The Underground Railroad (13 page)

Runaway or conveyed off, From the subscriber’s residence, near Henderson, on the 16th inst. a negro girl named
MARTHA
, belonging to the Subscriber. Said girl is of a dark brown complexion, slightly made, and very free spoken, about 21 years of age; she wore a black silk bonnet with feathers; and had in her possession two calico bed quiltings. I understand she will try to pass as a free girl.

RIGDON
BANKS

G
RANVILLE
C
OUNTY,
A
UGUST 28, 1839

SHE
lost the candles. One of the rats woke Cora with its teeth and when she settled herself, she crawled across the dirt of the platform in her search. She came up with nothing. It was the day after Sam’s house collapsed, though she couldn’t be sure. Best to measure time now with one of the Randall plantation’s cotton scales, her hunger and fear piling on one side while her hopes were removed
from the other in increments. The only way to know how long you are lost in the darkness is to be saved from it.

By then Cora only needed the candlelight for company, having collected the particulars of her prison. The platform was twenty-eight paces long, and five and a half from wall to tracks’ edge. It was twenty-six steps up to the world above. The trapdoor was warm when she placed her palm
against it. She knew which step snagged her dress when she crawled up (the eighth) and which liked to scrape her skin if she scrabbled down too fast (the fifteenth). Cora remembered seeing a broom in a corner of the platform. She used it to tap the ground like the blind lady in town, the way Caesar had probed the black water during their flight. Then she got clumsy or cocky and fell onto the tracks,
losing both the broom and any desire beyond huddling on the ground.

She had to get out. In those long hours, she could not keep from devising cruel scenes, arranging her own Museum of Terrible Wonders. Caesar strung up by the grinning mob; Caesar a brutalized mess on the floor of the slave catcher’s wagon, halfway back to Randall and the waiting punishments. Kind Sam in jail; Sam tarred and feathered,
interrogated about the underground railroad, broken-boned and senseless. A faceless white posse sifted through the smoldering remains of the cabin, pulled up the trapdoor and delivered her into wretchedness.

Those were the scenes she decorated in blood when awake. In nightmares the exhibits were more grotesque. She strolled back and forth before the glass, a customer of pain. She was locked in
Life on the Slave Ship after the museum had closed, ever between ports and waiting for the wind while hundreds of kidnapped souls screamed belowdecks. Behind the next window, Miss Lucy cut open Cora’s stomach with a letter opener and a thousand black spiders spilled from her guts. Over and over, she was transported back to the night of the smokehouse, held down by nurses from the hospital as Terrance
Randall grunted and thrusted above her. Usually the rats or bugs woke her when their curiosity became too much, interrupting her dreams and returning her to the darkness of the platform.

Her stomach quivered under her fingers. She had starved before, when Connelly got it in his mind to punish the quarter for mischief and cut off rations. But they needed food to work and the cotton demanded the
punishment be brief. Here, there was no way to know when she would eat next. The train was late. The night Sam told them about the bad blood—when the house still stood—the next train was due in two days. It should have arrived. She didn’t know how late it was, but the delay signified nothing good. Maybe this branch was shut down. The entire line exposed and canceled. No one was coming. She was too
weak to walk the unknowable miles to the next station, in the dark, let alone face whatever waited at the following stop.

Caesar. If they had been sensible and kept running, she and Caesar would be in the Free States. Why had they believed that two lowly slaves deserved the bounty of South Carolina? That a new life existed so close, just over the state line? It was still the south, and the devil
had long nimble fingers. And then, after all the world had taught them, not to recognize chains when they were snapped to their wrists and ankles. The South Carolina chains were of new manufacture—the keys and tumblers marked by regional design—but accomplished the purpose of chains. They had not traveled very far at all.

She could not see her own hand in front of her but saw Caesar’s capture
many times. Seized at his factory station, snatched en route to meet Sam at the Drift. Walking down Main Street, arm in arm with his girl Meg. Meg cries out when they seize him, and they knock her to the sidewalk. That was one thing that would be different if she had made Caesar her lover: They might have been captured together. They would not be alone in their separate prisons. Cora drew her knees
to her chest and wrapped her arms around them. In the end she would have disappointed him. She was a stray after all. A stray not only in its plantation meaning—orphaned, with no one to look after her—but in every other sphere as well. Somewhere, years ago, she had stepped off the path of life and could no longer find her way back to the family of people.

