Underground Airlines (37 page)

He was sweating; a heavy sweat on his forehead like a glaze. Martha looked from him to me, from me to him.

“FWH,” I said. “It’s an abbreviation. From your roster of contract drivers. Please tell me what it means.”

“It’s—that’s…it’s Free White Housing.” His voice quivering like a ribbon. “That’s—our white people. They live here…FWH just means—that’s where they live.”

He was here. The truck driver. Working white. William Fucking Smith lived
here.

I got down closer to Mr. Newell, down on my heels. I made my eyes wide and clenched my teeth. I was not going to kill Matty Newell, but his fear was of value. I used it as a gun, as a hundred-dollar bill, as the bent end of a paper clip to spring open a lock.

“FWH nine,” I said. “B eight.”

“Free White Housing area nine. Unit B eight. It’s…it’s like—an apartment complex. I don’t know.”

“Any reason a slave would go there?”

“Go—where?”

“To Free White Housing.”

“Yes. I mean, yes. Not—not usually, but yes. Niggers—I’m sorry. I’m sorry, sir. Slaves—I’m sorry…black persons…I’m sorry. Oh, Lord.” He licked his lips. Snot ran from his nose. When Matty Newell told this story later, he’d say I had a shotgun, at least. Machine gun, maybe. Martha with a pistol in each hand. The both of us dripping with knives.

“Slaves go there? It’s not unusual?”

“It’s not.”

Okay. Okay. I had what I needed, almost. The music had kicked up again, tightening my chest. There was a sickening feeling of excitement getting going in me as I realized what was going to happen. What I was going to have to do. The man was here. William Smith. He was
here.
I pulled open the top drawer of Newell’s desk and started to rifle through it, thinking quickly. “Okay.”

“What…” said Mr. Newell. “What are you doing?”

“Stay there, man.
Stay.
” He stayed down on his knees, his hands behind his head.

Mr. Newell looked to Martha, but she did not even see. She was at the desk now: she had found the page I had been looking at. She was staring at the screen. Oh, Martha.

I took the scissors out of Newell’s desk, and his eyes bulged. “No,” he said, his voice rising. Waddling backwards on his haunches, hands behind his head, repeating his refrain, “I never did any harm to any Negro person.”

“Quiet, please.”

I was unbuttoning my shirt. I was stepping out of my shoes. I held the scissors in my right hand and pointed at Newell with them. “How do I get to Free White Housing area nine?”

He told me what I needed to know. While he was talking I turned the scissors to my neck and began to carve, bringing up a deep well of blood, hacking away. Right where I had my inked-in tattoo, right at the root of my neck. I needed blood. I needed a fresh wound. You had to be very sick, puking and shitting sick, to be brought to a doctor’s attention around here, that I knew. A bad cut, though, was not the end of the world. Steroid shot and a bandage, you’re on your way.

“Martha,” I said, “there’s a first-aid kit on the bottom shelf over there. Can you get me some gauze, please?”

She was still at the computer. Transfixed by the screen. Martha was not watching us anymore. Her attention was wholly on that computer screen, where Samson’s face and fate were still displayed. She had taken a step forward; she had reached her hand halfway up toward the screen, a small gesture full of grief.

I got the bandage myself. Worked it slowly around and around my neck. When I was wound up, three thick layers of gauze covering my fresh, credible wound, covering where I would have borne the sheltering
G
of GGSI, when I had what I needed from Mr. Newell to get across campus, I pulled the cords from the printer and from the computer, one by one. Martha kept looking at the screen, even as it went blank.

I had a couple more questions for Mr. Newell, but when I had all of them answered I pushed him all the way to the ground.

“I never…” he said, sobbing. “Never…”

“I know,” I said. “You never did any harm to any Negro person. But I’m going to tie you up now, bind your hands and feet, bind your mouth to keep you quiet, and put you in the closet.”

I got to it. I did it fast. When he was in there, far from his panic button, far from his phone, I gently guided Martha away from the desk. I took her by the hands. Got her to look at my eyes.

