The Underground Railroad (4 page)

The Randalls were drinking wine out of goblets of cut glass and looked as if they had drained a few bottles. Cora searched for Caesar’s face in the crowd. She did not find him. He hadn’t been present the last time the brothers appeared together on the northern
half. You did well to remember the different lessons of those occasions. Something always happened when the Randalls ventured into the quarter. Sooner or later. A new thing coming that you couldn’t predict until it was upon you.

James left the daily operations to his man Connelly and rarely visited. He might grant a tour to a visitor, a distinguished neighbor or curious planter from another neck
of the woods, but it was rare. James rarely addressed his niggers, who had been taught by the lash to keep working and ignore his presence. When Terrance appeared on his brother’s plantation, he usually appraised each slave and made a note of which men were the most able and which women the most appealing. Content to leer at his brother’s women, he grazed heartily upon the women of his own half.
“I like to taste my plums,” Terrance said, prowling the rows of cabins to see what struck his fancy. He violated the bonds of affection, sometimes visiting slaves on their wedding night to show the husband the proper way to discharge his marital duty. He tasted his plums, and broke the skin, and left his mark.

It was accepted that James was of a different orientation. Unlike his father and brother,
James did not use his property to gratify himself. Occasionally he had women from the county to dine, and Alice was always sure to make the most sumptuous, seductive supper at her means. Mrs. Randall had passed many years before, and it was Alice’s thought that a woman would be a civilizing presence on the plantation. For months at a time, James entertained these pale creatures, their white
buggies traversing the mud tracks that led to the great house. The kitchen girls giggled and speculated. And then a new woman would appear.

To hear his valet Prideful tell it, James confined his erotic energies to specialized rooms in a New Orleans establishment. The madam was broad-minded and modern, adept in the trajectories of human desire. Prideful’s stories were hard to believe, despite
assurances that he received his reports from the staff of the place, with whom he’d grown close over the years. What kind of white man would willingly submit to the whip?

Terrance scratched his cane in the dirt. It had been his father’s cane, topped with a silver wolf’s head. Many remembered its bite on their flesh. “Then I recollected James telling me about a nigger he had down here,” Terrance
said, “could recite the Declaration of Independence. I can’t bring myself to believe him. I thought perhaps tonight he can show me, since everyone is out and about, from the sound of it.”

“We’ll settle it,” James said. “Where is that boy? Michael.”

No one said anything. Godfrey waved the lantern around pathetically. Moses was the boss unfortunate enough to stand closest to the Randall brothers.
He cleared his throat. “Michael dead, Master James.”

Moses instructed one of the pickaninnies to fetch Connelly, even if it meant interrupting the overseer from his Sunday-evening concubinage. The expression on James’s face told Moses to start explaining.

Michael, the slave in question, had indeed possessed the ability to recite long passages. According to Connelly, who heard the story from
the nigger trader, Michael’s former master was fascinated by the abilities of South American parrots and reasoned that if a bird could be taught limericks, a slave might be taught to remember as well. Merely glancing at the size of the skulls told you that a nigger possessed a bigger brain than a bird.

Michael had been the son of his master’s coachman. Had a brand of animal cleverness, the kind
you see in pigs sometimes. The master and his unlikely pupil started with simple rhymes and short passages from popular British versifiers. They went slow over the words the nigger didn’t understand and, if truth be told, the master only half understood, as his tutor had been a reprobate who had been chased from every decent position he had ever held and who decided to make his final posting the
canvas for his secret revenge. They made miracles, the tobacco farmer and the coachman’s son. The Declaration of Independence was their masterpiece. “A history of repeated injuries and usurpations.”

Michael’s ability never amounted to more than a parlor trick, delighting visitors before the discussion turned as it always did to the diminished faculties of niggers. His owner grew bored and sold
the boy south. By the time Michael got to Randall, some torture or punishment had addled his senses. He was a mediocre worker. He complained of noises and black spells that blotted his memory. In exasperation Connelly beat out what little brains he had left. It was a scourging that Michael was not intended to survive, and it achieved its purpose.

“I should have been told,” James said, his displeasure
plain. Michael’s recitation had been a novel diversion the two times he trotted the nigger out for guests.

Terrance liked to tease his brother. “James,” he said, “you need to keep better account of your property.”

“Don’t meddle.”

“I knew you let your slaves have revels, but I had no idea they were so extravagant. Are you trying to make me look bad?”

“Don’t pretend you care what a nigger thinks
of you, Terrance.” James’s glass was empty. He turned to go.

“One more song, James. These sounds have grown on me.”

George and Wesley were forlorn. Noble and his tambourine were nowhere to be seen. James pressed his lips into a slit. He gestured and the men started playing.

Terrance tapped his cane. His face sank as he took in the crowd. “You’re not going to dance? I have to insist. You and
you.”

