The Underground Railroad

  “Indiana was a slave state,” Valentine continued. “That evil soaks into the soil. Some say it steeps and gets stronger. Maybe this isn’t the place. Maybe Gloria and I should have kept going after Virginia.”

  “I feel it when I go to town now,” Cora said. “See that look in their eyes I know.” It wasn’t just Terrance and Connelly and Ridgeway she recognized, the savage ones. She’d watched the faces in the park in North Carolina during the daytime, and at night when they gathered for atrocities. Round white faces like an endless field of cotton bolls, all the same material.

  Taking in Cora’s downcast expression, Valentine told her, “I’m proud of what we’ve built here, but we started over once. We can do it again. I have two strong sons to help now, and we’ll get a nice sum for the land. Gloria has always wanted to see Oklahoma, although for the life of me I don’t know why. I try to make her happy.”

  “If we stay,” Cora said, “Mingo wouldn’t allow people like me. The runaways. Those with nowhere to go.”

  “Talk is good,” Valentine said. “Talk clears the air and makes it so you can see what’s what. We’ll see what the mood of the farm is. It’s mine, but it’s everybody’s, too. Yours. I’ll abide by the decision of the people.”

  Cora saw the discussion had depleted him. “Why do all this,” she asked. “For all of us?”

  “I thought you were one of the smart ones,” Valentine said. “Don’t you know? White man ain’t going to do it. We have to do it ourselves.”

  If the farmer had come in for a specific book, he left empty-handed. The wind whistled through the open door and Cora pulled her shawl tight. If she kept reading, she might start another book by suppertime.

  The final gathering on Valentine farm took place on a brisk December night. In the years to come, the survivors shared their versions of what happened that evening, and why. Until the day she died, Sybil insisted Mingo was the informer. She was an old lady then, living on a Michigan lake with a gang of grandchildren who had to listen to her familiar stories. According to Sybil, Mingo told the constables that the farm harbored fugitives and provided the particulars for a successful ambush. A dramatic raid would put an end to relations with the railroad, the endless stream of needy negroes, and ensure the longevity of the farm. When asked if he anticipated the violence, she pressed her lips into a line and said no more.

  Another survivor—Tom the blacksmith—observed that the law had hunted Lander for months. He was the intended target. Lander’s rhetoric inflamed passions; he fomented rebellion; he was too uppity to allow to run free. Tom never learned to read but liked to show off his volume of Lander’s Appeal, which the great orator had signed to him.

  Joan Watson was born on the farm. She was six years old that night. In the aftermath of the attack she wandered the forest for three days, chewing acorns, until a wagon train discovered her. When she got older, she described herself as a student of American history, attuned to the inevitable. She said that white towns had simply banded together to rid themselves of the black stronghold in their midst. That is how the European tribes operate, she said. If they can’t control it, they destroy it.

  If anyone on the farm knew what was to come, they gave no sign. Saturday proceeded in lazy calm. Cora spent most of the day in her bedroom with the latest almanac Royal had given her. He’d picked it up in Chicago. He knocked on her door ’round midnight to give it to her; he knew she was awake. It was late and she didn’t want to disturb Sybil and Molly. Cora took him into her room for the first time.

  She broke down at the sight of next year’s almanac. Thick as a book of prayer. Cora had told Royal about the attic days in North Carolina, but seeing the year on the cover—an object conjured from the future—spurred Cora to her own magic. She told him about her childhood on Randall where she had picked cotton, tugging a sack. About her grandmother Ajarry who’d been kidnapped from her family in Africa and tilled a small corner of land, the only thing to call her own. Cora spoke of her mother, Mabel, who absconded one day and left her to the inconstant mercy of the world. About Blake and the doghouse and how she had faced him down with a hatchet. When she told Royal about the night they took her behind the smokehouse and she apologized to him for letting it happen, he told her to hush. She was the one due an apology for all her hurts, he said. He told her that every one of her enemies, all the masters and overseers of her suffering, would be punished, if not in this world then the next, for justice may be slow and invisible, but it always renders its true verdict in the end. He folded his body into hers to quiet her shaking and sobs and they fell asleep like that, in the back room of a cabin on the Valentine farm.

