The Underground Railroad

~ ~ ~

THE first and last things she gave to her daughter were apologies. Cora slept in her stomach, the size of a fist, when Mabel apologized for what she was bringing her into. Cora slept next to her in the loft, ten years later, when Mabel apologized for making her a stray. Cora didn’t hear either one.

At the first clearing Mabel found the north star and reoriented. She gathered herself and resumed her escape through the black water. Kept her eyes forward because when she looked back she saw the faces of those she left behind.

She saw Moses’s face. She remembered Moses when he was little. A twitching bundle so frail no one expected him to survive until he was old enough for pickaninny work, the trash gang, or offering a ladle of water in the cotton. Not when most children on Randall died before their first steps. His mother used the witch-woman cures, the poultices and root potions, and sang to him every night, crooning in their cabin. Lullabies and work tunes and her own maternal wishes in singsong: Keep the food in your stomach, break the fever, breathe until morning. He outlived most of the boys born that year. Everybody knew it was his mother, Kate, who saved him from affliction and the early winnowing that is every plantation slave’s first trial.

Mabel remembered when Old Randall sold off Kate once her arm went numb and wasn’t fit for labor. Moses’s first whipping for stealing a potato, and his second whipping for idleness, when Connelly had the boy’s wounds washed out with hot pepper until he howled. None of that made Moses mean. It made him silent and strong and fast, faster than any other picker in his gang. He wasn’t mean until Connelly made him a boss, the master’s eyes and ears over his own kind. That’s when he became Moses the monster, Moses who made the other slaves quake, black terror of the rows.

When he told her to come to the schoolhouse she scratched his face and spat at him and he just smiled and said if you’re not game I’ll find someone else — how old is your Cora now? Cora was eight. Mabel didn’t fight him after that. He was quick and he wasn’t rough after that first time. Women and animals, you only have to break them in once, he said. They stay broke.

All those faces, living and dead. Ajarry twitching in the cotton, bloody foam on her lips. She saw Polly swinging on a rope, sweet Polly, who she’d come up with in the quarter, born the same month. Connelly transferred them from the yard to the cotton fields the same day. Always in tandem until Cora lived but Polly’s baby didn’t — the young women delivered within two weeks of each other, with one baby girl crying when the midwife pulled her out and the other making no sound at all. Stillborn and stone. When Polly hung herself in the barn with a loop of hemp, Old Jockey said, You did everything together. Like Mabel was supposed to hang herself now, too.

She started to see Cora’s face and she looked away. She ran.

Men start off good and then the world makes them mean. The world is mean from the start and gets meaner every day. It uses you up until you only dream of death. Mabel wasn’t going to die on Randall, even if she’d never been a mile away from the grounds in her life. One midnight she decided, up in the sweltering loft, I am going to survive—and the next midnight she was in the swamp, tracking after the moon in stolen shoes. She turned her escape over in her head all day, let no other thought intrude or dissuade. There were islands in the swamp — follow them to the continent of freedom. She took the vegetables she raised, flint and tinder, a machete. Everything else she left behind, including her girl.

Cora, sleeping back in the cabin she was born in, that Mabel was born in. Still a girl, before the worst of it, before she learns the size and heft of a woman’s burdens. If Cora’s father had lived, would Mabel be here now, tramping through the marsh? Mabel was fourteen when Grayson arrived on the southern half, sold down south by a drunken indigo farmer in North Carolina. Tall and black, sweet-tempered with a laughing eye. Swaggering even after the hardest toil. They couldn’t touch him.

She picked him out that first day and decided: him. When he grinned it was the moon shining down on her, a presence in the sky blessing her. He scooped her up and twirled her when they danced. I’m going to buy our freedom, he said, hay in his hair from where they lay down. Old Randall didn’t go in for that, but he’d convince him. Work hard, be the best hand on the plantation — he’d earn his way out of bondage and take her, too. She said, You promise? Half believing he could do it. Grayson the Sweet, dead of fever before she knew she carried their child. His name never again crossed her lips.

Mabel tripped over a cypress root and went sprawling into the water. She staggered through the reeds to the island ahead and flattened on the ground. Didn’t know how long she had been running. Panting and tuckered out.

She took a turnip from her sack. It was young and tender-soft, and she took a bite. The sweetest crop she’d ever raised in Ajarry’s plot, even with the taste of marsh water. Her mother had left that in her inheritance, at least, a tidy plot to watch over. You’re supposed to pass on something useful to your children. The better parts of Ajarry never took root in Mabel. Her indomitability, her perseverance. But there was a plot three yards square and the hearty stuff that sprouted from it. Her mother had protected it with all her heart. The most valuable land in all of Georgia.

She lay on her back and ate another turnip. Without the sound of her splashing and huffing, the noises of the swamp resumed. The spadefoot toads and turtles and slithering creatures, the chattering of black insects. Above — through the leaves and branches of the black-water trees — the sky scrolled before her, new constellations wheeling in the darkness as she relaxed. No patrollers, no bosses, no cries of anguish to induct her into another’s despair. No cabin walls shuttling her through the night seas like the hold of a slave ship. Sandhill cranes and warblers, otters splashing. On the bed of damp earth, her breathing slowed and that which separated herself from the swamp disappeared. She was free.

This moment.

She had to go back. The girl was waiting on her. This would have to do for now. Her hopelessness had gotten the best of her, speaking under her thoughts like a demon. She would keep this moment close, her own treasure. When she found the words to share it with Cora, the girl would understand there was something beyond the plantation, past all that she knew. That one day if she stayed strong, the girl could have it for herself.

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.