The Underground Railroad

~ ~ ~

25 DOLLARS REWARD

RAN AWAY from the subscriber on the 6th of February last, his Negro Girl PEGGY. She is about 16 years of age, and is a bright mulatto, about the ordinary height, with straight hair and tolerable good features — she has a ragged scar on her neck occasioned by a burn. She will no doubt attempt to pass for a free girl, and it is likely she has obtained a free pass. She has a down look when spoken to, and not remarkably intelligent. She speaks quick, with a shrill voice.

JOHN DARK.

CHATHAM COUNTY, MAY 17.

~ ~ ~

“JESUS, carry me home, home to that land…”

Jasper wouldn’t stop singing. Ridgeway shouted from the head of their little caravan for him to shut his mouth, and sometimes they halted so Boseman could climb into the wagon and clout the runaway on the head. Jasper sucked the scars on his fingers for a short interval, then resumed his crooning. Quietly at first so that only Cora could hear. But soon he’d be singing again, to his lost family, to his god, to everyone they passed on the trail. He’d have to be disciplined again.

Cora recognized some of the hymns. She suspected he made up many of them; the rhymes were crooked. She wouldn’t have minded it so much if Jasper had a better voice, but Jesus had not blessed him in that department. Or with looks — he had a lopsided frog face and oddly thin arms for a field hand — or with luck. Luck least of all.

He and Cora had that in common.

They picked up Jasper three days out of North Carolina. Jasper was a delivery. He absconded from the Florida cane fields and made it to Tennessee before a tinker caught him stealing food from his pantry. After a few weeks the deputy located his owner, but the tinker had no means of transport. Ridgeway and Boseman were drinking in a tavern around the corner from the jail while little Homer waited with Cora and the wagon. The town clerk approached the famous slave catcher, brokered an arrangement, and Ridgeway now had the nigger chained in the wagon. He hadn’t reckoned the man for a songbird.

The rain tapped on the canopy. Cora enjoyed the breeze and then felt ashamed for enjoying something. They stopped to eat when the rain let up. Boseman slapped Jasper, chuckled, and unchained the two fugitives from the wagon floor. He offered his customary vulgar promise as he knelt before Cora, sniffing. Jasper’s and Cora’s wrists and ankles remained manacled. It was the longest she had ever been in chains.

Crows glided over. The world was scorched and harrowed as far as they could see, a sea of ash and char from the flat planes of the fields up to the hills and mountains. Black trees tilted, stunted black arms pointing as if to a distant place untouched by flame. They rode past the blackened bones of houses and barns without number, chimneys sticking up like grave markers, the husked stone walls of ravaged mills and granaries. Scorched fences marked where cattle had grazed; it was not possible the animals survived.

After two days of riding through it, they were covered in black grime. Ridgeway said it made him feel at home, the blacksmith’s son.

This is what Cora saw: Nowhere to hide. No refuge between those black stalks, even if she weren’t fettered. Even if she had an opportunity.

An old white man in a gray coat trotted by on a dun horse. Like the other travelers they passed on the black road, he slowed in curiosity. Two adult slaves were common enough. But the colored boy in the black suit driving the wagon and his queer smile discomfited strangers. The younger white man with the red derby wore a necklace adorned with pieces of shriveled leather. When they figured out these were human ears, he bared a line of intermittent teeth browned by tobacco. The older white man in command discouraged all conversation with his glowering. The traveler moved on, around the bend where the road limped between the denuded hills.

Homer unfolded a moth-eaten quilt for them to sit on and distributed their portions on tin plates. The slave catcher allowed his prisoners an equal share of the food, a custom dating to his earliest days in the job. It reduced complaints and he billed the client. At the edge of the blackened field they ate the salt pork and the beans Boseman had prepared, the dry flies screeching in waves.

Rain agitated the smell of the fire, making the air bitter. Smoke flavored every bite of food, each sip of water. Jasper sang, “Jump up, the redeemer said! Jump up, jump up if you want to see His face!”

“Hallelujah!” Boseman shouted. “Fat little Jesus baby!” His words echoed and he did a dance, splashing dark water.

“He’s not eating,” Cora said. Jasper had foregone the last few meals, screwing his mouth shut and crossing his arms.

“Then it doesn’t eat,” Ridgeway said. He waited for her to say something, having grown used to her chirping at his remarks. They were on to each other. She kept silent to interrupt their pattern.

Homer scampered over and gobbled down Jasper’s portion. He sensed Cora staring at him and grinned without looking up.

The driver of the wagon was an odd little imp. Ten years old, Chester’s age, but imbued with the melancholy grace of an elderly house slave, the sum of practiced gestures. He was fastidious about his fine black suit and stovepipe hat, extracting lint from the fabric and glaring at it as if it were a poison spider before flicking it. Homer rarely spoke apart from his hectoring of the horses. Of racial affinity or sympathy, he gave no indication. Cora and Jasper might as well have been invisible most of the time, smaller than lint.

Homer’s duties encompassed driving the team, sundry maintenance, and what Ridgeway termed “bookkeeping.” Homer maintained the business accounts and recorded Ridgeway’s stories in a small notebook he kept in his coat pocket. What made this or that utterance from the slave catcher worthy of inclusion, Cora could not discern. The boy preserved worldly truism and matter-of-fact observations about the weather with equal zeal.

