The Underground Railroad (25 page)

“I oil the pistons,” he liked to say. Royal placed the coded messages in the classifieds that informed runaways and conductors of departures. He bribed ship captains and constables, rowed shivering pregnant women across rivers in leaky skiffs, and delivered judges’ release orders to frowning deputies. In general
he was paired with a white ally, but Royal’s quick wits and proud bearing made it clear the color of his skin was no impediment. “A free black walks different than a slave,” he said. “White people recognize it immediately, even if they don’t know it. Walks different, talks different, carries himself different. It’s in the bones.” Constables never detained him and kidnappers kept their distance.

His association with Red began with the Indiana posting. Red was from North Carolina, absconding after the regulators strung up his wife and child. He walked the Freedom Trail for miles, searching for their bodies to say goodbye. He failed—the trail of corpses went on forever it seemed, in every direction. When Red made it north, he took up with the railroad and dedicated himself to the cause
with a sinister resourcefulness. On hearing of Cora’s accidental killing of the boy in Georgia, he smiled and said, “Good.”

The Justin mission was unusual from the start. Tennessee lay outside Royal’s posting, but the railroad’s local representative had been out of contact since the wildfire. To cancel the train would be disastrous. With no one else available, Royal’s superiors reluctantly sent
the two colored agents deep into the Tennessee badlands.

The guns were Red’s idea. Royal had never held one before.

“It fits in your hand,” Royal said, “but it’s as heavy as a cannon.”

“You looked fearsome,” Cora said.

“I was shaking, but inside,” he told her.

Justin’s master often hired him out for masonry work and a sympathetic employer made arrangements with the railroad on his behalf.
There was one condition—that Justin hold off on making tracks until he finished the stone wall around the man’s property. They agreed that a gap of three stones was acceptable, if Justin left thorough instructions for completion.

On the appointed day, Justin set off for work one last time. His absence wouldn’t be noticed until nightfall; his employer insisted that Justin never showed up that
morning. He was in the back of Royal and Red’s cart by ten o’clock. The plan changed when they came upon Cora in town.

The train pulled into the Tennessee station. It was the most splendid locomotive yet, its shiny red paint returning the light even through the shroud of soot. The engineer was a jolly character with a booming voice, opening the door to the passenger car with no little ceremony.
Cora suspected a kind of tunnel madness afflicted railroad engineers, to a man.

After the rickety boxcar and then the cargo platform that had conveyed her to North Carolina, to step into a proper passenger car—well-appointed and comfortable like the ones she’d read about in her almanacs—was a spectacular pleasure. There were seats enough for thirty, lavish and soft, and brass fixtures gleamed
where the candlelight fell. The smell of fresh varnish made her feel like the inaugural passenger of a magical, maiden voyage. Cora slept across three seats, free from chains and attic gloom for the first time in months.

The iron horse still rumbled through the tunnel when she woke. Lumbly’s words returned to her:
If you want to see what this nation is all about, you have to ride the rails. Look
outside as you speed through, and you’ll find the true face of America.
It was a joke, then, from the start. There was only darkness outside the windows on her journeys, and only ever would be darkness.

Justin talked in the seat in front of her. He said that his brother and three nieces he’d never met lived up in Canada. He’d spend a few days at the farm and then head north.

Royal assured the
fugitive that the railroad was at his disposal. Cora sat up and he repeated what he’d just told her fellow fugitive. She could continue on to a connection in Indiana, or stay on the Valentine farm.

White people took John Valentine as one of theirs, Royal said. His skin was very light. Any person of color recognized his Ethiopian heritage immediately. That nose, those lips, good hair or no. His
mother was a seamstress, his father a white peddler who passed through every few months. When the man died, he left his estate to his son, the first time he acknowledged the boy outside of the walls of their house.

Valentine tried his hand at potato farming. He employed six freemen to work his land. He never claimed to be that which he was not, but did not disabuse people of their assumptions.
When Valentine purchased Gloria, no one thought twice. One way of keeping a woman was to keep her in bondage, especially if, like John Valentine, you were new to romantic liaisons. Only John, Gloria, and a judge on the other side of the state knew she was free. He was fond of books and taught his wife her letters. They raised two sons. The neighbors thought it broad-minded, if wasteful, that he
set them free.