“Here’s what’s happening. You take the elevator down. You walk briskly across the lobby and say thank you to that blond girl and get in your car and drive north.”

“Yeah,” she said. “Okay.”

“Are you listening?”

Her eyes were not on the screen anymore, but that’s where she was. She was with him, she was with her Samson, far away. I squeezed her hands between mine, squeezed each individual finger, trying to gather her attention, get her here with me.

“You go and get Lionel from your sister’s house and get that money I gave you and drive to Canada. Or fly overseas. Go anywhere. Go somewhere good. You got it?”

“I do.”

“That’s enough bread to start a new life, and that’s what I want you to do, okay? Get that boy out of America. Get him out.”

“You…” She looked at me. Shirtless, shoeless. Wrapped with gauze. The simple black slacks now looking dingy, pathetic. Slave garb. “What are you doing?”

“I gotta finish this up.”

“And then how are you going to get out?”

“I’ll figure it out.”

Her eyes at last were back in focus. She was back in the room.

“How? How are you going to figure it out?”

7.

Poor Mr. Newell,
inarticulate with fear though he was, had managed to answer my questions one by one, even the one question I hadn’t known to ask—what is the line around the property, the broken black line that had puzzled me when I first got a look at the full file? It was a train. A subway. Not an electric fence or a utility pipe, but an underground train. Delivering Persons Bound to Labor from the population center to their shifts.

It explained why I’d seen no actual people at work from way up there in the perch, where Newell had taken us so he could crow. The slaves were way out in the far-flung acreage of the cotton fields; the slaves were laboring in the high floors of the stitch houses; the slaves were transported belowground, where they couldn’t be seen. Not past the headquarters buildings full of happy Matty Newells, meeting in conference rooms and making calls, doing no harm to any Negro person.

You’ll take the service elevator, Newell had said. The door will open directly onto the platform. So down I went. Shirtless and shoeless, disguised in my five feet of bandage and bright green wristband and my own black skin, I rode the service elevator down from Newell’s fourteenth-floor office with my head slightly lowered, my brain on fire.

As it descended I began to hear music, loud and martial music, and when the elevator door opened I was in a gigantic room full of men singing.

The men were shirtless and shoeless, as I was, and they were facing away from me, just backs and heads, rows and rows of backs and heads, hundreds of men standing totally still, their voices raised.

“These strong hands belong to you,” they sang in chorus. “Hands and back and spirit, too.” The melody was simple, a childish four-note singsong. “Every day in all I do”—I shouldered my way forward, finding a spot in the crowd—“GGSI, my heart is true.”

Now I was in among them, and nobody looked at me, nobody said who the fuck are you: I was one more shirtless man with a wristband and black pants, with mummy strips of bandage covering my neck and shoulder.

“As Thou hast done in days gone by…” I listened to the lyrics. I got it by heart. “Oh, Lord, protect GGSI.”

That was it. After that the song just started again, and now I sang it, too. “These strong hands belong to you…”

I found a place between two men. The first was about my age, maybe a little younger, with high cheekbones and small eyes. The other was middle-aged, with a wide forehead and bulb nose, and beside him was a man with a striking face, a square, dimpled chin and high cheekbones…and then there was another, and another—all the kinds of faces in all the colors the world calls black: brown and tan and yellow and orange, copper and bronze and gold.

“These strong hands belong to you…”

They sang—we sang—with no enthusiasm or joy. We used to sing at Bell’s, crossing the yard or working on the pile, just like slaves used to sing in Old Slavery, spirituals and work songs, sly lyrics, silly lyrics, yearning for freedom or roasting Massa in nonsense words he couldn’t understand. This, though—this was a different kind of singing. I looked from man to man, and they were singing mechanically, eyes front, mouths moving like puppets. Singing this dumb refrain about how much they loved their bosses and loved their work.

Nothing spiritual about this. This was something else altogether.

