The Underground Railroad (2 page)

Ran away from the subscriber, living in Salisbury, on the 5th instant, a negro girl by the name of
LIZZIE
. It is supposed that said girl is in the vicinity of Mrs. Steel’s plantation. I will give the above reward on the delivery of the girl, or for information on her being lodged in any Gaol in this state. All persons are forewarned of harboring said girl, under penalty of
law prescribed.

W
.
M
.
DIXON

J
ULY 18, 1820

JOCKEY’S
birthday only came once or twice a year. They tried to make a proper celebration. It was always Sunday, their half day. At three o’clock the bosses signaled the end of work and the northern plantation scurried to prepare, rushing through chores. Mending, scavenging moss, patching the leak in the roof. The feast took precedence, unless you had a pass to go into town to sell crafts or had
hired yourself out for day labor. Even if you were inclined to forgo the extra wages—and no one was so inclined—impossible was the slave impudent enough to tell a white man he couldn’t work because it was a slave’s birthday. Everybody knew niggers didn’t have birthdays.

Cora sat by the edge of her plot on her block of sugar maple and worked dirt from under her fingernails. When she could, Cora
contributed turnips or greens to the birthday feasts, but nothing was coming in today. Someone shouted down the alley, one of the new boys most likely, not completely broken in by Connelly yet, and the shouts cracked open into a dispute. The voices more crotchety than angry, but loud. It was going to be a memorable birthday if folks were already this riled.

“If you could pick your birthday, what
would it be?” Lovey asked.

Cora couldn’t see Lovey’s face for the sun behind her, but she knew her friend’s expression. Lovey was uncomplicated, and there was going to be a celebration that night. Lovey gloried in these rare escapes, whether it was Jockey’s birthday, Christmas, or one of the harvest nights when everyone with two hands stayed up picking and the Randalls had the bosses distribute
corn whiskey to keep them happy. It was work, but the moon made it okay. The girl was the first to tell the fiddler to get busy and the first to dance. She’d try to pull Cora from the sidelines, ignoring her protestations. As if they’d twirl in circles, arm in arm, with Lovey catching a boy’s eyes for a second on every revolution and Cora following suit. But Cora never joined her, tugging her arm
away. She watched.

“Told you when I was born,” Cora said. She was born in winter. Her mother, Mabel, had complained enough about her hard delivery, the rare frost that morning, the wind howling between the seams in the cabin. How her mother bled for days and Connelly didn’t bother to call the doctor until she looked half a ghost. Occasionally Cora’s mind tricked her and she’d turn the story into
one of her memories, inserting the faces of ghosts, all the slave dead, who looked down at her with love and indulgence. Even people she hated, the ones who kicked her or stole her food once her mother was gone.

“If you could pick,” Lovey said.

“Can’t pick,” Cora said. “It’s decided for you.”

“You best fix your mood,” Lovey said. She sped off.

Cora kneaded her calves, grateful for the time
off her feet. Feast or no feast, this was where Cora ended up every Sunday when their half day of work was done: perched on her seat, looking for things to fix. She owned herself for a few hours every week was how she looked at it, to tug weeds, pluck caterpillars, thin out the sour greens, and glare at anyone planning incursions on her territory. Tending to her bed was necessary maintenance but
also a message that she had not lost her resolve since the day of the hatchet.

The dirt at her feet had a story, the oldest story Cora knew. When Ajarry planted there, soon after her long march to the plantation, the plot was a rumble of dirt and scrub behind her cabin, at the end of the line of slave quarters. Beyond that lay fields and after that the swamp. Then Randall had a dream one night
about a white sea that ranged as far as the eye could see and switched his crop from dependable indigo to Sea Island cotton. He made new contacts in New Orleans, shook hands with speculators backed by the Bank of England. The money came in as never before. Europe was famished for cotton and needed to be fed, bale by bale. One day the bucks cleared the trees and at night when they returned from the
fields they got in chopping logs for the new row of cabins.

Looking at them now as folks chased in and out, getting ready, it was hard for Cora to imagine a time when the fourteen cabins hadn’t been there. For all the wear, the complaints from deep in the wood at every step, the cabins had the always-quality of the hills to the west, of the creek that bisected the property. The cabins radiated
permanence and in turn summoned timeless feelings in those who lived and died in them: envy and spite. If they’d left more space between the old cabins and the new cabins it would have spared a lot of grief over the years.