When his eldest boy was five, one of Valentine’s teamsters was strung up and burned for reckless eyeballing. Joe’s friends maintained that he hadn’t been to town that day; a bank clerk friendly with Valentine shared the rumor that the woman was trying to make a paramour jealous. As the years pass, Valentine observed, racial violence only becomes more vicious in its expression.
It will not abate or disappear, not anytime soon, and not in the south. He and his wife decided that Virginia was an unfit place to raise a family. They sold the farm and picked up stakes. Land was cheap in Indiana. There were white people there, too, but not so close.

Valentine learned the temperament of Indian corn. Three lucky seasons in a row. When he visited relations back in Virginia, he
promoted the advantages of his new home. He hired old cronies. They could even live on his property until they found their footing; he’d expanded his acreage.

Those were the guests he invited. The farm as Cora discovered it originated one winter night after a blur of slow, heavy snow. The woman at the door was an awful sight, frozen half to death. Margaret was a runaway from Delaware. Her journey
to the Valentine farm had been fraught—a troupe of hard characters took her on a zigzag route away from her master. A trapper, the pitchman of a medicine show. She roamed from town to town with a traveling dentist until he turned violent. The storm caught her between places. Margaret prayed to God for deliverance, promised an end to the wickedness and moral shortcomings she had expressed in her
flight. The lights of Valentine emerged in the gloom.

Gloria tended to her visitor the best she could; the doctor came around on his pony. Margaret’s chills never subsided. She expired a few days later.

The next time Valentine went east on business, a broadsheet promoting an antislavery meeting stopped him in his tracks. The woman in the snow was the emissary of a dispossessed tribe. He bent
himself to their service.

By that autumn, his farm was the latest office of the underground railroad, busy with fugitives and conductors. Some runaways lingered; if they contributed, they could stay as long as they liked. They planted the corn. In an overgrown patch, a former plantation bricklayer built a forge for a former plantation blacksmith. The forge spat out nails at a remarkable rate.
The men crosscut trees and erected cabins. A prominent abolitionist stopped for a day en route to Chicago and stayed for a week. Luminaries, orators, and artists started attending the Saturday-night discussions on the negro question. One freewoman had a sister in Delaware who’d gotten into difficulties; the sister came out west for a new start. Valentine and the farm’s parents paid her to teach their
children, and there were always more children.

With his white face, Royal said, Valentine went down to the county seat and bought parcels for his friends with black faces, the former field hands who had come west, the fugitives who had found a haven on his farm. Found a purpose. When the Valentines arrived, that neck of Indiana was unpopulated. As the towns erupted into being, quickened by the
relentless American thirst, the black farm was there as a natural feature of the landscape, a mountain or a creek. Half the white stores depended on its patronage; Valentine residents filled the squares and Sunday markets to sell their crafts. “It’s a place of healing,” Royal told Cora on the train north. “Where you can take stock and make preparations for the next leg of the journey.”

The previous
night in Tennessee, Ridgeway had called Cora and her mother a flaw in the American scheme. If two women were a flaw, what was a community?

ROYAL
didn’t mention the philosophical disputes that dominated the weekly meetings. Mingo, with his schemes for the next stage in the progress of the colored tribe, and Lander, whose elegant but opaque appeals offered no easy remedy. The conductor also
avoided the very real matter of the white settlers’ mounting resentment of the negro outpost. The divisions would make themselves known by and by.

As they hurtled through the underground passage, a tiny ship on this impossible sea, Royal’s endorsement achieved its purpose. Cora slapped her hands on the cushions of the parlor car and said the farm suited her just fine.

Justin stayed two days,
filled his belly, and joined his relations in the north. He later sent a letter describing his welcome, his new position at a building company. His nieces had signed their names in different-colored ink, frisky and naïve. Once Valentine lay before her in its seductive plenty, there was no question of Cora leaving. She contributed to the life of the farm. This was labor she recognized, she understood
the elemental rhythms of planting and harvest, the lessons and imperatives of the shifting seasons. Her visions of city life clouded—what did she know about places like New York City and Boston? She’d grown up with her hands in the dirt.

One month after her arrival, at the mouth of the ghost tunnel, Cora remained certain of her decision. She and Royal were about to return to the farm when a gust
swept out of the tunnel’s murky depths. As if something moved toward them, old and dark. She reached for Royal’s arm.

“Why did you bring me here?” Cora said.

“We’re not supposed to talk about what we do down here,” Royal said. “And our passengers aren’t supposed to talk about how the railroad operates—it’d put a lot of good people in danger. They could talk if they wanted to, but they don’t.”

