Underground Airlines (35 page)

“This is my office,” said Mr. Newell, and immediately snorted and waved his hands. “Just kiddin’, of course. This is the observation deck, what we call the perch. I love taking folks up here. Just gives a real strong sense of the place.”

He walked up to the glass and gestured for us to follow—well, for Martha to follow. My presence he had more or less forgotten: I was the rolling suitcase. I did what I was told. I was not worth thinking of.

He stood at Martha’s elbow. “Really something, huh?”

“It sure is.”

From inside my cloak of invisibility, I looked, too. Most of the buildings were like the one we were in, made of glass, beaming and winking at each other across wide green lawns. The buildings were gathered in clusters, divided into regions, separated by winding walkways and black-paved service roads and high chain-link fences. I was in both places at once. I was back there in the Capital City Crossroads Hotel, staring at the satellite image from the full file, and I was here for real on this plantation, in the presence of the real thing. Everything getting realer and realer, the closer you get to it, like flesh on bones.

I got busy correlating, matching up the buildings I was looking at with the blurry images I’d seen in the file: the offices, the outbuildings, the shipping and receiving center, the machine shop. The five brick towers of the population center, gathered around a tall tower with a glass cupola.

My mind saw that something was missing before I knew what it was. Where were all the people? At Bell’s the yards were always full of us, hustling and hollering, singing sometimes, yelling at each other or getting yelled at by the guards and the working whites. Down there on the green lawn of GGSI, I saw not a soul. Everybody inside, I figured. Shift in progress. Slaving away. And yet…

“Now, okay, so those right there are the garment factories,” said Matty Newell, pointing down at industrial buildings as big as football stadiums, scaffolded with exterior piping and drums, sending up streams of dark smoke. “That right there is kind of the heart of the place.”

Newell was looking down at the pristine lawn and the handsome facilities with clear satisfaction, giving us his overhead tour with almost proprietary pride, as though GGSI belonged to him instead of the other way around.

“Inside there are the ginning operations,” Newell added. “The cleaners and the dryers and so on. We’ve got the largest set of high-capacity round-base cotton gins in the state.”

“Well, I’ll be,” said Martha. “No kidding.”

My eye, meanwhile, had found it, that one abstract rectangle, shaded by the Institute for Agricultural Innovation, the small dark building that bore no number or name on the aerial picture.

I couldn’t ask Newell what it was, of course. I couldn’t ask Martha to ask. I was black. I wasn’t there.

“Now, this is a twenty-four-hour-a-day operation, just by the way,” Newell was saying, Martha still nodding, eyes big with amazement. “Twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. We run in shifts here, morning, afternoon, night, and late night. Never a dull moment. Sabbath comes every day for one-seventh of the population, so we never have to stop the plants. We got seven Easters, too. Seven Christmases. Only thing shuts us down is a bad accident, and”—he made a fist and knocked gently, ha-ha, on his bald forehead—“none of those in twenty-nine months.”

He grinned, nice and broad, and gave me a wink. “None of your cousins got a thing to complain about down here, son. And I mean it.”

It seemed he wanted me to respond, so I responded. “I bet you right, Mr. Newell. I bet you right.”

Newell laughed nervously, inside his throat.

“I mean it, son. This is not the slavery of fifty or even ten years ago. People think about slavery, and they still think—
still!
—about the whips and the dogs and the spiky neck chains, all of that nasty business. But this is
now
. This is the twenty-first century. You see there”—pointing again with that fat finger, a gold ring between the second and third knuckles, forcing me to look—“that there is the population center. Four thousand head in those buildings right there. We got a rec center in there, gymnasium equipment that every one of our team members is not just encouraged but also required to use. And you see that building in the center, with the turret-looking thing on the top? From up in there the guards can see into every single cell, and every single cell can see the guards, too. So everybody knows they’re safe. Everybody’s looking after each other. That goes back to Jefferson, by the way, that design. So you’re looking at a proud tradition here.”

He had fixed his hand on my arm all of a sudden, tight and congenial, like a fraternity brother.

“Forget about whips, okay? Forget about Tasers. The BLP allows it, you probably know that, but I can tell you—because I know the folks down on the sixth floor—I can tell you that we do not use Tasers here. Once in a blue moon, maybe, is it thought to be necessary. Because this here is an
incentive
-based facility, okay?” His fingers were tight as a shackle on my bicep. “And I tell you, you hear folks saying, what do they feed those poor boys? Then I go home on meat-loaf night at my house, I’m thinking, gee, I
wish
I was over in the mess hall with the peebs!” He snorted. “I only
wish!
Just don’t go telling my wife!”

I laughed, good and loud.
Come on, Victor. Come on, Brother.
Get it done. Find this fool trucker, find out what happened to that envelope. Bring the damn thing home. That was all I had to do. I laughed and laughed.

Newell, encouraged by my laughter, in full booster mode, turned his attention back to Martha. “Can I tell you something crazy?” He leaned in toward her earnestly. “If Garments of the Greater South were its own country, we would have a gross domestic product bigger than that of Rhode Island!” He leaned back, goggle-eyed, red-faced. “Now, ain’t that a hell of a thing?”

“It sure is,” said Martha. “It sure is.”

One thing that you could see from up here that
hadn’t
been included in the satellite imagery from the full file were the cotton fields themselves, the unending acres of them, rolling out from the campus in all directions like the moonscape beyond a space station. And I could not see them, not from this height, but I knew they were out there, hundreds of Persons Bound to Labor too small to be seen, lost in among the long white lines of cotton. For a second or two I stared out into those distant fields, stared at the fact that when this was over, once I talked to that driver and he pointed me to the next place I had to go, I would walk out of here, and those people I could not see but knew to be suffering, they all would be here forever.