White men squabbled before judges over claims to this or that tract hundreds of miles away that had been carved up on a map. Slaves fought with equal fervor over their tiny
parcels at their feet. The strip between the cabins was a place to tie a goat, build a chicken coop, a spot to grow food to fill your belly on top of the mash doled out by the kitchen every morning. If you got there first. When Randall, and later his sons, got a notion to sell you, the contract wasn’t dry before someone had snatched up your plot. Seeing you out there in the evening calm, smiling
or humming, might give your neighbor an idea to coerce you from your claim using methods of intimidation, various provocations. Who would hear your appeal? There were no judges here.

“But my mother wouldn’t let them touch her field,” Mabel told her daughter. Field in jest, as Ajarry’s stake was scarcely three yards square. “Said she’d dig a hammer in they heads if they so much as looked at it.”

The image of her grandmother assaulting another slave didn’t jibe with Cora’s recollections of the woman, but once she started tending to the plot she understood the truth of the portrait. Ajarry kept watch over her garden through prosperity’s transformations. The Randalls bought out the Spencer spread to the north, once that family decided to try their luck out west. They bought the next plantation
south and switched the crop from rice to cotton, adding two more cabins to each row, but Ajarry’s plot remained in the middle of it all, immovable, like a stump that reached down too deep. After Ajarry’s death, Mabel assumed care of the yams and okra, whatever struck her fancy. The fuss started when Cora took it over.

WHEN
Mabel vanished Cora became a stray. Eleven years old, ten years, thereabouts—there
was no one now to tell for sure. In Cora’s shock, the world drained to gray impressions. The first color to return was the simmering brown-red of the soil in her family’s plot. It reawakened her to people and things, and she decided to hold on to her stake, even though she was young and small and had nobody to look after her anymore. Mabel was too quiet and stubborn to be popular but
people had respected Ajarry. Her shadow had provided protection. Most of the original Randall slaves were in the ground now or sold, some variety of gone. Was there anyone left who was loyal to her grandmother? Cora made a canvass of the village: Not a soul. They were all dead.

She fought for the dirt. There were the small pests, the ones too young for real work. Cora shooed off those children
trampling her sprouts and yelled at them for digging up her yam slips, using the same tone she used at Jockey’s feasts to corral them into footraces and games. She handled them with good nature.

But pretenders stepped from the wings. Ava. Cora’s mother and Ava grew up on the plantation at the same time. They were treated to the same Randall hospitality, the travesties so routine and familiar
that they were a kind of weather, and the ones so imaginative in their monstrousness that the mind refused to accommodate them. Sometimes such an experience bound one person to another; just as often the shame of one’s powerlessness made all witnesses into enemies. Ava and Mabel did not get along.

Ava was wiry and strong, with hands as quick as a cottonmouth. Speed that was good for picking and
for clopping her little ones across the face for idleness and other sins. She cherished her chickens more than those children and coveted Cora’s land to expand her coop. “It’s a waste,” Ava said, ticking her tongue against her teeth. “All that for her.” Ava and Cora slept next to each other every night in the loft and even though they were crammed up there with eight other people Cora could distinguish
Ava’s every frustration as it moved through the wood. The woman’s breath was humid with rage, sour. She made a point of knocking Cora whenever she got up to make water.

“You in Hob now,” Moses told Cora one afternoon when she came in from helping with the baling. Moses had made a deal with Ava, using some form of currency. Ever since Connelly had promoted the field hand to boss, to one of the
overseer’s enforcers, Moses had set himself up as a broker of cabin intrigues. Order in the rows, such as it was, needed to be preserved, and there were things a white man could not do. Moses accepted his role with enthusiasm. Cora thought he had a mean face, like a burl sprouting from a squat, sweaty trunk. She wasn’t surprised when his character revealed itself—if you waited long enough, it always
did. Like the dawn. Cora slunk over to Hob, where they banished the wretched. There was no recourse, were no laws but the ones rewritten every day. Someone had already moved her things over.

No one remembered the unfortunate who had lent his name to the cabin. He lived long enough to embody qualities before being undone by them. Off to Hob with those who had been crippled by the overseers’ punishments,
off to Hob with those who had been broken by the labor in ways you could see and in ways you could not see, off to Hob with those who had lost their wits. Off to Hob with strays.