  She didn’t believe what he said about justice, but it was nice to hear him say it.

  Then she woke up the next morning and felt better, and had to admit that she did believe it, maybe just a little.

  Thinking Cora was laid up with one of her headaches, Sybil brought her some food around noon. She teased Cora about Royal staying the night. She was mending the dress she’d wear to the gathering when he “come sneaking out of here holding his boots in his hand and looking like a dog that’d stolen some scraps.” Cora just smiled.

  “Your man ain’t the only one come around last night,” Sybil said. Lander had returned.

  That accounted for Sybil’s playfulness. Lander impressed her mightily, every one of his visits fortifying her for days after. Those honeyed words of his. Now he had finally come back to Valentine. The gathering would happen, to an unknowable outcome. Sybil didn’t want to move west and leave her home, which everyone assumed to be Lander’s solution. She’d been adamant about staying ever since the talk of resettling started. But she wouldn’t abide Mingo’s conditions, that they stop providing shelter to those in need. “There ain’t no place like here, not anywhere. He wants to kill it.”

  “Valentine won’t let him spoil it,” Cora said, though after talking with the man in the library it seemed he’d already packed up in his mind.

  “We’ll see,” Sybil said. “I may have to give a speech my own self, and tell these people what they need to hear.”

  That night Royal and Cora sat in the front row next to Mingo and his family, the wife and children he had rescued from slavery. His wife, Angela, was silent, as always; to hear her speak, you had to hide under the window of their cabin as she counseled her man in private. Mingo’s daughters wore bright blue dresses, their long pigtails entwined with white ribbons. Lander played guessing games with the youngest one as the residents filled the meeting hall. Her name was Amanda. She held a bouquet of cloth flowers; he made a joke about them and they laughed. When Cora caught Lander at a moment such as this, in a brief lapse between performances, he reminded her of Molly. For all his friendly talk, she thought he’d prefer to be home by himself, playing concerts in empty rooms.

  He had long, dainty fingers. How curious that one who’d never picked a boll or dug a trench or experienced the cat-o’-nine-tails had come to speak for those who had been defined by those things. He was lean in build, with glowing skin that announced his mixed parentage. She had never seen him rush or hurry. The man moved with exquisite calm, like a leaf drifting on the surface of a pond, making its own way on gentle currents. Then he opened his mouth, and you saw that the forces steering him to your presence were not gentle at all.

  There were no white visitors this night. Everyone who lived and worked on the farm was in attendance, as well as the families from the neighboring colored farms. Seeing them all in one room, Cora got an idea of how large they were for the first time. There were people she’d never seen before, like the mischievous little boy who winked at her when their eyes met. Strangers but family, cousins but never introduced. She was surrounded by men and women who’d been born in Africa, or born in chains, who had freed themselves or escaped. Branded, beaten, raped. Now they were here. They were free and black and stewards of their own fates. It made her shiver.

  Valentine gripped the lectern for support. “I didn’t grow up the
way you did,” he said. “My mother never feared for my safety. No trader was going to snatch me in the night and sell me south. The whites saw the color of my skin, and that sufficed to let me be. I told myself I was doing nothing wrong, but I conducted myself in ignorance all my days. Until you came here and made a life with us.”

  He left Virginia, he said, to spare his children the ravages of prejudice and its bully partner, violence. But saving two children is not enough when God has gifted you with so much. “A woman came to us out of the bitter winter—sick and desperate. We could not save her.” Valentine’s voice rasped. “I neglected my duty. As long as one of our family endured the torments of bondage, I was a freeman in name only. I want to express my gratitude to everyone here for helping me to put things right. Whether you have been among us for years or just a few hours, you have saved my life.”

  He faltered. Gloria joined him and gathered his body in hers. “Now some of our family have things they want to share with you,” Valentine said, clearing his throat. “I hope you’ll listen to them like you listen to me. There’s room enough for different notions when it comes to charting our path through the wilderness. When the night is dark and full of treacherous footing.”