They didn’t wait for their master’s signal. The slaves of the northern half converged on the alley, haltingly, trying to insinuate themselves into their previous rhythm and put on a show. Crooked Ava had not lost her power to dissemble since her days of harassing Cora—she hooted and stomped as if it were the height of the Christmas celebrations. Putting on a show for the master was a familiar
skill, the small angles and advantages of the mask, and they shook off their fear as they settled into the performance. Oh, how they capered and hollered, shouted and hopped! Certainly this was the most lively song they had ever heard, the musicians the most accomplished players the colored race had to offer. Cora dragged herself into the circle, checking the Randall brothers’ reactions on
every turn like everyone else. Jockey tumbled his hands in his lap to keep time. Cora found Caesar’s face. He stood in the shadow of the kitchen, his expression flat. Then he withdrew.

“You!”

It was Terrance. He held his hand before him as if it were covered in some eternal stain that only he could see. Then Cora caught sight of it—the single drop of wine staining the cuff of his lovely white
shirt. Chester had bumped him.

Chester simpered and bowed down before the white man. “Sorry, master! Sorry, master!” The cane crashed across his shoulder and head, again and again. The boy screamed and shrank to the dirt as the blows continued. Terrance’s arm rose and fell. James looked tired.

One drop. A feeling settled over Cora. She had not been under its spell in years, since she brought
the hatchet down on Blake’s doghouse and sent the splinters into the air. She had seen men hung from trees and left for buzzards and crows. Women carved open to the bones with the cat-o’-nine-tails. Bodies alive and dead roasted on pyres. Feet cut off to prevent escape and hands cut off to stop theft. She had seen boys and girls younger than this beaten and had done nothing. This night the feeling
settled on her heart again. It grabbed hold of her and before the slave part of her caught up with the human part of her, she was bent over the boy’s body as a shield. She held the cane in her hand like a swamp man handling a snake and saw the ornament at its tip. The silver wolf bared its silver teeth. Then the cane was out of her hand. It came down on her head. It crashed down again and this time
the silver teeth ripped across her eyes and her blood splattered the dirt.

The Hob women were seven that year. Mary was the oldest. She was in Hob because she was prone to fits. Foaming at the mouth like a mad dog, writhing in the dirt with wild eyes. She had feuded for years with another picker named Bertha, who finally put a curse on her. Old Abraham complained that Mary’s affliction dated back to when she was a pickaninny, but no one listened to him. By any reckoning
these fits were nothing like those she had suffered in her youth. She woke from them battered and confused and listless, which led to punishments for lost work, and recuperation from punishments led to more lost work. Once the bosses’ mood turned against you, anyone might be swept up in it. Mary moved her things to Hob to avoid the scorn of her cabin mates. She dragged her feet all the way as
if someone might intervene.

Mary worked in the milk house with Margaret and Rida. Before their purchase by James Randall these two had been so tangled by sufferings that they could not weave themselves into the fabric of the plantation. Margaret produced awful sounds from her throat at inopportune moments, animal sounds, the most miserable keenings and vulgar oaths. When the master made his rounds,
she kept her hand over her mouth, lest she call attention to her affliction. Rida was indifferent to hygiene and no inducement or threat could sway her. She stank.

Lucy and Titania never spoke, the former because she chose not to and the latter because her tongue had been hacked out by a previous owner. They worked in the kitchen under Alice, who preferred assistants who were disinclined to natter
all day, to better hear her own voice.

Two other women took their own lives that spring, more than usual but nothing remarkable. No one with a name that would be remembered come winter, so shallow was their mark. That left Nag and Cora. They tended to the cotton in all of its phases.

At the end of the workday Cora staggered and Nag rushed to steady her. She led Cora back to Hob. The boss glared
at their slow progress out of the rows but said nothing. Cora’s obvious madness had removed her from casual rebuke. They passed Caesar, who loitered by one of the work sheds with a group of young hands, carving a piece of wood with his knife. Cora averted her eyes and made her face into slate for him, as she had ever since his proposal.

It was two weeks after Jockey’s birthday and Cora was still
on the mend. The blows to her face had left one eye swollen shut and performed a gross injury to her temple. The swelling disappeared but where the silver wolf had kissed was now a rueful scar shaped like an X. It seeped for days. That was her tally for the night of feast. Far worse was the lashing Connelly gave her the next morning under the pitiless boughs of the whipping tree.

Connelly was
one of Old Randall’s first hires. James preserved the man’s appointment under his stewardship. When Cora was young, the overseer’s hair was a livid Irish red that curled from his straw hat like the wings of a cardinal. In those days he patrolled with a black umbrella but eventually surrendered and now his white blouses were stark against his tanned flesh. His hair had gone white and his belly overflowed
his belt, but apart from that he was the same man who had whipped her grandmother and mother, stalking the village with a lopsided gait that reminded her of an old ox. There was no rushing him if he chose not to be rushed. The only time he exhibited speed was when he reached for his cat-o’-nine-tails. Then he demonstrated the energy and rambunctiousness of a child at a new pastime.

