Colson Whitehead - The Underground Railroad

The previous night in Tennessee, Ridgeway had called Cora and her mother a flaw in the American scheme. If two women were a flaw, what was a community?

—

ROYAL didn’t mention the philosophical disputes that dominated the weekly meetings. Mingo, with his schemes for the next stage in the progress of the colored tribe, and Lander, whose elegant but opaque appeals offered no easy remedy. The conductor also avoided the very real matter of the white settlers’ mounting resentment of the negro outpost. The divisions would make themselves known by and by.

As they hurtled through the underground passage, a tiny ship on this impossible sea, Royal’s endorsement achieved its purpose. Cora slapped her hands on the cushions of the parlor car and said the farm suited her just fine.

Justin stayed two days, filled his belly, and joined his relations in the north. He later sent a letter describing his welcome, his new position at a building company. His nieces had signed their names in different-colored ink, frisky and naïve. Once Valentine lay before her in its seductive plenty, there was no question of Cora leaving. She contributed to the life of the farm. This was labor she recognized, she understood the elemental rhythms of planting and harvest, the lessons and imperatives of the shifting seasons. Her visions of city life clouded — what did she know about places like New York City and Boston? She’d grown up with her hands in the dirt.

One month after her arrival, at the mouth of the ghost tunnel, Cora remained certain of her decision. She and Royal were about to return to the farm when a gust swept out of the tunnel’s murky depths. As if something moved toward them, old and dark. She reached for Royal’s arm.

“Why did you bring me here?” Cora said.

“We’re not supposed to talk about what we do down here,” Royal said. “And our passengers aren’t supposed to talk about how the railroad operates — it’d put a lot of good people in danger. They could talk if they wanted to, but they don’t.”

It was true. When she told of her escape, she omitted the tunnels and kept to the main contours. It was private, a secret about yourself it never occurred to you to share. Not a bad secret, but an intimacy so much a part of who you were that it could not be made separate. It would die in the sharing.

“I showed you because you’ve seen more of the railroad than most,” Royal continued. “I wanted you to see this — how it fits together. Or doesn’t.”

“I’m just a passenger.”

“That’s why,” he said. He rubbed his spectacles with his shirttail. “The underground railroad is bigger than its operators — it’s all of you, too. The small spurs, the big trunk lines. We have the newest locomotives and the obsolete engines, and we have handcars like that one. It goes everywhere, to places we know and those we don’t. We got this tunnel right here, running beneath us, and no one knows where it leads. If we keep the railroad running, and none of us can figure it out, maybe you can.”

She told him she didn’t know why it was there, or what it meant. All she knew is that she didn’t want to run anymore.

November sapped them with Indiana cold, but two events made Cora forget about the weather. The first was Sam’s appearance on the farm. When he knocked on her cabin, she hugged him tight until he pleaded for her to stop. They wept. Sybil brewed cups of root tea while they composed themselves.

His coarse beard was entwined with gray and his belly had grown large, but he was the same garrulous fellow who’d taken in her and Caesar those long months past. The night the slave catcher came to town had cleaved him from his old life. Ridgeway snatched Caesar at the factory before Sam could warn him. Sam’s voice faltered as he told her how their friend was beaten in the jail. He kept mum about his comrades, but one man said he’d seen the nigger talking to Sam on more than one occasion. That Sam abandoned the saloon in the middle of his shift — and the fact some in town had known Sam since they were children and disliked his self-satisfied nature — sufficed to get his house burned to the ground.

“My grandfather’s house. My house. Everything that was mine.” By the time the mob tore Caesar from the jail and mortally assaulted him, Sam was well on his way north. He paid a peddler for a ride and was on a ship bound for Delaware the next day.

A month later under cover of night, operatives filled in the entrance to the tunnel beneath his house, per railroad policy. Lumbly’s station had been dealt with in similar fashion. “They don’t like to take chances,” he said. The men brought him back a souvenir, a copper mug warped from the fire. He didn’t recognize it but kept it anyway.

“I was a station agent. They found me different things to do.” Sam drove runaways to Boston and New York, hunkered over the latest surveys to devise escape routes, and took care of the final arrangements that would save a fugitive’s life. He even posed as a slave catcher named “James Olney,” prying slaves from jail on the pretext of delivering them to their masters. The stupid constables and deputies. Racial prejudice rotted one’s faculties, he said. He demonstrated his slave-catcher voice and swagger, to Cora’s and Sybil’s amusement.

He had just brought his latest cargo to the Valentine farm, a family of three who’d been hiding out in New Jersey. They had insinuated themselves into the colored community there, Sam said, but a slave catcher nosed around and it was time to flee. It was his final mission for the underground railroad. He was western bound. “Every pioneer I meet, they like their whiskey. They’ll be needing barkeeps in California.”

It heartened her to see her friend happy and fat. So many of those who had helped Cora had come to awful fates. She had not got him killed.

Then he gave her the news from her plantation, the second item that took the sting out of the Indiana cold.

Terrance Randall was dead.

From all accounts, the slave master’s preoccupation with Cora and her escape only deepened over time. He neglected the plantation’s affairs. His day to day on the estate consisted of conducting sordid parties in the big house and putting his slaves to bleak amusements, forcing them to serve as his victims in Cora’s stead. Terrance continued to advertise for her capture, filling the classifieds in far-off states with her description and details of her crime. He upped the considerable reward more than once — Sam had seen the bulletins himself, astounded — and hosted any slave catcher who passed through, to provide a fuller portrait of Cora’s villainy and also to shame the incompetent Ridgeway, who had failed first his father and then him.

Terrance died in New Orleans, in a chamber of a Creole brothel. His heart relented, weakened by months of dissipation.

“Or even his heart was tired of his wickedness,” Cora said. As Sam’s information settled, she asked about Ridgeway.

Sam waved his hand dismissively. “He’s the butt of humor now. He’d been at the end of his career even before”—here he paused—“the incident in Tennessee.”

Cora nodded. Red’s act of murder was not spoken of. The railroad discharged him once they got the full story. Red wasn’t bothered. He had new ideas about how to break the stranglehold of slavery and refused to give up his guns. “Once he lays his hand to the plow,” Royal said, “he is not one to turn back.” Royal was sad to see his friend ride off, but there was no bringing their methods into convergence, not after Tennessee. Cora’s own act of murder he excused as a matter of self-protection, but Red’s naked bloodthirstiness was another matter.