Underground Airlines (34 page)

That same logo was on each of the three buildings that together formed GGSI headquarters, three glass-walled skyscrapers standing lordly above the parking lot, blinking back the sun. The logo was on one of the flags flapping above the concrete plaza in front of the buildings. There were three altogether—one flag for the company, one for the state, and one for the United States of America. Flags and recessed concrete and a handsome fountain. There was a statue, a giant abstract bronze, rounded and swooping, which as you got closer turned out not to be abstract at all: it was a boll, a simple boll made heroic, a cotton boll like a triumphal arch.

I had seen corporate plazas. Corporate plazas in Manhattan, in Boston, in Washington, DC. This was no different. Exactly the same.

I held tightly to the grip of the rolling suitcase. I came up alongside Martha, but her sunglasses were on. Her human eyes were hidden now. She stopped just outside the door of the center building, and I rushed past her to open it. She walked past me and did not say thank you. Deep in her character, ready to go.

The lobby was vaultlike and chilly after the early-autumn warmth of the parking lot. The words
GARMENTS
OF
THE
GREATER
SOUTH
,
INCORPORATED
were six feet high on the back wall, cotton-white letters on a wall of blue-sky blue, alongside a gigantic photomontage of happy Asian children kicking soccer balls, turning cartwheels, shouldering their sturdy backpacks in their brightly colored cotton clothes.

“Yes?” The receptionist was waiting at a desk big as a spaceship between two banks of elevators. Red lipstick, blond hair, blue eyes, a tasteful gold necklace. “How can I help y’all?”

I ducked my head while Martha smiled.

“How are you this morning? My name is Ms. Jane Reynolds, from Peach Tree Management Systems. I am here to see Mr. Matthew Newell.”

“O-
kay,
” said the woman behind the big semicircular desk, lingering on the
kay,
teasing the word out into a question while she typed, pulling up a calendar. “And did you have an appointment?”

“Well, yes and no,” said Martha, and my head was still down, eyes down, but I could hear in her voice that she winked as she said it. “We met down at the CSO, back in June? And Matty—I’m sorry: Matthew; Mr. Newell—he was sweet enough to say that if I was ever in the area I should feel free to stop by.”

“Oh,” said the blonde. “I see.”

CSO was the Conference of Slaveholding Organizations. It was a safe bet that a plantation the size of GGSI would have sent a sizable contingent; it was an open question whether Matthew R. Newell, assistant vice president of transport operations, would have been among them. We were out on the wire here, me and Martha. Out there together.

“So would you mind just ringing up, see if he’s around? Of course I should have called first—I just had an appointment right down in Blessing, and I thought…”

The blonde was already in motion, offering Martha an empty smile and a wait-just-a-moment forefinger. She tucked the telephone receiver under her ear and pressed a button on her console. The elevator doors opened on the far side of the lobby, but no one got out. We had gone over everything on the way, discussed every detail, various contingencies and possibilities, but Martha was in charge now—she would have to be. My job was to walk with my eyes pointed downward at about forty-five degrees. My job was to smile and keep smiling.

There was no security in the lobby. No powerfully built men with keen eyes and bulges at their hips. Probably a panic button under the woman’s desk or a panic switch at her feet. Maybe a gun down there, too. And there were cameras, unhidden: one above the reception desk, angled down; one above each bank of elevators. Cameras in the public spaces, Ada had said, but not in the private areas. Not in the executive offices. That was as far as she knew; that was according to the latest reckoning. We were counting on it, but we didn’t know.

The receptionist cupped one palm over the mouthpiece. “Excuse me? Hi. Where did you say you were from again?”

“Peach Tree, ma’am,” I said. “Peach Tree Management Systems.”

“We’re consultants,” said Martha, flicking an irritated look at me, servant speaking out of turn. “Workplace efficiency. But like I said, it’s as much a personal call as anything. I just wanted to say hi.”

I pressed my hands together while the blonde said “Hmm” a couple more times and went back to murmuring into her phone.

I stood and waited and grinned and looked at the floor, fighting back against the simple, sick, vertiginous awareness of where I was, where
exactly
. I was tottering on the rim of it. Through those doors. Up those elevators. Behind these three towers…

I was breathing very slowly. Martha stared into the expanse of the lobby, and I could not guess what she was thinking. We were deep in character, and I’d taken us into this place, and I could feel the terrible weight of it pressing my flesh, and when the receptionist looked up again and smiled, her red-lip smile was the wide, burning grin of the devil.

“You’re in luck,” she said to Martha. “He
is
here, and he’ll be right out.”

“Oh, isn’t that nice,” said Martha. “That’s just perfect.”

“Yes.” She sniffed. “Your Negro will need to be cleared.”

Again, as at the border. Scalp and armpits, teeth and tongue; pants down, shirt up. They had a room for it, just off the lobby, and an attendant, a tired-looking free black man who scowled and said nothing as he ran his clumsy fingers over my body. I stood absolutely still. I held my arms out. It would have been the school at Bell’s, the first time, the first of such searches I had endured in my life. Lesson 1: your body is not your own.

This place, this plantation, was on a different order from Bell’s. Physical size and scope of work, a different universe of slavery from the little three dozen acres where I’d been raised. Green grass, farm country, pig lots, cattle pens, silos. The world I was about to enter was a twenty-four-hour operation, ultramodern and ultraefficient, with computerized inventory tracking and comprehensive worker-control protocols. There was a camera in the upper left corner of the room, bearing cold witness to the man and me. I was here and I was there at the same time, feeling this tired guard’s hands on my chest at the same time as I was feeling the rough hands of the guards at Bell’s, a lifetime ago.

This is so much worse,
I thought, and immediately thought,
No, no, nothing could be worse.
But it’s a waste anyway, isn’t it, the idea of comparison, just in general. Holding up one kind of horror against another.