It was true. When she told of her escape, she omitted the tunnels and kept to the main contours. It was private, a secret about yourself it never occurred to you to share. Not a bad secret, but an intimacy so much a part of who you were that it could not be made separate. It would die in the sharing.

“I showed you because you’ve seen more of the railroad than most,” Royal continued. “I wanted
you to see this—how it fits together. Or doesn’t.”

“I’m just a passenger.”

“That’s why,” he said. He rubbed his spectacles with his shirttail. “The underground railroad is bigger than its operators—it’s all of you, too. The small spurs, the big trunk lines. We have the newest locomotives and the obsolete engines, and we have handcars like that one. It goes everywhere, to places we know and those
we don’t. We got this tunnel right here, running beneath us, and no one knows where it leads. If we keep the railroad running, and none of us can figure it out, maybe you can.”

She told him she didn’t know why it was there, or what it meant. All she knew is that she didn’t want to run anymore.

November sapped them with Indiana cold, but two events made Cora forget about the weather. The first was Sam’s appearance on the farm. When he knocked on her cabin, she hugged him tight until he pleaded for her to stop. They wept. Sybil brewed cups of root tea while they composed themselves.

His coarse beard was entwined with gray and his belly had grown large, but he was the same garrulous fellow
who’d taken in her and Caesar those long months past. The night the slave catcher came to town had cleaved him from his old life. Ridgeway snatched Caesar at the factory before Sam could warn him. Sam’s voice faltered as he told her how their friend was beaten in the jail. He kept mum about his comrades, but one man said he’d seen the nigger talking to Sam on more than one occasion. That Sam
abandoned the saloon in the middle of his shift—and the fact some in town had known Sam since they were children and disliked his self-satisfied nature—sufficed to get his house burned to the ground.

“My grandfather’s house. My house. Everything that was mine.” By the time the mob tore Caesar from the jail and mortally assaulted him, Sam was well on his way north. He paid a peddler for a ride
and was on a ship bound for Delaware the next day.

A month later under cover of night, operatives filled in the entrance to the tunnel beneath his house, per railroad policy. Lumbly’s station had been dealt with in similar fashion. “They don’t like to take chances,” he said. The men brought him back a souvenir, a copper mug warped from the fire. He didn’t recognize it but kept it anyway.

“I
was a station agent. They found me different things to do.” Sam drove runaways to Boston and New York, hunkered over the latest surveys to devise escape routes, and took care of the final arrangements that would save a fugitive’s life. He even posed as a slave catcher named “James Olney,” prying slaves from jail on the pretext of delivering them to their masters. The stupid constables and deputies.
Racial prejudice rotted one’s faculties, he said. He demonstrated his slave-catcher voice and swagger, to Cora’s and Sybil’s amusement.

He had just brought his latest cargo to the Valentine farm, a family of three who’d been hiding out in New Jersey. They had insinuated themselves into the colored community there, Sam said, but a slave catcher nosed around and it was time to flee. It was his
final mission for the underground railroad. He was western bound. “Every pioneer I meet, they like their whiskey. They’ll be needing barkeeps in California.”

It heartened her to see her friend happy and fat. So many of those who had helped Cora had come to awful fates. She had not got him killed.

Then he gave her the news from her plantation, the second item that took the sting out of the Indiana
cold.

Terrance Randall was dead.

From all accounts, the slave master’s preoccupation with Cora and her escape only deepened over time. He neglected the plantation’s affairs. His day to day on the estate consisted of conducting sordid parties in the big house and putting his slaves to bleak amusements, forcing them to serve as his victims in Cora’s stead. Terrance continued to advertise for her
capture, filling the classifieds in far-off states with her description and details of her crime. He upped the considerable reward more than once—Sam had seen the bulletins himself, astounded—and hosted any slave catcher who passed through, to provide a fuller portrait of Cora’s villainy and also to shame the incompetent Ridgeway, who had failed first his father and then him.

Terrance died in
New Orleans, in a chamber of a Creole brothel. His heart relented, weakened by months of dissipation.

“Or even his heart was tired of his wickedness,” Cora said. As Sam’s information settled, she asked about Ridgeway.

Sam waved his hand dismissively. “He’s the butt of humor now. He’d been at the end of his career even before”—here he paused—“the incident in Tennessee.”