  The farm’s patriarch withdrew from the lectern and Mingo replaced him. Mingo’s children trailed him, kissing his hands for good luck before returning to the pews.

  Mingo opened with the story of his journey, the nights he spent begging the Lord for guidance, the long years it took to purchase his family’s freedom. “With my honest labor, one by one, just as you saved yourselves.” He rubbed a knuckle in his eye.

  Then he changed course. “We accomplished the impossible,” Mingo said, “but not everyone has the character we do. We’re not all going to make it. Some of us are too far gone. Slavery has twisted their minds, an imp filling their minds with foul ideas. They have given themselves over to whiskey and its false comforts. To hopelessness and its constant devils. You’ve seen these lost ones on the plantations, on the streets of the towns and cities—those who will not, cannot respect themselves. You’ve seen them here, receiving the gift of this place but unable to fit in. They always disappear in the night because deep in their hearts they know they are unworthy. It is too late for them.”

  Some of his cronies in the back of the room amened. There are realities we have to face, Mingo explained. White people aren’t going to change overnight. The farm’s dreams are worthy and true, but require a gradual approach. “We can’t save everyone, and acting as if we can will doom us all. You think the white folks—just a few miles from here—are going to endure our impudence forever? We flaunt their weakness. Harboring runaways. Underground railroad agents with guns coming and going. People who are wanted for murder. Criminals.” Cora made fists as Mingo’s gaze fell on her.

  The Valentine farm had taken glorious steps into the future, he said. White benefactors supplied schoolbooks for their children—why not ask them to pass the hat for entire schools? And not just one or two, but dozens more? By proving the negro’s thrift and intelligence, Mingo argued, he will enter into American society as a productive member with full rights. Why jeopardize that? We need to slow things down. Reach an accommodation with our neighbors and, most of all, stop activities that will force their wrath upon us. “We’ve built something astounding here,” he concluded. “But it is a precious thing, and it needs to be protected, nourished, or else it will wither, like a rose in a sudden frost.”

  During the applause, Lander whispered to Mingo’s daughter and they giggled again. She removed one of the cloth flowers from her bouquet and twisted it into the top buttonhole of his green suit. Lander pretended to sniff its fragrance and mock-swooned.

  “It’s time,” Royal said as Lander shook Mingo’s hand and assumed his place at the lectern. Royal had spent the day with him, walking the grounds and talking. Royal didn’t share what Lander would speak on that night, but he had an optimistic air. Formerly, when the subject of relocating came up, Royal told Cora he favored Canada over the west. “They know how to treat free negroes there,” he said. And his work with the railroad? Have to settle down sometime, Royal said. Can’t raise a family while running around on railroad errands. Cora changed the subject when he engaged in such talk.

  Now she’d see for herself—they’d all see—what the man from Boston had in mind.

  “Brother Mingo made some good points,” Lander said. “We can’t save everyone. But that doesn’t mean we can’t try. Sometimes a useful delusion is better than a useless truth. Nothing’s going to grow in this mean cold, but we can still have flowers.

  “Here’s one delusion: that we can escape slavery. We can’t. Its scars will never fade. When you saw your mother sold off, your father beaten, your sister abused by some boss or master, did you ever think you would sit here today, without chains, without the yoke, among a new family? Everything you ever knew told you that freedom was a trick—yet here you are. Still we run, tracking by the good full moon to sanctuary.

  “Valentine farm is a delusion. Who told you the negro deserved a place of refuge? Who told you that you had that right? Every minute of your life’s suffering has argued otherwise. By every fact of history, it can’t exist. This place must be a delusion, too. Yet here we are.

  “And America, too, is a delusion, the grandest one of all. The white race believes—believes with all its heart—that it is their right to take the land. To kill Indians. Make war. Enslave their brothers. This nation shouldn’t exist, if there is any justice in the world, for its foundations are murder, theft, and cruelty. Yet here we are.

