The Underground Railroad (24 page)

Once the hogs disappeared, Georgina and some of the younger women took the children to the barn for games and sing-alongs. The children didn’t sit still for all the talk at the meetings. Their
absence placed the stakes of the discussions into relief; ultimately, it was for the young ones that they schemed. Even if the adults were free of the shackles that had held them fast, bondage had stolen too much time. Only the children could take full advantage of their dreaming. If white men let them.

The meeting house filled. Cora joined Sybil in a pew. Tonight was to be a subdued affair.
Next month after the shucking bee, the farm would host the most important gathering yet, to address the recent debates about picking up stakes. In advance, the Valentines had reduced the Saturday-night entertainments. The pleasant weather—and the warnings of the coming Indiana winter, which scared those who’d never seen snow—kept them occupied. Trips to town turned into dallying expeditions. Social
calls stretched into the evening now that so many colored settlers had put down roots, the advance guard of a great migration.

Many of the farm’s leaders were out of town. Valentine himself was in Chicago meeting with the banks, his two sons in tow now that they were old enough to help with the farm’s accounts. Lander traveled with one of the new abolitionist societies in New York, on a speaking
tour of New England; they kept him busy. What he learned during this latest excursion into the country would doubtless shape his contribution to the big meeting.

Cora studied her neighbors. She’d held out hope that Jimmy’s hogs would lure Royal back in time, but he and his partners were still engaged in their mission for the underground railroad. There was no word from their party. Gruesome reports
reached the farm concerning a posse that had strung up some colored troublemakers the previous night. It had happened thirty miles downstate, and the victims supposedly worked for the railroad, but nothing specific on top of that. A freckled woman unfamiliar to Cora—so many strangers these days—carried on about the lynchings in a loud voice. Sybil turned and shushed her, then gave Cora a quick
hug as Gloria Valentine stepped to the lectern.

Gloria had been working in the laundry of an indigo plantation when John Valentine met her. “The most delicious vision these eyes ever beheld,” Valentine liked to tell the new arrivals, drawing out
delicious
as if ladling hot caramel. Valentine didn’t make a habit of visiting slavers in those days, but he’d gone in on a shipment of feed with Gloria’s
owner. By the end of the week he had purchased her freedom. A week after that they wed.

She was still delicious, and as graceful and composed as if she’d gone to a finishing school for white ladies. She protested that she didn’t enjoy filling in for her husband, but her ease in front of a crowd argued otherwise. Gloria worked hard on eliminating her plantation inflections—Cora heard her slip
when conversation took a folksy turn—but she was naturally impressive, whether she spoke colored or white. When Valentine’s addresses took a stern tone, his practical disposition overcoming his generosity, Gloria stepped in to smooth matters.

“Did you all have a pleasant day?” Gloria said when the room quieted. “I was down in the root cellar all day and then I come up to see what a gift God gave
us today. That sky. And them hogs…”

She apologized for her husband’s absence. John Valentine wanted to take advantage of the big harvest to renegotiate their loan. “Lord knows, there’s so much in the offing, it’s nice to have a little peace of mind.” She bowed at Mingo, who sat in front, next to the empty space usually reserved for Valentine. Mingo was a stoutly made man of middle stature, with
a West Indian complexion that was livened by his red checkered suit tonight. He gave an amen and turned to nod at his allies in the meeting house.

Sybil nudged Cora at this acknowledgment of the farm’s political arguments, an acknowledgment that legitimized Mingo’s position. There was frequent talk now of lighting out west, where colored towns sprouted up on the other side of the Arkansas River.
To places that didn’t share a border with slave states, had never countenanced the abomination of slavery. Mingo advocated staying in Indiana, but with a severe reduction in those they sheltered: the runaways, the lost. People like Cora. The parade of famous visitors spreading the farm’s renown made the place into a symbol of colored uplift—and a target. After all, the specter of colored rebellion,
all those angry dark faces surrounding them, had stirred white settlers to leave the south. They come to Indiana, and right next door is a black nation rising. It always ended in violence.

Sybil scorned Mingo, his greasy personality and constant jockeying; an imperious nature lurked beneath his gregariousness. Yes, the man wore an honorable legend: After he hired himself out from his master for
weekend labor, he had purchased the freedom of his wife, then his children, and finally himself. Sybil dismissed this prodigious feat—the man got lucky with regards to his master is all. Mingo would never be more than an opportunist, harassing the farm with his own notions about colored advancement. With Lander, he would take the lectern at next month’s gathering to decide their future.