Cora nodded. Red’s act
of murder was not spoken of. The railroad discharged him once they got the full story. Red wasn’t bothered. He had new ideas about how to break the stranglehold of slavery and refused to give up his guns. “Once he lays his hand to the plow,” Royal said, “he is not one to turn back.” Royal was sad to see his friend ride off, but there was no bringing their methods into convergence, not after Tennessee.
Cora’s own act of murder he excused as a matter of self-protection, but Red’s naked bloodthirstiness was another matter.

Ridgeway’s penchant for violence and odd fixations had made it hard to find men willing to ride with him. His soiled reputation, coupled with Boseman’s death and the humiliation of being bested by nigger outlaws, turned him into a pariah among his cohort. The Tennessee sheriffs
still searched for the murderers, of course, but Ridgeway was out of the hunt. He had not been heard of since the summer.

“What about the boy, Homer?”

Sam had heard about the strange little creature. It was he who eventually brought help to the slave catcher, out in the forest. Homer’s bizarre manner did nothing for Ridgeway’s standing—their arrangement fed unseemly speculations. At any rate,
the two disappeared together, their bond unbroken by the assault. “To a dank cave,” Sam said, “as befits those worthless shits.”

Sam stayed on the farm for three days, pursuing the affections of Georgina to no avail. Long enough to mix it up with the shucking bee.

THE
competition unfolded on the first night of the full moon. The children spent all day arranging the corn into two mammoth piles,
inside a border of red leaves. Mingo captained one team—the second year in a row, Sybil observed with distaste. He picked a team full of allies, heedless of representing the breadth of farm society. Valentine’s eldest son, Oliver, gathered a diverse group of newcomers and old hands. “And our distinguished guest, of course,” Oliver said finally, beckoning Sam.

A little boy blew the whistle and
the shucking began in a frenzy. This year’s prize was a large silver mirror Valentine had picked up in Chicago. The mirror stood between the piles, tied with a blue ribbon, reflecting the orange flicker of the jack-o’-lanterns. The captains shouted orders to their men while the audience hooted and clapped. The fiddler played a fast and comical accompaniment. The smaller children raced around the
piles, snatching the husks, sometimes before they even touched the ground.

“Get that corn!”

“You best hurry up over there!”

Cora watched from the side, Royal’s hand resting on her hip. She had permitted him to kiss her the night before, which he took, not without reason, as an indication Cora was finally allowing him to step up his pursuit. She’d made him wait. He’d wait more. But Sam’s report
on Terrance’s demise had softened her, even as it bred spiteful visions. She envisioned her former master tangled in linens, purple tongue poking from his lips. Calling for help that never arrived. Melting to a gory pulp in his casket, and then torments in a hell out of Revelation. Cora believed in that part of the holy book, at least. It described the slave plantation in code.

“This wasn’t harvest
on Randall,” Cora said. “It was full moon when we picked, but there was always blood.”

“You’re not on Randall anymore,” Royal said. “You’re free.”

She kept ahold of her temper and whispered, “How so? Land is property. Tools is property. Somebody’s going to auction the Randall plantation, the slaves, too. Relations always coming out when someone dies. I’m still property, even in Indiana.”

“He’s
dead. No cousin is going to bother over getting you back, not like he did.” He said, “You’re free.”

Royal joined the singing to change the subject and to remind her that there were things a body could feel good about. A community that had come together, from seeding to harvest to the bee. But the song was a work song Cora knew from the cotton rows, drawing her back to the Randall cruelties and
making her heart thud. Connelly used to start the song as a signal to go back to picking after a whipping.

How could such a bitter thing become a means of pleasure? Everything on Valentine was the opposite. Work needn’t be suffering, it could unite folks. A bright child like Chester might thrive and prosper, as Molly and her friends did. A mother raise her daughter with love and kindness. A beautiful
soul like Caesar could be anything he wanted here, all of them could be: own a spread, be a schoolteacher, fight for colored rights. Even be a poet. In her Georgia misery she had pictured freedom, and it had not looked like this. Freedom was a community laboring for something lovely and rare.

Mingo won. His men chaired him around the piles of naked cobs, hoarse with cheers. Jimmy said he’d never
seen a white man work so hard and Sam beamed with pleasure. Georgina remained unswayed, however.

On the day of Sam’s departure, Cora embraced him and kissed his whiskered cheek. He said he’d send a note when he settled, wherever that was.

