mind.

“You boys are lost,” Ridgeway said. He didn’t have a weapon.

“Lost in that we don’t like Tennessee much and would rather be home, yes,” the leader said. “You seem lost yourself.”

Boseman coughed and traded a glance with Ridgeway. He sat up and tensed. The two rifles turned to him.

Their
leader said, “We’re going to be on our way but we thought we’d ask the lady if she wanted to come with us. We’re a better sort of traveling companion.”

“Where you boys from?” Ridgeway said. He talked in a way that told Cora he was scheming.

“All over,” the man said. The north lived in his voice, his accent from up there, like Caesar. “But we found each other and now we work together. You settle
down, Mr. Ridgeway.” He moved his head slightly. “I heard him call you Cora. Is that your name?”

She nodded.

“She’s Cora,” Ridgeway said. “You know me. That’s Boseman, and that’s Homer.”

At his name, Homer threw the lantern at the man holding the knife. The glass didn’t break until it hit the ground after bouncing off the man’s chest. The fire splashed. The leader fired at Ridgeway and missed.
The slave catcher tackled him and they both tumbled into the dirt. The red-headed rifleman was a better shot. Boseman flew back, a black flower blooming suddenly on his belly.

Homer ran to get a gun, followed by the rifleman. The boy’s hat rolled into the fire. Ridgeway and his opponent scuffled in the dirt, grunting and hollering. They rolled over to the edge of the burning oil. Cora’s fear
from moments ago returned—Ridgeway had trained her well. The slave catcher got the upper hand, pinning the man to the ground.

She could run. She only had chains on her wrists now.

Cora jumped on Ridgeway’s back and strangled him with her chains, twisting them tight against his flesh. Her scream came from deep inside her, a train whistle echoing in a tunnel. She yanked and squeezed. The slave
catcher threw his body to smear her into the ground. By the time he shook her off, the man from town had his pistol again.

The runaway helped Cora to her feet. “Who’s that boy?” he said.

Homer and the rifleman hadn’t returned. The leader instructed the man with the knife to have a look, keeping the gun on Ridgeway.

The slave catcher rubbed his thick fingers into his ravaged neck. He did not
look at Cora, which made her fearful again.

Boseman whimpered. He burbled, “He’s going to look in your soul and see what you done, sinner…” The light from the burning oil was inconstant, but they had no trouble making out the widening puddle of blood.

“He’s going to bleed to death,” Ridgeway said.

“It’s a free country,” the man from town said.

“This is not your property,” Ridgeway said.

“That’s what the law says. White law. There are other ones.” He addressed Cora in a gentler tone. “If you want, miss, I can shoot him for you.” His face was calm.

She wanted every bad thing for Ridgeway and Boseman. And Homer? She didn’t know what her heart wanted for the strange black boy, who seemed an emissary from a different country.

Before she could speak, the man said, “Though we’d prefer
to put irons on them.” Cora retrieved his spectacles from the dirt and cleaned them with her sleeve and the three of them waited. His companions returned empty-handed.

Ridgeway smiled as the men shackled his wrists through the wagon wheel.

“The boy is a devious sort,” the leader said. “I can tell that. We have to go.” He looked at Cora. “Will you come with us?”

Cora kicked Ridgeway in the face
three times with her new wooden shoes. She thought, If the world will not stir itself to punish the wicked. No one stopped her. Later she said it was three kicks for three murders, and told of Lovey, Caesar, and Jasper to let them live briefly again in her words. But that was not the truth of it. It was all for her.