Cora
declined to join her friend in her derision. Mingo had been distant to her on account of the attention that runaways brought to the farm, and when he heard she was wanted for murder, shunned Cora altogether. Still, the man had saved his family and could’ve died before completing his task—it was a mighty thing. Her first day in the schoolhouse his two girls, Amanda and Marie, had delivered the Declaration
with poise. They were admirable girls. But no, Cora didn’t like his smart talk. Something in his smile reminded her of Blake, that preening buck from the old days. Mingo didn’t need a place to put his doghouse, but surely he was on the lookout to expand his domain.

They’d get to the music in short order, Gloria reassured them. There weren’t what Valentine called “dignitaries” among them tonight—in
fancy clothes, with Yankee accents—although some guests from the county had come down the road. Gloria asked them to stand up and identify themselves for a welcome. Then it was time for the diversions. “While you digest that fine meal, we have a sweet treat,” she said. “You may recognize his face from his earlier visit to Valentine, a most distinguished young man of the arts.”

The previous Saturday,
it had been a pregnant opera singer from Montreal. The Saturday before that, a violinist from Connecticut who made half the women weep, so overcome were they with feeling. Tonight belonged to the poet. Rumsey Brooks was solemn and slim, dressed in a black suit with a black bow tie. He looked like a traveling preacher.

HE’D
been there three months prior with a delegation out of Ohio. Did the
Valentine farm deserve its reputation? An old white lady devoted to the cause of negro uplift had organized the expedition. The widow of a big Boston lawyer, she collected funds for various ventures, the publication and dissemination of colored literature a particular concern. After hearing one of Lander’s orations, she arranged for the distribution of his autobiography; the printer had previously
put out a line of Shakespeare’s tragedies. The volume’s first run sold out in days, a handsome edition with Elijah Lander’s name in gold leaf. Rumsey’s own manuscript was forthcoming next month, Gloria said.

The poet kissed his host’s hand and asked permission to share some of his poetry. He was not without charisma, Cora had to admit. According to Georgina, Rumsey courted one of the milk-house
girls, but was so liberal with flattery that he was obviously a young man open to the sweet mysteries of fate. “Who knows what destiny has in store for us,” he asked Cora on his first visit, “and what kind of people we will have the pleasure to know?” Royal suddenly appeared at her side and pulled her away from the poet’s honey words.

She should have recognized Royal’s intentions. If she’d known
how out of sorts his disappearances made her, she would have rebuffed him.

With Gloria’s blessing, the poet cleared his throat. “ ’Ere I saw a dappled wonder,” he recited, his voice rising and dipping as if battling a headwind. “Settling ’cross the fields, hovering on angel wings and brandishing a blazing shield…”

The meeting house amened and sighed. Rumsey tried not to smile at their reaction,
the effect of his performance. Cora couldn’t make much out of his poems: a visitation of a magnificent presence, a seeker awaiting a message. A conversation between an acorn, a sapling, and a powerful oak. Also a tribute to Benjamin Franklin and his ingenuity. Versifying left her cold. Poems were too close to prayer, rousing regrettable passions. Waiting for God to rescue you when it was up to
you. Poetry and prayer put ideas in people’s heads that got them killed, distracting them from the ruthless mechanism of the world.

After the poetry the musicians were set to perform, some players who had just joined the farm. The poet prepared the dancing circles well, intoxicating them with visions of flight and release. If it made them happy, who was Cora to belittle them? They put bits of
themselves into his characters, grafting their faces onto the figures in his rhymes. Did they see themselves in Benjamin Franklin or his inventions? Slaves were tools, so maybe the latter, but no one here was a slave. Counted as property by someone far away, perhaps, but not here.

The entire farm was something beyond her imagination. The Valentines had performed a miracle. She sat among the proof
of it; more than that, she was part of that miracle. She had given herself too easily to the false promises of South Carolina. Now a bitter part of her refused the treasures of the Valentine farm, even as every day some blessing part came into bloom. In a young girl taking her hand. In her fears for a man she’d come to feel for.

Rumsey closed with an appeal for nurturing the artistic temperament
in young and old alike, “to stoke that Apollonian ember in all mortal beings.” One of the newcomers shoved the lectern across the stage. A cue for the musicians, and a cue for Cora. Sybil knew her friend’s ways by now and kissed her farewell. The hall stifled; outside it was cold and dark. Cora left to the sound of the large pews scraping to make room to dance. She passed someone on the path who
declared, “You going the wrong way, girl!”