The overseer
was not pleased by what had transpired during the Randall brothers’ surprise visit. First, Connelly had been interrupted while taking his pleasure with Gloria, his current wench. He flogged the messenger and roused himself from bed. Second, there was the matter of Michael. Connelly hadn’t informed James about Michael’s loss as his employer never bothered over routine fluctuations in the hands,
but Terrance’s curiosity had made it a problem.

Then there was the matter of Chester’s clumsiness and Cora’s incomprehensible action. Connelly peeled them open the following sunrise. He started with Chester, to follow the order in which the transgressions had occurred, and called for their bloody backs to be scrubbed out with pepper water afterward. It was Chester’s first proper licking, and
Cora’s first in half a year. Connelly repeated the whippings the next two mornings. According to the house slaves, Master James was more upset that his brother had touched his property, and before so many witnesses, than with Chester and Cora. Thus was the brunt of one brother’s ire toward another borne by property. Chester never said a word to Cora again.

Nag helped Cora up the steps to Hob.
Cora collapsed once they entered the cabin and were out of sight of the rest of the village. “Let me get you some supper,” Nag said.

Like Cora, Nag had been relocated to Hob over politics. For years she had been Connelly’s preferred, spending most nights in his bed. Nag was haughty for a nigger gal even before the overseer bestowed his slim favors upon her, with her pale gray eyes and roiling
hips. She became insufferable. Preening, gloating over the ill treatment that she alone escaped. Her mother had consorted frequently with white men and tutored Nag in licentious practices. She bent in dedication to the task even as he swapped their offspring. The northern and southern halves of the great Randall plantation exchanged slaves all the time, unloading beat niggers, skulky workers, and
rascals on each other in a desultory game. Nag’s children were tokens. Connelly could not countenance his mulatto bastards when their curls glowed his Irish red in the sunlight.

One morning Connelly made it clear that he no longer required Nag in his bed. It was the day her enemies had waited for. Everyone saw it coming except for her. She returned from the fields to find her possessions had
been moved to Hob, announcing her loss in status to the village. Her shame nourished them as no food could. Hob hardened her, as was its way. The cabin tended to set one’s personality.

Nag had never been close to Cora’s mother but that didn’t stop her from befriending the girl when she became a stray. After the night of the feast and in the following bloody days she and Mary ministered to Cora,
applying brine and poultices to her ravaged skin and making sure she ate. They cradled her head and sang lullabies to their lost children through her. Lovey visited her friend as well, but the young girl was not immune to Hob’s reputation and got skittish in the presence of Nag and Mary and the others. She stayed until her nerves gave out.

Cora lay on the floor and moaned. Two weeks after her
beating, she endured dizzy spells and a pounding in her skull. For the most part she was able to keep it at bay and work the row, but sometimes it was all she could do to stay upright until the sun sank. Every hour when the water girl brought the ladle she licked it clean and felt the metal on her teeth. Now she had nothing left.

Mary appeared. “Sick again,” she said. She had a wet cloth ready
and placed it on Cora’s brow. She still maintained a reservoir of maternal feeling after the loss of her five children—three dead before they could walk and the others sold off when they were old enough to carry water and grab weeds around the great house. Mary descended from pure Ashanti stock, as did her two husbands. Pups like that, it didn’t take much salesmanship. Cora moved her mouth in silent
thanks. The cabin walls pressed on her. Up in the loft one of the other women—Rida by the stench—rummaged and banged. Nag rubbed out the knots in Cora’s hands. “I don’t know what’s worse,” she said. “You sick and out of sight or you up and outside when Master Terrance come tomorrow.”

The prospect of his visit depleted Cora. James Randall was bedridden. He’d fallen ill after a trip to New Orleans
to negotiate with a delegation of trading agents from Liverpool and to visit his disgraceful haven. He fainted in his buggy on his return and had been out of sight since. Now whispers came from the house staff that Terrance was going to take over while his brother was on the mend. In the morning he would inspect the northern half to bring the operation in harmony with how things were done in the
southern half.

No one doubted that it would be a bloody sort of harmony.

Her friends’ hands slipped away and the walls relinquished their pressure and she passed out. Cora woke in the pit of the night, her head resting on a rolled-up linsey blanket. Everyone asleep above. She rubbed the scar on her temple. It felt like it was seeping. She knew why she had rushed to protect Chester. But she was
stymied when she tried to recall the urgency of that moment, the grain of the feeling that possessed her. It had retreated to that obscure corner in herself from where it came and couldn’t be coaxed. To ease her restlessness she crept out to her plot and sat on her maple and smelled the air and listened. Things in the swamp whistled and splashed, hunting in the living darkness. To walk in there
at night, heading north to the Free States. Have to take leave of your senses to do that.