They were in the time of short days and long nights. Cora visited the library frequently as the weather turned. She brought Molly when she could coax the girl.
They sat next to each other, Cora with a history or a romance, and Molly turning the pages of a fairy tale. A teamster stopped them one day as they were about to enter. “Master said the only thing more dangerous than a nigger with a gun,” he told them, “was a nigger with a book. That must be a big pile of black powder, then!”

When some of the grateful residents proposed building an addition to
Valentine’s house for his books, Gloria suggested a separate structure. “That way, anyone with a mind to pick up a book can do so at their leisure.” It also gave the family more privacy. They were generous, but there was a limit.

They put up the library next to the smokehouse. The room smelled pleasantly of smoke when Cora sat down in one of the big chairs with Valentine’s books. Royal said it
was the biggest collection of negro literature this side of Chicago. Cora didn’t know if that was true, but she certainly didn’t lack for reading material. Apart from the treatises on farming and the cultivation of various crops, there were rows and rows of histories. The ambitions of the Romans and the victories of the Moors, the royal feuds of Europe. Oversize volumes contained maps of lands Cora
had never heard of, the outlines of the unconquered world.

And the disparate literature of the colored tribes. Accounts of African empires and the miracles of the Egyptian slaves who had erected pyramids. The farm’s carpenters were true artisans—they had to be to keep all those books from jumping off the shelves, so many wonders did they contain. Pamphlets of verse by negro poets, autobiographies
of colored orators. Phillis Wheatley and Jupiter Hammon. There was a man named Benjamin Banneker who composed almanacs—almanacs! she devoured them all—and served as a confidant to Thomas Jefferson, who composed the Declaration. Cora read the accounts of slaves who had been born in chains and learned their letters. Of Africans who had been stolen, torn from their homes and families, and described
the miseries of their bondage and then their hair-raising escapes. She recognized their stories as her own. They were the stories of all the colored people she had ever known, the stories of black people yet to be born, the foundations of their triumphs.

People had put all that down on paper in tiny rooms. Some of them even had dark skin like her. It put her head in a fog each time she opened
the door. She’d have to get started if she was going to read them all.

Valentine joined her one afternoon. Cora was friendly with Gloria, who called Cora “the Adventuress,” owing to the many complications of her journey, but she hadn’t spoken to Gloria’s husband beyond greetings. The enormity of her debt was inexpressible, so she avoided him altogether.

He regarded the cover of her book, a romance
about a Moorish boy who becomes the scourge of the Seven Seas. The language was simple and she was making quick work of it. “I never did read that,” Valentine said. “I heard you like to spend time here. You’re the one from Georgia?”

She nodded.

“Never been there—the stories are so dismal, I’m liable to lose my temper and make my wife a widow.”

Cora returned his smile. He’d been a presence in
the summer months, looking after the Indian corn. The field hands knew indigo, tobacco—cotton, of course—but corn was its own beast. He was pleasant and patient in his instructions. With the changing of the season he was scarce. Feeling poorly, people said. He spent most of his time in the farmhouse, squaring the farm’s accounts.

He wandered to the shelves of maps. Now that they were in the same
room, Cora was compelled to rectify her months of silence. She asked after the preparations for the gathering.

“Yes, that,” Valentine said. “Do you think it will happen?”

“It has to,” Cora said.

The meeting had been postponed twice on account of Lander’s speaking engagements. Valentine’s kitchen table started the culture of debate on the farm, when Valentine and his friends—and later, visiting
scholars and noted abolitionists—stayed up past midnight arguing over the colored question. The need for trade schools, colored medical schools. For a voice in Congress, if not a representative then a strong alliance with liberal-minded whites. How to undo slavery’s injury to the mental faculties—so many freed men continued to be enslaved by the horrors they’d endured.

The supper conversations
became ritual, outgrowing the house and migrating to the meeting house, whereupon Gloria stopped serving food and drink and let them fend for themselves. Those favoring a more gradual view of colored progress traded barbs with those on a more pressing schedule. When Lander arrived—the most dignified and eloquent colored man any of them had seen—the discussions adopted a more local character. The
direction of the nation was one matter; the future of the farm, another.

“Mingo promises it will be a memorable occasion,” Valentine said. “A spectacle of rhetoric. These days, I hope they get the spectacle done early so I can retire at a decent hour.” Worn down by Mingo’s lobbying, Valentine had ceded organization of the debate.

Mingo had lived on the farm for a long time, and when it came
to addressing Lander’s appeals, it was good to have a native voice. He was not as accomplished a speaker, but as a former slave spoke for a large segment of the farm.