When she got home, Royal was leaning against a post of her porch. His silhouette, even in the dark. “I thought you’d be along once that banjo got on,” he said.

Cora lit the lamp and saw his black eye, the yellow-purple lump. “Oh,” she said, hugging him, putting her face into his neck.

“A scuffle is all,” he said. “We got away.” Cora shuddered and he
whispered, “I know you were worried. I didn’t feel like mixing with folks tonight, reckoned I’d wait here.”

On the porch, they sat on the lovelorn carpenters’ chairs and took in the night. He moved over so their shoulders touched.

She told him what he’d missed, the poet and the meal.

“There’ll be more,” he said. “I got you something.” He rummaged in his leather satchel. “It’s this year’s edition,
but I thought you’d appreciate it even though it’s October. When I get to a place where they got next year’s, I’ll pick it up.”

She grabbed his hand. The almanac had a strange, soapy smell and made a cracking noise like fire as she turned the pages. She’d never been the first person to open a book.

Royal took her to the ghost tunnel after a month on the farm.

Cora started working her second day, thoughts in a knot over Valentine’s motto: “Stay, and contribute.” A request, and a cure. She contributed first in the washhouse. The head of the laundry was a woman named Amelia who’d known the Valentines in Virginia and followed two years later. Gently she warned Cora against “abusing the garments.”
Cora was quick with her labor on Randall. Working with her hands stirred her old, fearful industry. She and Amelia decided that she might prefer another chore. She helped in the milk house for a week and did a stint with Aunty, watching the babies while their parents worked. After that, she spread manure in the fields when the leaves of the Indian corn turned yellow. As Cora bent in the rows
she looked out for an overseer, haunted.

“You look weary,” Royal told her one August evening after Lander delivered one of his speeches. Lander’s talk verged on a sermon, concerning the dilemma of finding your purpose once you’ve slipped the yoke of slavery. The manifold frustrations of liberty. Like the rest of the farm, Cora regarded the man with awe. He was an exotic prince, traveling from
a far land to teach them how people conducted themselves in decent places. Places so far away they eluded all maps.

Elijah Lander’s father was a rich white lawyer in Boston who lived openly with his colored wife. They suffered the rebukes of their circle and in midnight whispers characterized their offspring as the union of an African goddess and a pale mortal. A demigod. To hear the white dignitaries
tell it in their long-winded introductions to his speeches, Lander demonstrated his brilliance from an early age. A sickly child, he made the family library his playground, poring over volumes he struggled to lift from the shelves. At the age of six, he played the piano like a European master. He performed concerts to the empty parlor, bowing to silent applause.

Family friends interceded to make
him the first colored student at one of the prestigious white colleges. “They gave me a slave pass,” as he described it, “and I used it for mischief.” Lander lived in a broom closet; no one would room with him. After four years his fellows elected him valedictorian. He skittered between obstacles like a primeval creature who had outwitted the modern world. Lander could have been anything he wanted.
A surgeon, a judge. Brahmins urged him to go to the nation’s capital to make his mark in politics. He’d broken through into a small corner of American success where his race did not curse him. Some might have lived in that space happily, rising alone. Lander wanted to make room for others. People were wonderful company sometimes.

In the end, he chose to give speeches. In his parents’ parlor to
an audience of distinguished Bostonians, then in the homes of those distinguished Bostonians, in colored meeting houses and Methodist churches and lecture halls throughout New England. Sometimes he was the first colored person to set foot in the buildings apart from the men who built them, the women who cleaned them.

Red-faced sheriffs arrested him for sedition. He was jailed for inciting riots
that weren’t riots but peaceful gatherings. The Honorable Judge Edmund Harrison of Maryland issued a warrant for his arrest, accusing him of “promulgating an infernal orthodoxy that imperils the fabric of good society.” A white mob beat him before he was rescued by those who had come to hear him read from his “Declarations of the Rights of the American Negro.” From Florida to Maine his pamphlets,
and later his autobiography, were burned in bonfires along with his effigy. “Better in effigy than in person,” he said.

What private aches nagged him beneath that placid demeanor, none could say. He remained imperturbable and strange. “I’m what the botanists call a hybrid,” he said the first time Cora heard him speak. “A mixture of two different families. In flowers, such a concoction pleases
the eye. When that amalgamation takes its shape in flesh and blood, some take great offense. In this room we recognize it for what it is—a new beauty come into the world, and it is in bloom all around us.”