“All right.” The bored security man broke his silence, straightening up, pulling off his gloves and chucking them into a bin. “Bag now.” Quickly he opened the rolling suitcase I was hauling, rifled through that, too—a change of clothes for Martha, change of shoes, and a laptop turned off, which he opened and closed uninterestedly.

“Okay,” he said. “You’re clear.”

But then before I could lower my arm he wrapped something around the wrist, a thin strip of paper, bright green, which secured to itself, tight as hell, tugging at the small hairs of my arm.

“That is an identification bracelet,” said the man. “That identifies you as a Person Bound to Labor and a member of our staff.”

“Whoa,” I said. “Whoa, whoa.”

“Don’t worry. You’ll come back through here again on your egress from this facility. But every dark-skinned person is required to wear a band while on the grounds.” He showed me his own bracelet, which was a cool red.

“But don’t you have a color for folks like me? Negroes like me, just—just here for a visit?”

“No, man, we don’t.” His voice was dry, humorless. “We don’t actually get too many of those.”

Martha was waiting for me in the lobby, laughing with her hand on the arm of a short, fat white man in a sport jacket, who was laughing, too. This was Newell—instantly recognizable from his picture on the company website, where we’d found him yesterday afternoon on an old laptop belonging to the lawyer’s people, making our plan.

It was Martha who pointed to him—to his weak-chinned, sappy, smiling head shot, his sad-sounding title and anemic history within the company.
There’s the guy. There’s the guy we want.

And now here he was, the guy we wanted, dumpy and thin-haired and pink-cheeked, in casual slacks and polished shoes, with one of Martha’s hands on his forearm, the both of them laughing like old pals.

“Well, of course I do,” Matty Newell said hopefully. “You’re not the kinda gal a fella’s gonna go and forget.”

“I do like to think so,” said Martha, her laugh a tinkling falsehood. “I surely do.”

“You caught me in a good mood, too, I must say. A good week for us, darn good week.”

My mind jumped to Donatella Batlisch, to the footage from the motel TV: the woman flying forward suddenly with the gun blast, collapsing, limp. Good news for the southern interest, happy days at GGSI. But no, no. Newell just meant the late frost. “We’re coming up on Halloween, and here we still got acreage coming into flower. Don’t see that every year; no, ma’am.”

And for a second as I approached them across the lobby, my fake smile was real, a smile of appreciation for Martha. I watched her nod admiringly. I watched her touching Newell’s elbow. Jesus. She was a natural.

“Oh, Mr. Newell—”

“Please, please, Jane. Make it Matty.”

“All right, then.
Matty
.” She made it sound like “Hercules.” He beamed. “Matty, this is my associate.”

Newell peered at me, confusion in his small eyes. He had a lanyard around his neck, dangling an ID card in a plastic sheath. His face was soft, his hairline retreating, just as it was in the picture. Since sitting for the corporate head shot, though, he’d grown one of those little Tommy Jefferson ponytails, and it didn’t particularly suit him.

“Your, uh, associate?”

“Associate, assistant.” She winked at him, mouthed the word
servant
. “Whatever you want to call it. He does what he’s told.”

Matty sized me up, smiling weakly.

“Just seems like …” He shrugged. “Well. Funny work, for a nigger.”

Grin grin grin. Smile smile smile. “Oh, I know, sir, I know.” I glanced at Martha, at Ms. Jane Reynolds, making sure it was okay to talk. “I guess I’m a funny kind of nigger.”

Matty Newell gaped for a second, then laughed, a nervous, throaty chortle, shaking his head at this strange old world of ours. The flags snapped sharply outside in the brisk wind. The Asian children in the photomontages were frozen in their happy cartwheels.

“Well, come on up to the top floor,” said Newell. “Have a good look at the joint. Then we can talk about whatever it is y’all are selling.”

The whole building had that same pleasing color scheme, easy white and gentle blue, and every wall was lined with more of the glossy enlarged pictures. On the way to the elevator was a housewife of some indeterminate Southeast Asian ethnicity, reaching into her closet for a stack of towels—while reaching through the closet wall from the other side was a black slave, grinning, servile and unseen, as he provided the stack of sturdy cotton towels.

I did not blanch. I did not slow. I walked past, sticking close behind Martha, noticing things.

I noticed the pattern of the light fixtures in the long hallway: a bank of two, then a bank of three, two and then three. I noticed the pants of the slaves in the photographs, black like Marlon’s pants, like the ones I was wearing along with my inoffensive peach sweater. I noticed the lushness of the white carpet. I noticed everything.

The elevator raced us soundlessly upward fast enough for my ears to pop, and I stood clenching and unclenching my jaw, standing in quiet self-erasure at the rear of the car. I looked anywhere but up at the camera mounted in the high corner of the elevator. I studied the button plate on the elevator doors:
MURDOCK
ELEVATORS
, it said. Murdock, Louisiana. Martha laughed and flirted with Mr. Newell.

“No, sir,” she was saying. “Oh, no. We’re up from the Birmingham office, but the company is headquartered in Georgia.”

“Georgia, huh?” said Newell. “And how are things in the State of Surrender?”

“Oh, stop,” she said, and slapped him on the arm.

He laughed, eyed her nervously, hoping not to have offended, and rushed to reassure her. “I’m only teasing, of course. Bygones be bygones and all that. Every state free to choose its own path. The American way.”

While Newell mouthed these wooden platitudes I had another quick flash of Batlisch, flying forward, arms out, the panic of the crowd. I wondered what Martha was thinking about. The elevator dinged, and we stepped directly out into sunlight; the whole top floor was taken up by one room with windows for walls, the sun streaming in gloriously on a bright open penthouse with marble floors.