Prompted by Cora one night, Ridgeway maintained that he’d never owned a slave in his life, save for the fourteen hours Homer was his property. Why not? she asked. “What for?” he said. Ridgeway was riding through the outskirts of Atlanta — he’d just delivered a husband and wife to their owner, all the way from New York — when he came upon a butcher trying to square a gambling debt. His wife’s family had given them the boy’s mother as a wedding gift. The butcher had sold her during his previous stretch of bad luck. Now it was the boy’s turn. He painted a crude sign to hang around the boy’s neck advertising the offer.

The boy’s strange sensibility moved Ridgeway. Homer’s shining eyes, set in his round pudgy face, were at once feral and serene. A kindred spirit. Ridgeway bought him for five dollars and drew up emancipation papers the next day. Homer remained at his side despite Ridgeway’s halfhearted attempts to shoo him away. The butcher had held no strong opinions on the subject of colored education and had permitted the boy to study with the children of some freemen. Out of boredom, Ridgeway helped him with his letters. Homer pretended he was of Italian extraction when it suited him and let his questioners sit with their bewilderment. His unconventional attire evolved over time; his disposition remained unchanged.

“If he’s free, why don’t he go?”

“Where?” Ridgeway asked. “He’s seen enough to know a black boy has no future, free papers or no. Not in this country. Some disreputable character would snatch him and put him on the block lickety-split. With me, he can learn about the world. Find purpose.”

Each night, with meticulous care, Homer opened his satchel and removed a set of manacles. He locked himself to the driver’s seat, put the key in his pocket, and closed his eyes.

Ridgeway caught Cora looking. “He says it’s the only way he can sleep.”

Homer snored like a rich old man every night.

—

BOSEMAN, for his part, had been riding with Ridgeway for three years. He was a rambler out of South Carolina and found his way to slave catching after a hardscrabble sequence: dockhand, collection agent, gravedigger. Boseman was not the most intelligent fellow but had a knack for anticipating Ridgeway’s wishes in a manner equal parts indispensable and eerie. Ridgeway’s gang numbered five when Boseman joined, but his employees drifted off one by one. The reason was not immediately clear to Cora.

The previous owner of the ear necklace had been an Indian named Strong. Strong had promoted himself as a tracker, but the only creature he sniffed out reliably was whiskey. Boseman won the accessory in a wrestling contest, and when Strong disputed the terms of their match, Boseman clobbered the red man with a shovel. Strong lost his hearing and ditched the gang to work in a tannery in Canada, or so the rumor went. Even though the ears were dried and shriveled, they drew flies when it was hot. Boseman loved his souvenir, however, and the revulsion on a new client’s face was too delectable. The flies hadn’t harassed the Indian when he owned it, as Ridgeway reminded him from time to time.

Boseman stared at the hills between bites and had an uncharacteristically wistful air. He walked off to urinate and when he came back said, “My daddy passed through here, I think. He said it was forest then. When he came back, it had all been cleared by settlers.”

“Now it’s doubly cleared,” Ridgeway responded. “It’s true what you say. This road was a horse path. Next time you need to make a road, Boseman, make sure you have ten thousand starving Cherokee on hand to clear it for you. Saves time.”

“Where did they go?” Cora asked. After her nights with Martin, she had a sense of when white men were on the brink of a story. It gave her time to consider her options.

Ridgeway was an ardent reader of gazettes. The fugitive bulletins made them a requirement in his line of work — Homer maintained a thorough collection — and current affairs generally upheld his theories about society and the human animal. The type of individuals in his employ had made him accustomed to explaining the most elementary facts and history. He could hardly expect a slave girl to know the significance of their environs.

They sat on what was once Cherokee land, he said, the land of their red fathers, until the president decided otherwise and ordered them removed. Settlers needed the land, and if the Indians hadn’t learned by then that the white man’s treaties were entirely worthless, Ridgeway said, they deserved what they got. Some of his friends had been with the army at that time. They rounded up the Indians in camps, the women and children and whatever they could carry on their backs, and marched them west of the Mississippi. The Trail of Tears and Death, as one Cherokee sage put it later, not without cause, not without that Indian flair for rhetoric. Disease and malnutrition, not to mention the biting winter that year, which Ridgeway himself remembered without fondness, claimed thousands. When they got to Oklahoma there were still more white people waiting for them, squatting on the land the Indians had been promised in the latest worthless treaty. Slow learners, the bunch. But here they were on this road today. The trip to Missouri was much more comfortable than it had been previously, tamped by little red feet.

“Progress,” Ridgeway said. “My cousin got lucky and won some Indian land in the lottery, in the north part of Tennessee. Grows corn.”

Cora cocked her head at the desolation. “Lucky,” she said.