But her mother had.

AS
if to reflect Ajarry, who did not step off Randall land once she arrived on it, Mabel never left the plantation until the day of her escape. She gave no indication of her intentions, at least to no one who admitted to that knowledge under subsequent interrogations. No mean feat
in a village teeming with treacherous natures and informers who would sell out their dearest to escape the bite of the cat-o’-nine-tails.

Cora fell asleep nestled against her mother’s stomach and never saw her again. Old Randall raised the alarm and summoned the patrollers. Within an hour the hunting party tromped into the swamp, chasing after Nate Ketchum’s dogs. The latest in a long line of
specializers, Ketchum had slave-catching in his blood. The hounds had been bred for generations to detect nigger scent across whole counties, chewing and mangling many a wayward hand. When the creatures strained against their leather straps and pawed at the air, their barking made every soul in the quarters want to run to their cabins. But the day’s picking lay before the slaves foremost and they
stooped to their orders, enduring the dogs’ terrible noise and the visions of blood to come.

The bills and fliers circulated for hundreds of miles. Free negroes who supplemented their living catching runaways combed through the woods and wormed information from likely accomplices. Patrollers and posses of low whites harassed and bullied. The quarters of all the nearby plantations were thoroughly
searched and no small number of slaves beaten on principle. But the hounds came up empty, as did their masters.

Randall retained the services of a witch to goofer his property so that no one with African blood could escape without being stricken with hideous palsy. The witch woman buried fetishes in secret places, took her payment, and departed in her mule cart. There was a hearty debate in the
village over the spirit of the goofer. Did the conjure apply only to those who had an intention to run or to all colored persons who stepped over the line? A week passed before the slaves hunted and scavenged in the swamp again. That’s where the food was.

Of Mabel there was no sign. No one had escaped the Randall plantation before. The fugitives were always clawed back, betrayed by friends, they
misinterpreted the stars and ran deeper into the labyrinth of bondage. On their return they were abused mightily before being permitted to die and those they left behind were forced to observe the grisly increments of their demise.

The infamous slave catcher Ridgeway paid a call on the plantation one week later. He rode up on his horses with his associates, five men of disreputable mien, led
by a fearsome Indian scout who wore a necklace of shriveled ears. Ridgeway was six and a half feet tall, with the square face and thick neck of a hammer. He maintained a serene comportment at all times but generated a threatening atmosphere, like a thunderhead that seems far away but then is suddenly overhead with loud violence.

Ridgeway’s audience lasted half an hour. He took notes in a small
diary and to hear the house speak of it was a man of intense concentration and flowery manner of speech. He did not return for two years, not long before Old Randall’s death, to apologize in person for his failure. The Indian was gone, but there was a young rider with long black hair who wore a similar ring of trophies over his hide vest. Ridgeway was in the vicinity to visit a neighboring planter,
offering as proof of capture the heads of two runaways in a leather sack. Crossing the state line was a capital offense in Georgia; sometimes a master preferred an example over the return of his property.

The slave catcher shared rumors of a new branch of the underground railroad said to be operating in the southern part of the state, as impossible as it sounded. Old Randall scoffed. The sympathizers
would be rooted out and tarred and feathered, Ridgeway assured his host. Or whatever satisfied local custom. Ridgeway apologized once again and took his leave and soon his gang crashed to the county road toward their next mission. There was no end to their work, the river of slaves that needed to be driven from their hidey-holes and brought to the white man’s proper accounting.

Mabel had packed
for her adventure. A machete. Flint and tinder. She stole a cabin mate’s shoes, which were in better shape. For weeks, her empty garden testified to her miracle. Before she lit out she dug up every yam from their plot, a cumbersome load and ill-advised for a journey that required a fleet foot. The lumps and burrows in the dirt were a reminder to all who walked by. Then one morning they were smoothed
over. Cora got on her knees and planted anew. It was her inheritance.

NOW
in the thin moonlight, her head throbbing, Cora appraised her tiny garden. Weeds, weevils, the ragged footprints of critters. She had neglected her land since the feast. Time to return to it.

Terrance’s visit the next day was uneventful save for one disturbing moment. Connelly took him through his brother’s operation,
as it had been some years since Terrance had made a proper tour. His manner was unexpectedly civil from all accounts, absent his standard sardonic remarks. They discussed the numbers from last year’s haul and examined the ledgers that contained the weigh-ins from the previous September. Terrance expressed annoyance at the overseer’s lamentable handwriting but apart from that the men got along amiably.
They did not inspect the slaves or the village.