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.
Ridgeway’s penchant for violence and odd fixations had made it hard to find men willing to ride with him. His soiled reputation, coupled with Boseman’s death and the humiliation of being bested by nigger outlaws, turned him into a pariah among his cohort. The Tennessee sheriffs still searched for the murderers, of course, but Ridgeway was out of the hunt. He had not been heard of since the summer.
“What about the boy, Homer?”
Sam had heard about the strange little creature. It was he who eventually brought help to the slave catcher, out in the forest. Homer’s bizarre manner did nothing for Ridgeway’s standing—their arrangement fed unseemly speculations. At any rate, the two disappeared together, their bond unbroken by the assault. “To a dank cave,” Sam said, “as befits those worthless shits.”
Sam stayed on the farm for three days, pursuing the affections of Georgina to no avail. Long enough to mix it up with the shucking bee.
—
THE competition unfolded on the first night of the full moon. The children spent all day arranging the corn into two mammoth piles, inside a border of red leaves. Mingo captained one team—the second year in a row, Sybil observed with distaste. He picked a team full of allies, heedless of representing the breadth of farm society. Valentine’s eldest son, Oliver, gathered a diverse group of newcomers and old hands. “And our distinguished guest, of course,” Oliver said finally, beckoning Sam.
A little boy blew the whistle and the shucking began in a frenzy. This year’s prize was a large silver mirror Valentine had picked up in Chicago. The mirror stood between the piles, tied with a blue ribbon, reflecting the orange flicker of the jack-o’-lanterns. The captains shouted orders to their men while the audience hooted and clapped. The fiddler played a fast and comical accompaniment. The smaller children raced around the piles, snatching the husks, sometimes before they even touched the ground.
“Get that corn!”
“You best hurry up over there!”
Cora watched from the side, Royal’s hand
resting on her hip. She had permitted him to kiss her the night before, which he took, not without reason, as an indication Cora was finally allowing him to step up his pursuit. She’d made him wait. He’d wait more. But Sam’s report on Terrance’s demise had softened her, even as it bred spiteful visions. She envisioned her former master tangled in linens, purple tongue poking from his lips. Calling for help that never arrived. Melting to a gory pulp in his casket, and then torments in a hell out of Revelation. Cora believed in that part of the holy book, at least. It described the slave plantation in code.
“This wasn’t harvest on Randall,” Cora said. “It was full moon when we picked, but there was always blood.”
“You’re not on Randall anymore,” Royal said. “You’re free.”
She kept ahold of her temper and whispered, “How so? Land is property. Tools is property. Somebody’s going to auction the Randall plantation, the slaves, too. Relations always coming out when someone dies. I’m still property, even in Indiana.”
“He’s dead. No cousin is going to bother over getting you back, not like he did.” He said, “You’re free.”
Royal joined the singing to change the subject and to remind her that there were things a body could feel good about. A community that had come together, from seeding to harvest to the bee. But the song was a work song Cora knew from the cotton rows, drawing her back to the Randall cruelties and making her heart thud. Connelly used to start the song as a signal to go back to picking after a whipping.
How could such a bitter thing become a means of pleasure? Everything on Valentine was the opposite. Work needn’t be suffering, it could unite folks. A bright child like Chester might thrive and prosper, as Molly and her friends did. A mother raise her daughter with love and kindness. A beautiful soul like Caesar could be anything he wanted here, all of them could be: own a spread, be a schoolteacher, fight for colored rights. Even be a poet. In her Georgia misery she had pictured freedom, and it had not looked like this. Freedom was a community laboring for something lovely and rare.
Mingo won. His men chaired him around the piles of naked cobs, hoarse with cheers. Jimmy said he’d never seen a white man work so hard and Sam beamed with pleasure. Georgina remained unswayed, however.
On the day of Sam’s departure, Cora embraced him and kissed his whiskered cheek. He said he’d send a note when he settled, wherever that was.
They were in the time of short days and long nights. Cora visited the library frequently as the weather turned. She brought Molly when she could coax the girl. They sat next to each other, Cora with a history or a romance, and Molly turning the pages of a fairy tale. A teamster stopped them one day as they were about to enter. “Master said the only thing more dangerous than a nigger with a gun,” he told them, “was a nigger with a book. That must be a big pile of black powder, then!”
When some of the grateful residents proposed building an addition to Valentine’s house for his books, Gloria suggested a separate structure. “That way, anyone with a mind to pick up a book can do so at their leisure.” It also gave the family more privacy. They were generous, but there was a limit.
They put up the library next to the smokehouse. The room smelled pleasantly of smoke when Cora sat down in one of the big chairs with Valentine’s books. Royal said it was the biggest collection of negro literature this side of Chicago. Cora didn’t know if that was true, but she certainly didn’t lack for reading material. Apart from the treatises on farming and the cultivation of various crops, there were rows and rows of histories. The ambitions of the Romans and the victories of the Moors, the royal feuds of Europe. Oversize volumes contained maps of lands Cora had never heard of, the outlines of the unconquered world.