WHEN
Lander finished his address that August night, Cora and Royal sat on the meeting-house steps. The other residents streamed past them. Lander’s words had set Cora in a melancholy place.
“I don’t want them to put me out,” she said.

Royal turned over her palm and slid a thumb across her fresh calluses. No need to fret about that, he said. He proposed a trip to see more of Indiana, as a break from her labors.

The next day they set out in a buggy pulled by two piebald horses. With her wages she had bought a new dress and bonnet. The bonnet covered the scar on her temple, for the
most part. The scar made her nervous lately. She’d never thought overlong about brands before, the Xs and Ts and clovers slave masters burned into their chattel. A horseshoe puckered on Sybil’s neck, ugly and purple—her first owner had raised draft horses. Cora thanked the Lord that her skin had never been burned in such a way. But we have all been branded even if you can’t see it, inside if not
without—and the wound from Randall’s cane was the very same thing, marking her as his.

Cora had been to town plenty, even climbed the steps of the white bakery to buy a cake. Royal took them in the opposite direction. The sky was a sheet of slate but it was still warm, an August afternoon that let you know its kind was running out. They stopped for a picnic at the side of a meadow, under a crab
apple tree. He’d packed some bread, jam, and sausage. She let him put his head in her lap. She considered running her hands through the soft black curls by his ears but refrained when a memory of old violence reared up.

On the way back Royal turned the buggy down an overgrown path. Cora wouldn’t have seen it otherwise. Cottonwood swallowed the entrance. He said he wanted to show her something.
She thought it might be a pond or a quiet place no one knew about. Instead they rounded a turn and stopped at a forlorn, ramshackle cottage, gray like chewed-up meat. Shutters slanted off, wild grasses bowing from the roof. Weather-beaten was the word—the house was a whipped mutt. She hesitated at the threshold. The grime and moss gave her a lonesome feeling, even with Royal there.

Weeds pushed
out of the floor of the main room as well. She covered her nose from the stench. “It makes that manure smell sweet,” she said. Royal laughed and said he’d always thought manure smelled sweet. He uncovered the trapdoor to the cellar and lit a candle. The stairs creaked. Animals scurried in the cellar, outraged over the intrusion. Royal counted off six paces and started digging. He stopped when he
had exposed the second trapdoor, and they descended to the station. He warned her about the steps, which were slick with a gray slime.

It was the sorriest, saddest station yet. There was no drop to the tracks—the rails started at the end of the steps and jetted into the dark tunnel. A small handcar rested on the tracks, its iron pump waiting for a human touch to animate it. As in the mica mine
in North Carolina, long wooden planks and struts buttressed the walls and ceiling.

“It’s not made for a locomotive,” Royal said. “The tunnel is too small, see. It doesn’t connect to the rest of the line.”

No one had been there in a long time. Cora asked where it went.

Royal grinned. “It’s from before my time. The conductor I replaced showed me when I took over this section. I took that handcar
a few miles in, but it was too unsettling. The walls hugging and coming close.” Cora knew better than to ask who built it. All the railroad men, from Lumbly to Royal, countered with a variation of “Who do you think made it? Who makes everything?” She’d get him to tell her one day, she decided.

The ghost tunnel had never been used, Royal said, as far as anyone knew. No one knew when it was dug,
or who had lived above. Some engineers told him the house had been built by one of the old surveyors, like Lewis and Clark, who had explored and mapped the American wilderness. “If you saw the entire country,” Royal said, “from the Atlantic to the Pacific, the great Niagara Falls and the Rio Grande, would you make a home here, in the woods of Indiana?” An old station master offered that it had been
the home of a major general in the Revolutionary War, a man who had witnessed much bloodshed and had withdrawn from the young nation after helping to bring it into existence.

A recluse story contained more sense, but Royal thought the army part was claptrap. Did Cora notice that there was no sign that someone had lived there, not even an old toothpick or a nail in the wall?

A notion crept over
her like a shadow: that this station was not the start of the line but its terminus. Construction hadn’t started beneath the house but at the other end of the black hole. As if in the world there were no places to escape to, only places to flee.

In the cellar above, the scavengers roused to activity, scraping.

Such a dank little hole. Any trip with this point of origin could only be ill-fated.
The last time she’d been in one of the railroad’s departure stations it had been brightly lit, generous in its comforts, and had delivered her to the bounty of Valentine. That was in Tennessee, when they waited to be carried away from the dangerous escapade with Ridgeway. The events of that night still made her heart quicken.

