Colson Whitehead - The Underground Railroad

His association with Red began with the Indiana posting. Red was from North Carolina, absconding after the regulators strung up his wife and child. He walked the Freedom Trail for miles, searching for their bodies to say goodbye. He failed — the trail of corpses went on forever it seemed, in every direction. When Red made it north, he took up with the railroad and dedicated himself to the cause with a sinister resourcefulness. On hearing of Cora’s accidental killing of the boy in Georgia, he smiled and said, “Good.”

The Justin mission was unusual from the start. Tennessee lay outside Royal’s posting, but the railroad’s local representative had been out of contact since the wildfire. To cancel the train would be disastrous. With no one else available, Royal’s superiors reluctantly sent the two colored agents deep into the Tennessee badlands.

The guns were Red’s idea. Royal had never held one before.

“It fits in your hand,” Royal said, “but it’s as heavy as a cannon.”

“You looked fearsome,” Cora said.

“I was shaking, but inside,” he told her.

Justin’s master often hired him out for masonry work and a sympathetic employer made arrangements with the railroad on his behalf. There was one condition — that Justin hold off on making tracks until he finished the stone wall around the man’s property. They agreed that a gap of three stones was acceptable, if Justin left thorough instructions for completion.

On the appointed day, Justin set off for work one last time. His absence wouldn’t be noticed until nightfall; his employer insisted that Justin never showed up that morning. He was in the back of Royal and Red’s cart by ten o’clock. The plan changed when they came upon Cora in town.

The train pulled into the Tennessee station. It was the most splendid locomotive yet, its shiny red paint returning the light even through the shroud of soot. The engineer was a jolly character with a booming voice, opening the door to the passenger car with no little ceremony. Cora suspected a kind of tunnel madness afflicted railroad engineers, to a man.

After the rickety boxcar and then the cargo platform that had conveyed her to North Carolina, to step into a proper passenger car — well-appointed and comfortable like the ones she’d read about in her almanacs — was a spectacular pleasure. There were seats enough for thirty, lavish and soft, and brass fixtures gleamed where the candlelight fell. The smell of fresh varnish made her feel like the inaugural passenger of a magical, maiden voyage. Cora slept across three seats, free from chains and attic gloom for the first time in months.

The iron horse still rumbled through the tunnel when she woke. Lumbly’s words returned to her: If you want to see what this nation is all about, you have to ride the rails. Look outside as you speed through, and you’ll find the true face of America. It was a joke, then, from the start. There was only darkness outside the windows on her journeys, and only ever would be darkness.

Justin talked in the seat in front of her. He said that his brother and three nieces he’d never met lived up in Canada. He’d spend a few days at the farm and then head north.

Royal assured the fugitive that the railroad was at his disposal. Cora sat up and he repeated what he’d just told her fellow fugitive. She could continue on to a connection in Indiana, or stay on the Valentine farm.

White people took John Valentine as one of theirs, Royal said. His skin was very light. Any person of color recognized his Ethiopian heritage immediately. That nose, those lips, good hair or no. His mother was a seamstress, his father a white peddler who passed through every few months. When the man died, he left his estate to his son, the first time he acknowledged the boy outside of the walls of their house.

Valentine tried his hand at potato farming. He employed six freemen to work his land. He never claimed to be that which he was not, but did not disabuse people of their assumptions. When Valentine purchased Gloria, no one thought twice. One way of keeping a woman was to keep her in bondage, especially if, like John Valentine, you were new to romantic liaisons. Only John, Gloria, and a judge on the other side of the state knew she was free. He was fond of books and taught his wife her letters. They raised two sons. The neighbors thought it broad-minded, if wasteful, that he set them free.

When his eldest boy was five, one of Valentine’s teamsters was strung up and burned for reckless eyeballing. Joe’s friends maintained that he hadn’t been to town that day; a bank clerk friendly with Valentine shared the rumor that the woman was trying to make a paramour jealous. As the years pass, Valentine observed, racial violence only becomes more vicious in its expression. It will not abate or disappear, not anytime soon, and not in the south. He and his wife decided that Virginia was an unfit place to raise a family. They sold the farm and picked up stakes. Land was cheap in Indiana. There were white people there, too, but not so close.

Valentine learned the temperament of Indian corn. Three lucky seasons in a row. When he visited relations back in Virginia, he promoted the advantages of his new home. He hired old cronies. They could even live on his property until they found their footing; he’d expanded his acreage.

Those were the guests he invited. The farm as Cora discovered it originated one winter night after a blur of slow, heavy snow. The woman at the door was an awful sight, frozen half to death. Margaret was a runaway from Delaware. Her journey to the Valentine farm had been fraught — a troupe of hard characters took her on a zigzag route away from her master. A trapper, the pitchman of a medicine show. She roamed from town to town with a traveling dentist until he turned violent. The storm caught her between places. Margaret prayed to God for deliverance, promised an end to the wickedness and moral shortcomings she had expressed in her flight. The lights of Valentine emerged in the gloom.

Gloria tended to her visitor the best she could; the doctor came around on his pony. Margaret’s chills never subsided. She expired a few days later.

The next time Valentine went east on business, a broadsheet promoting an antislavery meeting stopped him in his tracks. The woman in the snow was the emissary of a dispossessed tribe. He bent himself to their service.

By that autumn, his farm was the latest office of the underground railroad, busy with fugitives and conductors. Some runaways lingered; if they contributed, they could stay as long as they liked. They planted the corn. In an overgrown patch, a former plantation bricklayer built a forge for a former plantation blacksmith. The forge spat out nails at a remarkable rate. The men crosscut trees and erected cabins. A prominent abolitionist stopped for a day en route to Chicago and stayed for a week. Luminaries, orators, and artists started attending the Saturday-night discussions on the negro question. One freewoman had a sister in Delaware who’d gotten into difficulties; the sister came out west for a new start. Valentine and the farm’s parents paid her to teach their children, and there were always more children.

With his white face, Royal said, Valentine went down to the county seat and bought parcels for his friends with black faces, the former field hands who had come west, the fugitives who had found a haven on his farm. Found a purpose. When the Valentines arrived, that neck of Indiana was unpopulated. As the towns erupted into being, quickened by the relentless American thirst, the black farm was there as a natural feature of the landscape, a mountain or a creek. Half the white stores depended on its patronage; Valentine residents filled the squares and Sunday markets to sell their crafts. “It’s a place of healing,” Royal told Cora on the train north. “Where you can take stock and make preparations for the next leg of the journey.”