Colson Whitehead - The Underground Railroad

The world may be mean, but people don’t have to be, not if they refuse.

Mabel picked up her sack and got her bearings. If she kept a good pace, she’d be back well before first light and the earliest risers on the plantation. Her escape had been a preposterous idea, but even a sliver of it amounted to the best adventure of her life.

Mabel pulled out another turnip and took a bite. It really was sweet.

The snake found her not long into her return. She was wending through a cluster of stiff reeds when she disturbed its rest. The cottonmouth bit her twice, in the calf and deep in the meat of her thigh. No sound but pain. Mabel refused to believe it. It was a water snake, it had to be. Ornery but harmless. When her mouth went minty and her leg tingled, she knew. She made it another mile. She had dropped her sack along the way, lost her course in the black water. She could have made it farther — working Randall land had made her strong, strong in body if nothing else — but she stumbled onto a bed of soft moss and it felt right. She said, Here, and the swamp swallowed her up.

RAN AWAY

from her legal but not rightful master fifteen months past, a slave girl called CORA; of ordinary height and dark brown complexion; has a star-shape mark on her temple from an injury; possessed of a spirited nature and devious method. Possibly answering to the name BESSIE.

Last seen in Indiana among the outlaws of John Valentine Farm.

She has stopped running.

Reward remains unclaimed.

SHE WAS NEVER PROPERTY.

DECEMBER 23

HER point of departure that final voyage on the underground railroad was a tiny station beneath an abandoned house. The ghost station.

Cora led them there after her capture. The posse of bloodthirsty whites still rampaged across the Valentine farm when they left. The gunfire and screams came from farther away, deeper in the property. The newer cabins, the mill. Perhaps as far as the Livingston spread, the mayhem encompassing the neighboring farms. The whites meant to rout the entirety of colored settlers.

Cora fought and kicked as Ridgeway carried her to the wagon. The burning library and farmhouse illuminated the grounds. After a barrage to his face, Homer finally gathered her feet together and they got her inside, chaining her wrists to her old ring in the wagon floor. One of the young white men watching the horses cheered and asked for a turn when they were done. Ridgeway clopped him in the face.

She relinquished the location to the house in the woods when the slave catcher put his pistol to her eye. Cora lay down on the bench, seized by one of her headaches. How to snuff her thoughts like a candle? Royal and Lander dead. The others who were cut down.

“One of the deputies said it reminded him of the old days of proper Indian raids,” Ridgeway said. “Bitter Creek and Blue Falls. I think he was too young to remember that. Maybe his daddy.” He sat in the back with her on the bench opposite, his outfit reduced to the wagon and the two skinny horses that pulled it. The fire danced outside, showing the holes and long tears in the canvas.

Ridgeway coughed. He had been diminished since Tennessee. The slave catcher was completely gray, unkempt, skin gone sallow. His speech was different, less commanding. Dentures replaced the teeth Cora ruined in their last encounter. “They buried Boseman in one of the plague cemeteries,” he said. “He would have been appalled, but he didn’t have much of a say. The one bleeding on the floor — that was the uppity bastard who ambushed us, yes? I recognized his spectacles.”

Why had she put Royal off for so long? She thought they had time enough. Another thing that might have been, snipped at the roots as if by one of Dr. Stevens’s surgical blades. She let the farm convince her the world is other than what it will always be. He must have known she loved him even if she hadn’t told him. He had to.

Night birds screeched. After a time Ridgeway told her to keep a lookout for the path. Homer slowed the horses. She missed it twice, the fork in the road signaling they’d gone too far. Ridgeway slapped her across the face and told her to mind him. “It took me awhile to find my footing after Tennessee,” he said. “You and your friends did me a bad turn. But that’s done. You’re going home, Cora. At last. Once I get a look-see at the famous underground railroad.” He slapped her again. On the next circuit she found the cottonwoods that marked the turn.

Homer lit a lantern and they entered the mournful old house. He had changed out of his costume and back into his black suit and stovepipe hat. “Below the cellar,” Cora said. Ridgeway was wary. He pulled up the door and jumped back, as if a host of black outlaws waited in a trap. The slave catcher handed her a candle and told her to go down first.

“Most people think it’s a figure of speech,” he said. “The underground. I always knew better. The secret beneath us, the entire time. We’ll uncover them all after tonight. Every line, every one.”

Whatever animals lived in the cellar were quiet this night. Homer checked the corners of the cellar. The boy came up with the spade and gave it to Cora.

She held out her chains. Ridgeway nodded. “Otherwise we’ll be here all night.” Homer undid the shackles. The white man was giddy, his former authority easing into his voice. In North Carolina, Martin had thought he was onto his father’s buried treasure in the mine and discovered a tunnel instead. For the slave catcher the tunnel was all the gold in the world.

“Your master is dead,” Ridgeway said as Cora dug. “I wasn’t surprised to hear the news — he had a degenerate nature. I don’t know if the current master of Randall will pay your reward. I don’t rightly care.” He was surprised at his words. “It wasn’t going to be easy, I should have seen that. You’re your mother’s daughter through and through.”

The spade struck the trapdoor. She cleared out a square. Cora had stopped listening to him, to Homer’s unwholesome snickering. She and Royal and Red may have diminished the slave catcher when they last met, but it was Mabel who first laid him low. It flowed from her mother, his mania over their family. If not for her, the slave catcher wouldn’t have obsessed so over Cora’s capture. The one who escaped. After all it cost her, Cora didn’t know if it made her proud or more spiteful toward the woman.

This time Homer lifted the trapdoor. The moldy smell gusted up.

“This is it?” Ridgeway asked.

“Yes, sir,” Homer said.

Ridgeway waved Cora on with his pistol.

He would not be the first white man to see the underground railroad, but the first enemy. After all that had befallen her, the shame of betraying those who made possible her escape. She hesitated on the top step. On Randall, on Valentine, Cora never joined the dancing circles. She shrank from the spinning bodies, afraid of another person so close, so uncontrolled. Men had put a fear in her, those years ago. Tonight, she told herself. Tonight I will hold him close, as if in a slow dance. As if it were just the two of them in the lonesome world, bound to each other until the end of the song. She waited until the slave catcher was on the third step. She spun and locked her arms around him like a chain of iron. The candle dropped. He attempted to keep his footing with her weight on him, reaching out for leverage against the wall, but she held him close like a lover and the pair tumbled down the stone steps into the darkness.