On their way in, Ridgeway told them that a lightning strike must have started the fire. The smoke filled the sky for hundreds of miles, tinting the sunset into gorgeous contusions of crimson and purple. This was Tennessee announcing itself: fantastic beasts twisting in a volcano. For the first time, she crossed into another state without using the underground railroad. The tunnels had protected her. The station master Lumbly had said that each state was a state of possibility, with its own customs. The red sky made her dread the rules of this next territory. As they rode toward the smoke, the sunsets inspired Jasper to share a suite of hymns whose central theme was the wrath of God and the mortifications awaiting the wicked. Boseman made frequent trips to the wagon.

The town at the edge of the fire line was overrun with escapees. “Runaways,” Cora declared and Homer turned in his seat to wink. The white families swarmed in a camp off the main street, inconsolable and abject, the meager possessions they were able to save piled around their feet. Figures staggered through the street with demented expressions, wild-eyed, their clothes singed, rags tied around burns. Cora was well-accustomed to the screams of colored babies in torment, hungry, in pain, confused by the mania of those charged to protect them. Hearing the screams of so many little white babies was new. Her sympathies lay with the colored babies.

Empty shelves greeted Ridgeway and Boseman in the general store. The shopkeeper told Ridgeway that homesteaders had started the fire while trying to clear some scrub. The fire escaped them and ravaged the land with bottomless hunger until the rains came finally. Three million acres, the shopkeeper said. The government promised relief but no one could say when it would arrive. The biggest disaster in as long as anyone could remember.

The original residents had a more thorough list of wildfires and floods and tornadoes, Cora thought when Ridgeway shared the shopkeeper’s words. But they were not here to contribute their knowledge. She didn’t know which tribe had called this territory home, but knew it had been Indian land. What land hadn’t been theirs? She had never learned history proper, but sometimes one’s eyes are teacher enough.

“They must have done something to make God angry,” Boseman said.

“Just a spark that got away is all,” Ridgeway said.

They lingered by the road after their lunchtime meal, the white men smoking pipes by the horses and reminiscing an escapade. For all his talk of how long he had hunted her, Ridgeway displayed no urgency about delivering Cora to Terrance Randall. Not that she hurried toward that reunion. Cora stutter-stepped into the burned field. She’d learned to walk with irons. It was hard to believe it had taken this long. Cora had always pitied the downcast coffles marching in their pathetic line past the Randall place. Now look at her. The lesson was unclear. In one respect she had been spared an injury for many years. In another, misfortune had merely bided time: There was no escape. Sores puckered on her skin beneath the iron. The white men paid her no mind as she walked to the black trees.

By then she had run a few times. When they stopped for supplies, Boseman was distracted by a funeral procession rounding the corner and she made it a couple of yards before a boy tripped her. They added a neck collar, iron links dropping to her wrists like moss. It gave her the posture of a beggar or praying mantis. She ran when the men stopped to relieve themselves at the side of the trail and made it a little farther that time. She ran once at dusk, by a stream, the water making a promise of movement. The slick stones sent her tumbling into the water, and Ridgeway thrashed her. She stopped running.

—

THEY seldom spoke the first days after leaving North Carolina. She thought the confrontation with the mob had exhausted them as much as it had exhausted her, but silence was their policy in general — until Jasper came into their midst. Boseman whispered his rude suggestions and Homer turned back from the driver’s seat to give her an unsettling grin on his inscrutable schedule, but the slave catcher kept his distance at the head of the line. Occasionally he whistled.

Cora caught on that they were heading west instead of south. She’d never paid attention to the sun’s habits before Caesar. He told her it might aid their escape. They stopped in a town one morning, outside a bakery. Cora steeled herself and asked Ridgeway about his plans.

His eyes widened, as if he’d been waiting for her to approach. After this first conversation Ridgeway included her in their plans as if she had a vote. “You were a surprise,” he said, “but don’t worry, we’ll get you home soon enough.”

She was correct, he said. They were headed west. A Georgia planter named Hinton had commissioned Ridgeway to return one of his slaves. The negro in question was a wily and resourceful buck who had relatives in one of the colored settlements in Missouri; reliable information confirmed Nelson plied his trade as a trapper, in broad daylight, without concern of retribution. Hinton was a respected farmer with an enviable spread, a cousin of the governor. Regrettably, one of his overseers had gossiped with a slave wench and now Nelson’s behavior made his owner an object of ridicule on his own land. Hinton had been grooming the boy to be a boss. He promised Ridgeway a generous bounty, going so far as to present a contract in a pretentious ceremony. An elderly darky served as witness, coughing into his hand the while.

Given Hinton’s impatience, the most sensible course was to travel on to Missouri. “Once we have our man,” Ridgeway said, “you can be reunited with your master. From what I’ve seen, he’ll prepare a worthy welcome.”

Ridgeway didn’t hide his disdain for Terrance Randall; the man had what he called an “ornate” imagination when it came to nigger discipline. This much was plain from the moment his gang turned down the road to the big house and saw the three gallows. The young girl was installed in hers, hooked through her ribs by a large metal spike and dangling. The dirt below dark with her blood. The other two gallows stood waiting.

“If I hadn’t been detained upstate,” Ridgeway said, “I’m sure I’d have scooped up the three of you before the trail got cold. Lovey — was that its name?”

Cora covered her mouth to keep in her scream. She failed. Ridgeway waited ten minutes for her to regain her composure. The townspeople looked at the colored girl laying there collapsed on the ground and stepped over her into the bakery. The smell of the snacks filled the street, sweet and beguiling.