  “I’m supposed to answer Mingo’s call for gradual progress, for closing our doors to those in need. I’m supposed to answer those who think this place is too close to the grievous influence of slavery, and that we should move west. I don’t have an answer for you. I don’t know what we should do. The word we. In some ways, the only thing we have in common is the color of our skin. Our ancestors came from all over the African continent. It’s quite large. Brother Valentine has the maps of the world in his splendid library, you can look for yourself. They had different ways of subsistence, different customs, spoke a hundred different languages. And that great mixture was brought to America in the holds of slave ships. To the north, the south. Their sons and daughters picked tobacco, cultivated cotton, worked on the largest estates and smallest farms. We are craftsmen and midwives and preachers and peddlers. Black hands built the White House, the seat of our nation’s government. The word we. We are not one people but many different people. How can one person speak for this great, beautiful race—which is not one race but many, with a million desires and hopes and wishes for ourselves and our children?

  “For we are Africans in America. Something new in the history of the world, without models for what we will become.

  “Color must suffice. It has brought us to this night, this discussion, and it will take us into the future. All I truly know is that we rise and fall as one, one colored family living next door to one white family. We may not know the way through the forest, but we can pick each other up when we fall, and we will arrive together.”

  —

  WHEN the former residents of the Valentine farm recalled that moment, when they told strangers and grandchildren of how they used to live and how it came to an end, their voices still trembled years later. In Philadelphia, in San Francisco, in the cow towns and ranches where they eventually made a home, they mourned those who died that day. The air in the room turned prickly, they told their families, quickened by an unseen power. Whether they had been born free or in chains, they inhabited that moment as one: the moment when you aim yourself at the north star and decide to run. Perhaps they were on the verge of some new order, on the verge of clasping reason to disorder, of putting all the lessons of their history to bear on the future. Or perhaps time, as it will, lent the occasion a gravity that it did not possess, and everything was as Lander insisted: They were deluded.

  But that di
dn’t mean it wasn’t true.

  The shot hit Lander in the chest. He fell back, dragging down the lectern. Royal was the first one to his feet. As he ran to the fallen man, three bullets bit into his back. He jerked like one of Saint Vitus’s dancers and dropped. Then came a chorus of rifle fire, screams, and broken glass, and a mad scramble overtook the meeting hall.

  The white men outside whooped and howled over the carnage. Pell-mell the residents hastened to the exits, squeezing between pews, climbing over them, climbing over one another. Once the main entrance bottlenecked, people crawled over the windowsills. More rifles crackled. Valentine’s sons helped their father to the door. To the left of the stage, Gloria crouched over Lander. She saw there was nothing to be done and followed her family out.

  Cora held Royal’s head in her lap, just as she had the afternoon of the picnic. She ran her fingers through his curls and rocked him and wept. Royal smiled through the blood that bubbled on his lips. He told her not to be afraid, the tunnel would save her again. “Go to the house in the woods. You can tell me where it goes.” His body went slack.

  Two men grabbed her and removed her from Royal’s body. It’s not safe here, they said. One of them was Oliver Valentine, come back to help others escape the meeting house. He cried and shouted. Cora broke from her rescuers once they got her outside and down the steps. The farm was a commotion. The white posse dragged men and women into the dark, their hideous faces awash with delight. A musket cut down one of Sybil’s carpenters—he held a baby in his arms and they both crashed to the ground. No one knew where best to run, and no reasonable voice could be heard above the clamor. Each person on their own, as they ever had been.

  Mingo’s daughter Amanda shook on her knees, her family absent. Desolate in the dirt. Her bouquet had shed its petals. She gripped the naked stems, the iron wires the blacksmith had drawn out on the anvil last week, just for her. The wires cut her palms, she gripped them so tight. More blood in the dirt. As an old woman she would read about the Great War in Europe and recall this night. She lived on Long Island then, after roaming all over the country, in a small house with a Shinnecock sailor who doted on her to excess. She’d spent time in Louisiana and Virginia, where her father opened colored institutions of learning, and California. A spell in Oklahoma, where the Valentines resettled. The conflict in Europe was terrible and violent, she told her sailor, but she took exception to the name. The Great War had always been between the white and the black. It always would be.