The earth trembled faintly. In days to
come, when she remembered the late train’s approach, she would not associate the vibration with the locomotive but with the furious arrival of a truth she had always known: She was a stray in every sense. The last of her tribe.

The light of the train shuddered around the bend. Cora reached for her hair before realizing that after her interment there was no improving her appearance. The engineer
would not judge her; their secret enterprise was a fraternity of odd souls. She waved her hands animatedly, savoring the orange light as it expanded on the platform like a warm bubble.

The train sped past the station and out of sight.

She almost keeled over into the tracks as she howled after the train, her throat raspy and raw after days of privation. Cora stood and shook, incredulous, until
she heard the train stop and back up on the tracks.

The engineer was apologetic. “Will you take my sandwich, as well?” he asked as Cora guzzled from his waterskin. She ate the sandwich, oblivious to his jest, even though she had never been partial to hog tongue.

“You’re not supposed to be here,” the boy said, adjusting his spectacles. He was no older than fifteen, raw-boned and eager.

“Well,
you see me, don’t you?” She licked her fingers and tasted dirt.

The boy cried “Gosh!” and “Sweet mother!” at every complication in her story, tucking his thumbs into the pockets of his overalls and rocking on his heels. He spoke like one of the white children Cora had observed in the town square playing kick-the-ball, with a carefree authority that did not jibe with the color of his skin, let
alone the nature of his job. How he came to command the locomotive was a story, but now was not the time for the unlikely histories of colored boys.

“Georgia station is closed,” he said finally, scratching his scalp beneath his blue cap. “We’re supposed to stay away. Patrollers must have smoked it out, I figure.” He clambered into his cabin after his pisspot, then went to the edge of the tunnel
and emptied it. “The bosses hadn’t heard from the station agent, so I was running express. This stop wasn’t on my schedule.” He wanted to leave immediately.

Cora hesitated, unable to stop herself from looking at the stairs for a last-minute addition. The impossible passenger. Then she started for the cabin.

“You can’t go up here!” the boy said. “It’s regulations.”

“You can’t expect me to ride
on that,” Cora said.

“All passengers ride coach on this train, miss. They’re pretty strict about that.”

To call the flatcar a coach was an abuse of the word. It was a boxcar like the one she rode to South Carolina, but only in foundation. The plane of wooden planks was riveted to the undercarriage, without walls or ceiling. She stepped aboard and the train jolted with the boy’s preparations.
He turned his head and waved at his passenger with disproportionate enthusiasm.

Straps and ropes for oversize freight lay on the floor, loose and serpentine. Cora sat in the center of the flatcar, wrapped one around her waist three times, grabbed another two and fashioned reins. She pulled tight.

The train lurched into the tunnel. Northward. The engineer yelled, “All aboard!” The boy was simple,
Cora decided, responsibilities of his office notwithstanding. She looked back. Her underground prison waned as the darkness reclaimed it. She wondered if she was its final passenger. May the next traveler not tarry and keep moving up the line, all the way to liberty.

In the journey to South Carolina, Cora had slept in the turbulent car, nestled against Caesar’s warm body. She did not sleep on
her next train ride. Her so-called coach was sturdier than the boxcar, but the rushing air made the ride into a blustery ordeal. From time to time, Cora had to turn her body to catch her breath. The engineer was more reckless than his predecessor, going faster, goading the machine into velocity. The flatcar jumped whenever they took a turn. The closest she had ever been to the sea was her term in
the Museum of Natural Wonders; these planks taught her about ships and squalls. The engineer’s crooning drifted back, songs she did not recognize, debris from the north kicked up by the gale. Eventually she gave up and lay on her stomach, fingers dug into the seams.

“How goes it back there?” the engineer asked when they stopped. They were in the middle of the tunnel, no station in sight.

Cora
flapped her reins.

“Good,” the boy said. He wiped the soot and sweat from his forehead. “We’re about halfway there. Needed to stretch my legs.” He slapped the side of the boiler. “This old girl, she bucks.”

It wasn’t until they were moving again that Cora realized she forgot to ask where they were headed.