Boseman and Homer waited in the drive while he talked to the master of the house, Ridgeway said. The house had been lively and inviting when the father was alive — yes, he had been there before to search for Cora’s mother and come up empty-handed. One minute with Terrance and the cause of the terrible atmosphere was evident. The son was mean, and it was the kind of meanness that infected everything around. The daylight was gray and sluggish from the thunderheads, the house niggers slow and glum.

The newspapers liked to impress the fantasy of the happy plantation and the contented slave who sang and danced and loved Massa. Folks enjoyed that sort of thing and it was politically useful given the combat with the northern states and the antislavery movement. Ridgeway knew that image to be false — he didn’t need to dissemble about the business of slavery — but neither was the menace of the Randall plantation the truth. The place was haunted. Who could blame the slaves their sad comportment with that corpse twisting on a hook outside?

Terrance received Ridgeway into the parlor. He was drunk and had not bothered to dress himself, lounging on the sofa in a red robe. It was tragic, Ridgeway said, to see the degeneration that can happen in just one generation, but money does that to a family sometimes. Brings out the impurities. Terrance remembered Ridgeway from his earlier visit, when Mabel disappeared into the swamp, just like this latest trio. He told Ridgeway that his father had been touched that he came in person to apologize for his incompetence.

“I could have slapped the Randall boy twice across the face without losing the contract,” Ridgeway said. “But in my mature years I decided to wait until I had you and the other one in hand. Something to look forward to.” He assumed from Terrance’s eagerness and the size of the bounty that Cora was her master’s concubine.

Cora shook her head. She had stopped sobbing and stood now, her trembling under control, hands in fists.

Ridgeway paused. “Something else, then. At any rate, you exert a powerful influence.” He resumed the story of his visit to Randall. Terrance briefed the slave catcher on the state of affairs since Lovey’s capture. Just that morning his man Connelly had been informed that Caesar frequented the premises of a local shopkeeper — the man sold the nigger boy’s woodwork, supposedly. Perhaps the slave catcher might visit this Mr. Fletcher and see what developed. Terrance wanted the girl alive but didn’t care how the other one came back. Did Ridgeway know that the boy came from Virginia originally?

Ridgeway did not. This was some sort of jousting about his home state. The windows were closed and yet a disagreeable smell had moved into the room.

“That’s where he learned his bad habits,” Terrance had said. “They’re soft up there. You make sure he learns how we do things in Georgia.” He wanted the law kept out of it. The pair was wanted for the murder of a white boy and wouldn’t make it back once the mob got wind. The bounty accounted for his discretion.

The slave catcher took his leave. The axle of his empty wagon complained, as it did when there was no weight to quiet it. Ridgeway promised himself it would not be empty when he returned. He wasn’t going to apologize to another Randall, certainly not that whelp who ran the place now. He heard a sound and turned back to the house. It came from the girl, Lovey. Her arm fluttered. She was not dead after all. “Lingered another half day, from what I heard.”

Fletcher’s lies collapsed immediately — one of those weak religious specimens — and he relinquished the name of his associate on the railroad, a man named Lumbly. Of Lumbly there was no sign. He never returned after taking Cora and Caesar out of state. “To South Carolina was it?” Ridgeway asked. “Was he also the one who conveyed your mother north?”

Cora kept her tongue. It was not hard to envision Fletcher’s fate, and perhaps his wife’s as well. At least Lumbly made it out. And they hadn’t discovered the tunnel beneath the barn. One day another desperate soul might use that route. To a better outcome, fortune willing.

Ridgeway nodded. “No matter. We have plenty of time to catch each other up. It’s a long ride to Missouri.” The law had caught up with a station master in southern Virginia, he said, who gave up the name of Martin’s father. Donald was dead, but Ridgeway wanted to get a sense of the man’s operation if he could, to understand the workings of the larger conspiracy. He hadn’t expected to find Cora but had been utterly delighted.

Boseman chained her to the wagon. She knew the sound of the lock now. It hitched for a moment before falling into place. Jasper joined them the next day. His body shivered like that of a beaten dog. Cora tried to engage him, asking after the place he fled, the business of working cane, how he took flight. Jasper responded with hymns and devotions.

—

THAT was four days ago. Now she stood in a black pasture in bad-luck Tennessee, crunching burned wood beneath her feet.

The wind picked up, and the rain. Their stop was over. Homer cleaned after their meal. Ridgeway and Boseman tapped out their pipes and the younger man whistled for her to return. Tennessee hills and mountains rose around Cora like the sides of a black bowl. How awful the flames must have been, how fierce, to make such ruin. We’re crawling in a bowl of ashes. What’s left when everything worthwhile has been consumed, dark powder for the wind to take.

Boseman slid her chains through the ring in the floor and secured them. Ten rings were bolted to the wagon floor, two rows of five, enough for the occasional big haul. Enough for these two. Jasper claimed his favorite spot on the bench, crooning with vigor, as if he’d just gobbled down a Christmas feast. “When the Savior calls you up, you’re going to lay the burden down, lay that burden down.”