ONCE
they left the slave catcher and his wagon, her rescuers gave
their names. Royal was the man who’d spied her in town; his partner was Red, owing to the rusty color of his curly hair. The timid one was Justin, a fugitive like her and unaccustomed to waving bowie knives at white men.

After Cora agreed to go with them—never had an inevitability been so politely proposed—the three men made haste to hide the signs of the altercation. Homer’s looming presence,
somewhere in the dark, magnified the urgency. Red kept watch with his rifle as Royal and Justin chained first Boseman and then Ridgeway to the wagon. The slave catcher did not speak, sneering at Cora with his bloody mouth the while.

“That one,” she said, pointing, and Red chained him to the ring her captors had used for Jasper.

They drove the slave catcher’s wagon to the far edge of the pasture,
hiding it from the road. Red shackled Ridgeway five times over, using every chain in the wagon’s boot. He tossed the keys into the grass. They chased away the horses. Of Homer, there was no sound; perhaps the boy skulked just outside the lantern light. Whatever head start these measures gave would have to suffice. Boseman let out a mortifying gasp as they departed, which Cora took as his death
rattle.

Her rescuers’ cart was a short walk down the road from Ridgeway’s camp. She and Justin hid under a thick blanket in the back and they charged off, at dangerous velocity given the darkness and the uniformly poor quality of Tennessee roads. So agitated by the fight were Royal and Red that they forgot to blindfold their cargo for several miles. Royal was bashful about it. “It’s for the safety
of the depot, miss.”

That third trip on the underground railroad began beneath a stable. By now a station meant a descent down impossibly deep steps and the revelation of the next station’s character. The owner of the premises was away on business, Royal told them as he untied the rags from their eyes, a ruse to hide his part in their enterprise. Cora never got his name, nor that of the town
of departure. Just that he was another person of subterranean inclinations—and a taste for imported white tile. The walls of the station were covered with it.

“Every time we come down here, there’s something new,” Royal said. The four of them waited for the train at a table covered with a white tablecloth, sitting in heavy chairs upholstered in crimson. Fresh flowers jutted from a vase and paintings
of farmland hung on the walls. There was a cut-crystal pitcher full of water, a basket of fruit, and a big loaf of pumpernickel for them to eat.

“This is a rich folk’s house,” Justin said.

“He likes to maintain a mood,” Royal answered.

Red said he liked the white tiles, which were an improvement over the pine boards that had been there formerly. “I don’t know how he put them up himself,” he
added.

Royal said he hoped the help had a still tongue.

“You killed that man,” Justin said. He was numb. They had discovered a jug of wine inside a cupboard and the fugitive drank with abandon.

“Ask the girl if he had it coming,” Red said.

Royal grabbed Red’s forearm to stop the man’s trembling. His friend had never taken a man’s life before. The premise of their misadventure was enough to
get them hanged, but the murder ensured grim abuse before they swung. Royal was taken aback when Cora told him later that she was wanted for murder in Georgia. He recovered and said, “Then our course was already set from the moment I laid eyes on you, on that dirty street.”

Royal was the first freeborn man Cora had ever met. There were many freemen in South Carolina who’d relocated for the so-called
opportunities, but they’d served their time as chattel. Royal took in liberty with his first breath.

He was raised in Connecticut; his father was a barber and his mother a midwife. They were freeborn as well, hailing from New York City. On their orders, Royal apprenticed with a printer as soon as he was old enough to labor. His parents believed in the dignity of the honest trades, envisioning
the generations of their family branching into the future, each more accomplished than the last. If the north had eliminated slavery, one day the abominable institution would fall everywhere. The negro’s story may have started in this country with degradation, but triumph and prosperity would be his one day.

Had his parents realized the power of their reminiscences on the boy, they might have
been more reserved in their stories of their native city. Royal lit out for Manhattan at eighteen, and his first sight of the majestic city from the rail of the ferry confirmed his fate. He took a room with three other men in a colored boardinghouse in Five Points and hung a shingle as a barber until he met the famous Eugene Wheeler. The white man started a conversation with Royal at an antislavery
meeting; impressed, Wheeler told him to come to his office the next day. Royal had read of the man’s exploits in the newspaper—lawyer, abolitionist crusader, bane of slavers and those who did their dirty work. Royal scouted the city jail for runaways the lawyer might defend, ran messages between enigmatic persons, and distributed funds from antislavery societies to relocated fugitives. By his official
induction into the underground railroad, he had been its instrument for some time.