What do you do with that fact? Do you hold it like a stone in your hand? Pitch it away from this great height and watch it fall? Do you swallow it and feel it in your throat till the day you die?

The elevator dinged. “All right, now,” said Newell. “Let’s head on down.”

Martha really was a goddamn natural.

We filed into Matty Newell’s small office on the fourteenth floor, past a hallway of air-conditioner chill and the faint smell of coffee, the three of us crowded in there with the filing cabinets and his smooth black desk and computer. She and I had practiced it, going around and around, back and forth, in the lawyer’s basement, and as soon as Newell closed his door behind us, away she went. Off to the races.

“Well, as long as we’re here, visiting,” she said, and he grinned, gave her a tsk-tsk.

“Here it comes, huh? Here comes the sales pitch.”

Martha winked. “You caught me. It’ll be painless, Matthew, I promise it will.”

“Matty.”

“
Matty
. All I want to do is ask you a simple question.”

“All right.” His brows were knitted. His fingers were laced together. I could read his thoughts—from back by the door with my eager smile, a good boy, an obedient boy, I could see what he was thinking:
I’ve got no juice anyway. I can’t say yes or no to anything
. He had given us the tour. That was what he had to offer. His smile was preapologetic—soon she would find out, this pretty lady from Peach Tree Management Systems who had dropped from the sky into his little life, that he had no juice. We’d chosen him well.

My eyes flitted to the four corners of the room, one by one. Nothing. Not that a camera couldn’t be small, of course. Buried in the plaster; screwed into the lights. But nothing that I could see.

“All I ask is that you answer one question,” said Martha. “And it’s a darn easy question, too.”

“Okay…”

“This question is like, you know”—she palmed her forehead—“
duh.
”

“Okay.” Mr. Newell laughed. “Sure. I getcha.”

“So here’s the question. What is it that y’all are selling here?”

Newell puffed out his cheeks. Opened his hands. “Cotton? Cotton goods?” he said, tentatively, shyly, like a kid getting a trick played on him. Waited to see if that was right, then tried again. “A brand? A, uh…” He fumbled for the buzzword. “A lifestyle?”

“No, sir,” said Martha, shaking her head slowly, exuding confidence. I could have applauded. “What you are selling is
time
.”

She launched into it then, good and confident, the whole
Music Man
business, while I made my comprehensive survey of his office, moving only my eyes: two squat filing cabinets; a floor-to-ceiling tiered bookshelf, lined with binders and regulatory manuals; a sturdy industrial desk with a metal frame and a glass top, with three pictures arranged neatly (Mrs. Newell, Mr. and Mrs., Mr. and Mrs. and a handsome chocolate Lab). Hidden from view, not visible but certainly present, was the fingerprint danger button: on the underside of the desk, most likely; under the seat of the chair, second choice. Behind and to the right of where Newell sat was a single interior door. Not to any kind of executive washroom, surely. Our Mr. Newell wasn’t pulling those kinds of perks. A closet, more likely. Storage.

While I crawled through his tidy junior executive’s lair with my eyes, Martha was giving it to Matty with both barrels: “You got yourself four thousand, two hundred and thirty-two folks out there”—pausing, just barely, a quick sly acknowledgment that she had the figure, she’d done her homework—“and it’s their
time
that you all are selling. Every hour of good work they give to the company, every darn
minute
of it,
that
is the product.

“Now, let’s say we take one Person Bound to Labor,” she said, “and pop him anywhere on the flowchart. Okay? He’s splitting open bales. He’s a loom operator. Doesn’t matter. He’s top-level, he’s a trusty, he’s punching code on a pattern maker. Okay?”

“Okay…”

“Let’s say he works one hour. How many minutes are in that hour?”

Newell hesitated—he knew there was some smart answer here, but he couldn’t figure it. “Sixty?”

“No, sir,” said Martha, said Jane Reynolds, saleswoman of the year. “Maybe it’s fifty. Maybe thirty. Maybe a hundred! It all depends on what’s going on in that man’s head, what’s going on with that man’s body. What we sell at Peach Tree, what we do is, we sell minutes. With our system of incentives and corrections, we add minutes to the hours that your PBLs are putting in, and you know what that does?”

“Uh…” He was afraid to answer. Afraid to be wrong. “It makes better clothes?”

“It makes money, Mr. Newell!” She spread her hands. “It makes more money.”

Newell chortled. “Well, we sure hope so!”

For a surreal half a moment I became excited at the prospect of making a sale. Ms. Reynolds and I would return to the office in Birmingham and report on our success, log it in the system, get high fives from the other sales teams, arrange a meeting with the tech guys for follow-up. Jane Reynolds would be employee of the month. I’d get—what? What reward would a freedman associate receive? Alternate universes, other worlds.

“I tell you what,” said Martha. “I’ll
show
you. Can I show you?”

“Sure,” said Mr. Newell. He stood up, as though maybe she was going to lead him somewhere. “Show me.”

“Albert?”

I popped out of the back corner like a jack-in-the-box. “Yes, ma’am!”

“Can we get set up, please?”

She said it with mild irritation, like she couldn’t believe I hadn’t done it already. I saw the small look she gave to Newell, the small look he gave back:
these people.
I opened the bag, opened up the laptop, and pressed a few buttons. Newell scurried out of my way, stood awkwardly in his own office, hands behind his back, ponytail jutting out over his pink neck.

“Okay,” said Martha. “Away we go. Albert, would you mind hitting the lights for us?”

“They’re just there,” said Newell and pointed, and I hopped over to the light switch.

“What I’m going to show you,” said Martha, calling up the first slide—the logo for Peach Tree, clipped off their website—and beaming it onto the window shade of Newell’s office, “if you’ll bear with me, is just a taste of the proprietary technology that Peach Tree is offering. Just a sense of it. So…”