“Boseman,” Ridgeway said softly.

“He’s going to look in your soul and see what you done, sinner, He’s going to look in your soul and see what you done.”

Boseman said, “Oh.”

The slave catcher got into the wagon for the first time since he picked up Cora. He held Boseman’s pistol in his hand and shot Jasper in the face. The blood and the bone covered the inside of the canopy, splashing Cora’s filthy shift.

Ridgeway wiped his face and explained his reasoning. Jasper’s reward was fifty dollars, fifteen of that for the tinker who brought the fugitive to jail. Missouri, back east, Georgia — it would be weeks before they delivered the man to his owner. Divide thirty-five dollars by, say, three weeks, minus Boseman’s share, and the lost bounty was a very small price to pay for silence and a restful mind.

Homer opened his notebook and checked his boss’s figures. “He’s right,” he said.

~ ~ ~

Tennessee proceeded in a series of blights. The blaze had devoured the next two towns on the cindered road. In the morning the remains of a small settlement emerged around a hill, an arrangement of scorched timber and black stonework. First came the stumps of the houses that had once contained the dreams of pioneers, and then the town proper in a line of ruined structures. The town farther along was larger but its rival in destruction. The heart was a broad intersection where ravaged avenues had converged in enterprise, now gone. A baker’s oven in the ruins of the shop like a grim totem, human remains bent behind the steel of a jail cell.

Cora couldn’t tell what feature of the landscape had persuaded the homesteaders to plant their futures, fertile earth or water or vistas. Everything had been erased. If the survivors returned it would be to confirm the resolution to try again somewhere else, scurrying back east or ever west. No resurrection here.

Then they escaped the wildfire’s reach. The birches and wild grasses vibrated with impossible color after their time in the burned land, Edenic and fortifying. In jest, Boseman imitated Jasper’s singing, to mark the change in mood; the black scenery had worked on them more than they knew. The robust corn in the fields, already two feet high, pointed to an exuberant harvest; with equal force the ruined territory had advertised reckonings to come.

Ridgeway called for a stop shortly after noon. The slave catcher stiffened as he read aloud the sign at the crossroads. The town up the road was overcome by yellow fever, he said. All travelers warned away. An alternative trail, smaller and uneven, led southwest.

The sign was new, Ridgeway observed. Most likely the sickness had not run its course.

“My two brothers passed of yellow fever,” Boseman said. He grew up on the Mississippi, where the fever liked to visit when the weather turned warm. His younger brothers’ skin turned jaundiced and waxen, they bled from their eyes and asses and seizures wracked their tiny bodies. Some men took away their corpses in a squeaky wheelbarrow. “It’s a miserable death,” he said, his jokes taken from him again.

Ridgeway knew the town. The mayor was a corrupt boor, the food turned your guts runny, but he held a good thought for them. Going around would add considerable time to their trip. “The fever comes on the boats,” Ridgeway said. From the West Indies, all the way from the dark continent, following in the wake of trade. “It’s a human tax on progress.”

“Who’s the taxman came to collect it?” Boseman said. “I never saw him.” His fear made him skittish and petulant. He didn’t want to linger, even this crossroads too close to the fever’s embrace. Not waiting for Ridgeway’s order — or obeying a signal shared only by the slave catcher and the boy secretary — Homer drove the wagon away from the doomed town.

Two more signs along the southwesterly course maintained the warning. The trails feeding into the quarantined towns displayed no sign of the danger ahead. Traveling through the handiwork of the fire for so long made an unseeable menace more terrifying. It was a long time, after dark, before they stopped again. Time enough for Cora to take stock of her journey from Randall and make a thick braid of her misfortunes.

List upon list crowded the ledger of slavery. The names gathered first on the African coast in tens of thousands of manifests. That human cargo. The names of the dead were as important as the names of the living, as every loss from disease and suicide — and the other mishaps labeled as such for accounting purposes — needed to be justified to employers. At the auction block they tallied the souls purchased at each auction, and on the plantations the overseers preserved the names of workers in rows of tight cursive. Every name an asset, breathing capital, profit made flesh.

The peculiar institution made Cora into a maker of lists as well. In her inventory of loss people were not reduced to sums but multiplied by their kindnesses. People she had loved, people who had helped her. The Hob women, Lovey, Martin and Ethel, Fletcher. The ones who disappeared: Caesar and Sam and Lumbly. Jasper was not her responsibility, but the stains of his blood on the wagon and her clothes might as well have represented her own dead.

Tennessee was cursed. Initially she assigned the devastation of Tennessee — the blaze and the disease — to justice. The whites got what they deserved. For enslaving her people, for massacring another race, for stealing the very land itself. Let them burn by flame or fever, let the destruction started here rove acre by acre until the dead have been avenged. But if people received their just portion of misfortune, what had she done to bring her troubles on herself? In another list, Cora marked the decisions that led her to this wagon and its iron rings. There was the boy Chester, and how she had shielded him. The whip was the standard punishment for disobedience. Running away was a transgression so large that the punishment enveloped every generous soul on her brief tour of freedom.