And the disparate literature of the colored tribes. Accounts of African empires and the miracles of the Egyptian slaves who had erected pyramids. The farm’s carpenters were true artisans—they had to be to keep all those books from jumping off the shelves, so many wonders did they contain. Pamphlets of verse by negro poets, autobiographies of colored orators. Phillis Wheatley and Jupiter Hammon. There was a man named Benjamin Banneker who composed almanacs—almanacs! she devoured them all—and served as a confidant to Thomas Jefferson, who composed the Declaration. Cora read the accounts of slaves who had been born in chains and learned their letters. Of Africans who had been stolen, torn from their homes and families, and described the miseries of their bondage and then their hair-raising escapes. She recognized their stories as her own. They were the stories of all the colored people she had ever known, the stories of black people yet to be born, the foundations of their triumphs.
People had put all that down on paper in tiny rooms. Some of them even had dark skin like her. It put her head in a fog each time she opened the door. She’d have to get started if she was going to read them all.
Valentine joined her one afternoon. Cora was friendly with Gloria, who called Cora “the Adventuress,” owing to the many complications of her journey, but she hadn’t spoken to Gloria’s husband beyond greetings. The enormity of her debt was inexpressible, so she avoided him altogether.
He regarded the cover of her book, a romance about a Moorish boy who becomes the scourge of the Seven Seas. The language was simple and she was making quick work of it. “I never did read that,” Valentine said. “I heard you like to spend time here. You’re the one from Georgia?”
She nodded.
“Never been there—the stories are so dismal, I’m liable to lose my temper and make my wife a widow.”
Cora returned his smile. He’d been a presence in the summer months, looking after the Indian corn. The field hands knew indigo, tobacco—cotton, of course—but corn was its own beast. He was pleasant and patient in his instructions. With the changing of the season he was scarce. Feeling poorly, people said. He spent most of his time in the farmhouse, squaring the farm’s accounts.
He wandered to the shelves of maps. Now that they were in the same room, Cora was compelled to rectify her months of silence. She asked after the preparations for the gathering.
“Yes, that,” Valentine said. “Do you think it will happen?”
“It has to,” Cora said.
The meeting had been postponed twice on account of Lander’s speaking engagements. Valentine’s kitchen table started the culture of debate on the farm, when Valentine and his friends—and later, visiting scholars and noted abolitionists—stayed up past midnight arguing over the colored question. The need for trade schools, colored medical schools. For a voice in Congress, if not a representative then a strong alliance with liberal-minded whites. How to undo slavery’s injury to the mental faculties—so many freed men continued to be enslaved by the horrors they’d endured.
The supper conversations became ritual, outgrowing the house and migrating to the meeting house, whereupon Gloria stopped serving food and drink and let them fend for themselves. Those favoring a more gradual view of colored progress traded barbs with those on a more pressing schedule. When Lander arrived—the most dignified and eloquent colored man any of them had seen—the discussions adopted a more local character. The direction of the nation was one matter; the future of the farm, another.
“Mingo promises it will be a memorable occasion,” Valentine said. “A spectacle of rhetoric. These days, I hope they get the spectacle done early so I can retire at a decent hour.” Worn down by Mingo’s lobbying, Valentine had ceded organization of the debate.
Mingo had lived on the farm for a long time, and when it came to addressing Lander’s appeals, it was good to have a native voice. He was not as accomplished a speaker, but as a former slave spoke for a large segment of the farm.
Mingo had taken advantage of the delay to press for improved relations with the white towns. He swayed a few from Lander’s camp—not that it was clear exactly what Lander had in mind. Lander was plainspoken but opaque.
“What if they decide that we should leave?” Cora was surprised at her difficulty in mustering the words.
??
?They? You’re one of us.” Valentine took the chair that Molly favored on her visits. Up close, it was plain the burden of so many souls had exacted its toll. The man was weariness itself. “It may be out of our hands,” he said. “What we built here…there are too many white people who don’t want us to have it. Even if they didn’t suspect our alliance with the railroad. Look around. If they kill a slave for learning his letters, how do you think they feel about a library? We’re in a room brimming with ideas. Too many ideas for a colored man. Or woman.”
Cora had come to cherish the impossible treasures of the Valentine farm so completely that she’d forgotten how impossible they were. The farm and the adjacent ones operated by colored interests were too big, too prosperous. A pocket of blackness in the young state. Valentine’s negro heritage became known years before. Some felt tricked that they’d treated a nigger as an equal—and then to have that uppity nigger shame them with his success.
She told Valentine of an incident the previous week, when she’d been walking up the road and was almost trampled by a wagon. The driver yelled disgusting epithets as he passed. Cora was not the only victim of abuse. The new arrivals to the nearby towns, the rowdies and low whites, started fights when residents came for supplies. Harassed the young women. Last week a feed store hung a shingle saying WHITES ONLY—a nightmare reaching up from the south to claim them.
Valentine said, “We have a legal right as American citizens to be here.” But the Fugitive Slave Law was a legal fact as well. Their collaborations with the underground railroad complicated things. Slave catchers didn’t show their faces often, but it wasn’t unheard of. Last spring, two catchers appeared with a warrant to search every house on the farm. Their quarry was long gone, but the reminder of the slave patrols exposed the precarious nature of the residents’ lives. One of the cooks urinated in their canteens as they ransacked the cabins.