There were no women. The women were somewhere else. Where were the women? Things were coming loose in me, being down here with all these men. Things were coming loose. I felt like I might fall down, but I could not do that—none of these men was wavering. They stood completely still, staring straight ahead, only singing.

What I did was, I focused on the room. Focused on noticing things. I was in a subway station, a platform, a kind of place familiar to me from New York, from Washington, DC, from a hundred different hunts. A cavernous room lit dimly by overhead fixtures hanging from a high domed roof. A concrete floor ending like a cliff edge above the sunken well of the tracks. I focused on the room and the sound of my own voice, singing along. “These strong hands…”

I kept it in, I kept it all in, I had to keep it in, so I kept it in, made my face like their faces, expressionless, only the mouth moving. But I was too close, too close to their faces. For my whole career under Bridge I had always dreaded the page of the file that showed the photograph, the real human face of the man I was seeking, and now here I was among them—none of this peeb shit, none of this “Persons Bound,” no slaves down here, all that abstraction torn away like skin coming off a body, and these were
people
—human fucking
beings,
each with the one life he was given, and this was the life they had.

The music stopped in the middle of a line—“and back and spir”—and we stopped singing.

“Arms out.” A voice came through from on high, burred and flattened by the intercom. “Hands up.”

Everybody did as instructed: extended their arms, raised their hands. I did it, too. This was it. My rushing emotion was subsumed in a sudden heat of panic. Newell had untied himself somehow, stumbled, screaming, into the carpeted hallway. Or it was Martha—they’d stopped her in the lobby. They’d stopped her in the car. She was in no shape…

“Heads back.”

We tilted back our heads. Stared at the ceiling. The men around me followed the instructions dully, robotically. This seemed to be an everyday occurrence. This was protocol.

On my left hand was the green wristband the guard had fitted me for. In my right hand was a piece of paper that Newell had filled out and stamped under my command. Temporary Intracampus Travel Certificate. Permission slip. Travel papers. Some of the men around me, I noticed, carried similar passes; others had none. Some wore, along with the green band, other bands of different colors in various places up and down their arms. A whole world of systems, of rules and regulations.

The intercom voice again: “Hold pose.” A frozen moment. A room cramped with shirtless men, all of us with heads tilted back, arms up and out. People like trees.

“Forty-five and under, hands down.”

Most of the men lowered their arms to their sides. I did, too. The older men kept their arms up.

There was a man moving through the platform. The slaves parted to let him through. He was black, as we were, but wearing a shirt and boots. He came within a few feet of me but did not look in my direction, did not see me, the infiltrator, where I stood with my eyes lowered like everybody else. The train was coming—I felt the familiar stale breeze being pushed forward along the tunnel—but nobody moved.

This guard or trusty, whatever he was, moved from man to man, all those with their hands still up, checking for something in their mouths. Push his index finger between their lips, force open their teeth, then worm his finger around, upper palate, lower palate, then out. His face was set; mean; like Harbor, the hard boy who’d haunted my childhood at Bell’s. Thinking of Harbor, I thought of Castle, and I felt a dizzy sense of the world collapsing, of my lifetimes flattening together into one plane—and meanwhile this overseer type appeared to have found who he was looking for among the forty-five-plus men. He took his finger from the man’s mouth, had him bend over, and began to pat down the length of his body.

The train pulled into the station, and its doors pulsed open. Nobody moved.

“Up,” said the overseer or trusty to the man. “Let’s go.”

The forty-five-plus nodded and lowered his hands and allowed himself to be led through the crowd, toward the exit at the end of the platform, and his face remained as impassive as all the other faces. But his eyes: I saw it, a flickering in his eyes—I
saw
it—a slight widening. Absolute and abject terror. I had read about the up-to-date disincentive programs that were run in plantations now; all that shit that had come online since my days at Bell’s. They were permitted now to tie you to a plank, pour water in your mouth to simulate drowning. They were permitted now to employ electric shocks; the science was in place to precisely measure out the voltage. All the uses of darkness. Of noise. Everything was carefully regulated, of course, BLP officials on hand at all times.