Bouncing on the wagon springs, she smelled the damp earth and the heaving trees. Why had this field escaped while another burned five miles back? Plantation justice was mean and constant, but the world was indiscriminate. Out in the world, the wicked escaped comeuppance and the decent stood in their stead at the whipping tree. Tennessee’s disasters were the fruit of indifferent nature, without connection to the crimes of the homesteaders. To how the Cherokee had lived their lives.

Just a spark that got away.

No chains fastened Cora’s misfortunes to her character or actions. Her skin was black and this was how the world treated black people. No more, no less. Every state is different, Lumbly said. If Tennessee had a temperament, it took after the dark personality of the world, with a taste for arbitrary punishment. No one was spared, regardless of the shape of their dreams or the color of their skin.

A young man with curly brown hair, pebbly eyes dark beneath his straw hat, drove a team of workhorses from the west. His cheeks were sunburned a painful red. He intercepted Ridgeway’s gang. A big settlement lay ahead, the man said, with a reputation for a rambunctious spirit. Free of yellow fever as of that morning. Ridgeway told the man what lay ahead of him and gave his thanks.

Immediately the traffic on the road resumed, even the animals and insects contributing activity. The four travelers were returned to the sights and sounds and smells of civilization. On the outskirts of the town, lamps glowed in the farmhouses and shacks, the families settling in for the evening. The town rose into view, the biggest Cora had seen since North Carolina, if not as long established. The long main street, with its two banks and the loud row of taverns, was enough to bring her back to the days of the dormitory. The town gave no indication of quieting for the night, shops open, citizens a-prowl on the wooden sidewalks.

Boseman was adamant about not spending the night. If the fever was so close it might strike here next, perhaps it already churned in the bodies of the townspeople. Ridgeway was irritated but gave in, even though he missed a proper bed. They’d camp up the road after they resupplied.

Cora remained chained to the wagon as the men pursued errands. Strollers caught her face through the openings in the canvas and looked away. They had hard faces. Their clothes were coarse and homespun, less fine than the white people’s clothes in the eastern towns. The clothes of settlers, not of the settled.

Homer climbed in the wagon whistling one of Jasper’s more monotonous ditties. The dead slave still among them. The boy held a bundle wrapped in brown paper. “This is for you,” he said.

The dress was dark blue with white buttons, soft cotton that gave off a medicinal smell. She held up the dress so that it blocked the blood stains on the canvas, which were stark on the fabric from the streetlamps outside.

“Put it on, Cora,” Homer said.

Cora raised her hands, the chains making a noise.

He unlocked her ankles and wrists. As she did every time, Cora considered the chances of escape and came up with the dead result. A town like this, rough and wild, made good mobs, she figured. Had news of the boy in Georgia reached here? The accident she never thought about and which she didn’t include in her list of transgressions. The boy belonged on his own list — but what were its terms?

Homer watched her as she dressed, like a valet who had waited on her since the cradle.

“I’m caught,” Cora said. “You choose to be with him.”

Homer looked puzzled. He took out his notebook, turned to the last page, and scribbled. When he was finished, the boy fixed her manacles again. He gave her ill-fitting wooden shoes. He was about to chain Cora to the wagon when Ridgeway said to bring her outside.

Boseman was still out after a barber and a bath. The slave catcher handed Homer the gazettes and the fugitive bulletins he’d collected from the deputy in the jail. “I’m taking Cora for some supper,” Ridgeway said, and led her into the racket. Homer dropped her filthy shift into the gutter, the brown of the dried blood seeping into the mud.

The wooden shoes pinched. Ridgeway didn’t alter his stride to accommodate Cora’s hindered pace, walking ahead of her and unconcerned that she might run. Her chains were a cowbell. The white people of Tennessee took no notice of her. A young negro leaned against the wall of a stable, the only person to register her presence. A freeman from his appearance, dressed in striped gray trousers and a vest of cowhide. He watched her move as she had watched the coffles trudge past Randall. To see chains on another person and be glad they are not your own — such was the good fortune permitted colored people, defined by how much worse it could be any moment. If your eyes met, both parties looked away. But this man did not. He nodded before passersby took him from view.

Cora had peeked inside Sam’s saloon in North Carolina but never crossed the threshold. If she was an odd vision in their midst, one look from Ridgeway made the patrons return to their own business. The fat man tending the bar rolled tobacco and stared at the back of Ridgeway’s head.

Ridgeway led her to a wobbly table against the rear wall. The smell of stewed meat rose above that of the old beer soaked into the floorboards and the walls and the ceiling. The pigtailed maid was a broad-shouldered girl with the thick arms of a cotton loader. Ridgeway ordered their food.

“The shoes were not my first choice,” he told Cora, “but the dress suits you.”

“It’s clean,” Cora said.

“Now, well. Can’t have our Cora looking like the floor of a butcher’s shop.”

He meant to elicit a reaction. Cora declined. From the saloon next door, a piano started up. It sounded as if a raccoon ran back and forth, mashing on the keys.

“All this time you haven’t asked about your accomplice,” Ridgeway said. “Caesar. Did it make the newspapers up in North Carolina?”

This was going to be a performance then, like one of the Friday-night pageants on the park. He had her dress up for night at the theater. She waited.