The damaged men, the half men, lived in Hob first. Then the women took up residence. White men and brown men had used the women’s bodies violently, their babies came out stunted and shrunken, beatings had knocked the
sense out of their heads, and they repeated the names of their dead children in the darkness: Eve, Elizabeth, N’thaniel, Tom. Cora curled on the floor of the main room, too afraid to sleep up there with them, those abject creatures. Cursing herself for her small-mindedness even as she was powerless before it. She stared at dark shapes. The fireplace, the beams undergirding the loft, the tools dangling
off nails on the walls. The first time she had spent a night outside the cabin she’d been born in. A hundred paces and as many miles.

It was only a matter of time before Ava implemented the next stage of her scheme. And there was Old Abraham to contend with. Old Abraham, who was not old at all but who had comported himself in the manner of an elderly misanthrope since he first learned to sit
up. He had no designs but wanted the plot gone on principle. Why should he and everyone else respect this little girl’s claim just because her grandmother had kicked the dirt over once? Old Abraham was not one for tradition. He’d been sold too many times for the proposition to have much weight. On numerous occasions as she passed on errands, Cora overheard him lobby for the redistribution of her parcel.
“All that for her.” All three square yards of it.

THEN
Blake arrived. That summer young Terrance Randall assumed duties to prepare for the day he and his brother took over the plantation. He bought a bunch of niggers out of the Carolinas. Six of them, Fanti and Mandingo if the broker was to be believed, their bodies and temperament honed for labor by nature. Blake, Pot, Edward, and the rest
made a tribe of themselves on Randall land and were not above helping themselves to that which was not theirs. Terrance Randall made it known they were his new favorites, and Connelly made sure that everyone remembered it. You learned to step aside when the men were in a mood, or on a Saturday night once they’d emptied all the cider.

Blake was a big oak, a double-ration man who quickly proved
a testament to Terrance Randall’s investment acumen. The price they’d get for the offspring of such a stud alone. Blake wrassled his buddies and any other comers in a frequent spectacle, kicking up the dust, inevitably emerging the conqueror. His voice boomed through the rows as he worked and even those who despised him couldn’t help but sing along. The man had a miserable personality but the sounds
that came from his body made the labor fly.

After a few weeks of sniffing around and assessing the northern half, Blake decided that Cora’s spread would be a nice place to tie up his dog. Sun, breeze, proximity. Blake had coaxed the mutt to his side during a trip to town. The dog stayed, lingering around the smokehouse when Blake worked and barking at every noise in the busy Georgia night. Blake
knew some carpentry—it was not, as was often the case, a lie put out by the trader to bump up his price. He built a little house for his mutt and tried to induce compliments. The kind words were genuine, for the doghouse was a handsome piece of work, of nice proportion, with clean angles. There was a door on a hinge and sun and moon cutouts along the back wall.

“Ain’t this a nice mansion?” Blake
asked Old Abraham. Blake had come to value the man’s sometimes bracing candor since his arrival.

“Mighty fine work. That a little bed in there?”

Blake had sewn a pillowcase and stuffed it with moss. He decided that the patch outside his cabin was the most appropriate spot for his dog’s home. Cora had been invisible to him but now he sought her eyes when she was close, to warn her that she was
invisible no more.

She tried to call in a few debts owed her mother, the ones she knew about. They rebuffed her. Like Beau, the seamstress Mabel had nursed back to health when she was struck with fever. Mabel had given the girl her own supper portion and spooned potlikker and roots into her trembling lips until she opened her eyes again. Beau said she had paid that debt and then some and told
Cora to get back to Hob. Cora remembered that Mabel had extended an alibi to Calvin when some planting tools went missing. Connelly, who had an aptitude for the cat-o’-nine-tails, would have stripped the meat off Calvin’s back if she hadn’t concocted his defense. Would have done the same to Mabel if he’d found she was lying. Cora crept on Calvin after supper: I need help. He waved her away. Mabel
had said that she never discovered to what purpose he used those instruments.

Not soon after Blake made his intentions known, Cora woke one morning to the violation. She left Hob to check her garden. It had been a cool dawn. Wisps of white moisture hovered over the ground. There she saw it—the remains of what would have been her first cabbages. Heaped by the steps of Blake’s cabin, the tangled
vines already drying out. The ground had been turned and tamped to make a nice yard for the mutt’s house, which sat in the center of her plot like a grand mansion in the heart of a plantation.