“It’s so strange going to South Carolina,” Ridgeway said, “now that they have their new system. Had many a caper there in the old days. But the old days aren’t that far off. For all their talk of negro uplift and civilizing the savage, it’s the same hungry place it always was.”

The maid delivered bread heels and bowls full of beef and potato stew. Ridgeway whispered to her while looking at Cora, something she couldn’t hear. The girl laughed. Cora realized he was drunk.

Ridgeway slurped. “We caught up with it at the factory at the end of its shift,” he said. “These big colored bucks around it, finding their old fear again after thinking they’d put it behind them. At first, wasn’t no big fuss. Another runaway caught. Then word spread that Caesar was wanted for the murder of a little boy—”

“Not little,” Cora said.

Ridgeway shrugged. “They broke into the jail. The sheriff opened the door, to be honest, but that’s not as dramatic. They broke into the jail and ripped its body to pieces. The decent people of South Carolina with their schoolhouses and Friday credit.”

News of Lovey had broken her down in front of him. Not this time. She was prepared — his eyes brightened when he was on the verge of a cruelty. And she had known Caesar was dead for a long time now. No need to ask after his fate. It appeared before her one night in the attic like a spark, a small and simple truth: Caesar did not make it out. He was not up north wearing a new suit, new shoes, new smile. Sitting in the dark, nestled into the rafters, Cora understood that she was alone again. They had got him. She had finished mourning him by the time Ridgeway came knocking on Martin’s door.

Ridgeway plucked gristle from his mouth. “I made a little silver for the capture at any rate, and returned another boy to its master along the way. Profit in the end.”

“You scrape like an old darky for that Randall money,” Cora said.

Ridgeway laid his big hands on the uneven table, tilting it to his side. Stew ran over the rim of the bowls. “They should fix this,” he said.

The stew was lumpy with the thickening flour. Cora mashed the lumps with her tongue the way she did when one of Alice’s helpers had prepared the meal and not the old cook herself. Through the wall the piano player bit into an upbeat ditty. A drunken couple dashed next door to dance.

“Jasper wasn’t killed by no mob,” Cora said.

“There are always unexpected expenses,” Ridgeway said. “I’m not going to get reimbursed for all the food I fed it.”

“You go on about reasons,” Cora said. “Call things by other names as if it changes what they are. But that don’t make them true. You killed Jasper in cold blood.”

“That was more of a personal matter,” Ridgeway conceded, “and not what I’m talking about here. You and your friend killed a boy. You have your justifications.”

“I was going to escape.”

“That’s all I’m talking about, survival. Do you feel awful about it?”

The boy’s death was a complication of her escape, like the absence of a full moon or losing the head start because Lovey had been discovered out of her cabin. But shutters swung out inside her and she saw the boy trembling on his sickbed, his mother weeping over his grave. Cora had been grieving for him, too, without knowing it. Another person caught in this enterprise that bound slave and master alike. She moved the boy from the lonely list in her head and logged him below Martin and Ethel, even though she did not know his name. X, as she signed herself before she learned her letters.

Nonetheless. She told Ridgeway, “No.”

“Of course not — it’s nothing. Better weep for one of those burned cornfields, or this steer swimming in our soup. You do what’s required to survive.” He wiped his lips. “It’s true, though, your complaint. We come up with all sorts of fancy talk to hide things. Like in the newspapers nowadays, all the smart men talking about Manifest Destiny. Like it’s a new idea. You don’t know what I’m talking about, do you?” Ridgeway asked.

Cora sat back. “More words to pretty things up.”

“It means taking what is yours, your property, whatever you deem it to be. And everyone else taking their assigned places to allow you to take it. Whether it’s red men or Africans, giving up themselves, giving of themselves, so that we can have what’s rightfully ours. The French setting aside their territorial claims. The British and the Spanish slinking away.

“My father liked his Indian talk about the Great Spirit,” Ridgeway said. “All these years later, I prefer the American spirit, the one that called us from the Old World to the New, to conquer and build and civilize. And destroy that what needs to be destroyed. To lift up the lesser races. If not lift up, subjugate. And if not subjugate, exterminate. Our destiny by divine prescription — the American imperative.”

“I need to visit the outhouse,” Cora said.

The corners of his mouth sank. He gestured for her to walk in front. The steps to the back alley were slippery with vomit and he grabbed her elbow to steady her. Closing the outhouse door, shutting him out, was the purest pleasure she’d had in a long while.

Ridgeway continued his address undeterred. “Take your mother,” the slave catcher said. “Mabel. Stolen from her master by misguided whites and colored individuals in a criminal conspiracy. I kept an eye out all this time, turned Boston and New York upside down, all the colored settlements. Syracuse. Northampton. She’s up in Canada, laughing at the Randalls and me. I take it as a personal injury. That’s why I bought you that dress. To help me picture her wrapped like a present for her master.”

He hated her mother as much as she did. That, and the fact they both had eyes in their head, meant they had two things in common.

Ridgeway paused — a drunk wanted to use the privy. He shooed him away. “You absconded for ten months,” he said. “Insult enough. You and your mother are a line that needs to be extinguished. A week together, chained up, and you sass me without end, on your way to a bloody homecoming. The abolitionist lobby loves to trot out your kind, to give speeches to white people who have no idea how the world works.”

The slave catcher was wrong. If she’d made it north she would have disappeared into a life outside their terms. Like her mother. One thing the woman had passed on to her.

“We do our part,” Ridgeway said, “slave and slave catcher. Master and colored boss. The new arrivals streaming into the harbors and the politicians and sheriffs and newspapermen and the mothers raising strong sons. People like you and your mother are the best of your race. The weak of your tribe have been weeded out, they die in the slave ships, die of our European pox, in the fields working our cotton and indigo. You need to be strong to survive the labor and to make us greater. We fatten hogs, not because it pleases us but because we need hogs to survive. But we can’t have you too clever. We can’t have you so fit you outrun us.”

She finished her business and picked out a fugitive bulletin from the stack of paper to wipe herself. Then she waited. A pitiful respite, but it was hers.

“You heard my name when you were a pickaninny,” he said. “The name of punishment, dogging every fugitive step and every thought of running away. For every slave I bring home, twenty others abandon their full-moon schemes. I’m a notion of order. The slave that disappears — it’s a notion, too. Of hope. Undoing what I do so that a slave the next plantation over gets an idea that it can run, too. If we allow that, we accept the flaw in the imperative. And I refuse.”

The music from next door was slow now. Couples coming together to hold each other, to sway and twist. That was real conversation, dancing slow with another person, not all these words. She knew that, even though she had never danced like that with another person and had refused Caesar when he asked. The only person to ever extend a hand to her and say, Come closer. Maybe everything the slave catcher said was true, Cora thought, every justification, and the sons of Ham were cursed and the slave master performed the Lord’s will. And maybe he was just a man talking to an outhouse door, waiting for someone to wipe her ass.

—

CORA and Ridgeway returned to the wagon to find Homer rubbing his small thumbs on the reins and Boseman sipping whiskey from a bottle. “This town is sick with it,” Boseman said, slurring. “I can smell it.” The younger man led the way out of town. He shared his disappointments. The shave and bath had gone well; with a fresh face the man looked almost innocent. But he had not been able to perform like a man at the brothel. “The madam was sweating like a pig and I knew they had the fever, her and her whores.” Ridgeway let him decide how far was far enough to camp.

She had been asleep for a short time when Boseman crept in and put his hand over her mouth. She was ready.

Boseman put his fingers to his lips. Cora nodded as much as his grip permitted: She would not cry out. She could make a fuss now and wake Ridgeway; Boseman would give him some excuse and that would be the end of it. But she had thought about this moment for days, of when Boseman let his carnal desires get the best of him. It was the most drunk he’d been since North Carolina. He complimented her dress when they stopped for the night. She steeled herself. If she could persuade him to unshackle her, a dark night like this was made for running.

Homer snored loudly. Boseman slipped her chains from the wagon ring, careful not to let the links sound against each other. He undid her ankles and cinched her wrist chains to silence them. He descended first and helped Cora out. She could just make out the road a few yards away. Dark enough.

Ridgeway knocked him to the ground with a growl and started kicking him. Boseman started his defense and Ridgeway kicked him in the mouth. She almost ran. She almost did. But the quickness of the violence, the blade of it, arrested her. Ridgeway scared her. When Homer came to the back of the wagon with a lantern and revealed Ridgeway’s face, the slave catcher was staring at her with untempered fury. She’d had her chance and missed it and at the look on his face was relieved.

“What are you going to do now, Ridgeway?” Boseman wept. He was leaning against the wagon wheel for support. He looked at the blood on his hands. His necklace had snapped and the ears made it look like the dirt was listening. “Crazy Ridgeway, does as he pleases. I’m the last one left. Only Homer left to beat on when I’m gone,” he said. “I think he’ll like it.”

Homer chuckled. He got Cora’s ankle chains from the wagon. Ridgeway rubbed his knuckles, breathing heavily.

“It is a nice dress,” Boseman said. He pulled out a tooth.

“There’ll be more teeth if any of you fellows move,” the man said. The three of them stepped into the light.

The speaker was the young negro from town, the one who nodded at her. He didn’t look at her now, monitoring Ridgeway. His wire spectacles reflected the lantern’s glow, as if the flame burned inside him. His pistol wavered between the two white men like a dowser’s stick.

A second man held a rifle. He was tall and well-muscled, dressed in thick work clothes that struck her as a costume. He had a wide face and his long red-brown hair was combed up into a fan like a lion’s mane. The man’s posture said that he did not enjoy taking orders, and the insolence in his eyes was not slave insolence, an impotent pose, but a hard fact. The third man waved a bowie knife. His body shook with nerves, his quick breathing the night sound between his companion’s talk. Cora recognized his bearing. It was that of a runaway, one unsure of the latest turn in the escape. She’d seen it in Caesar, in the bodies of the new arrivals to the dormitories, and knew she’d exhibited it many times. He extended the trembling knife in Homer’s direction.

She had never seen colored men hold guns. The image shocked her, a new idea too big to fit into her mind.

“You boys are lost,” Ridgeway said. He didn’t have a weapon.

“Lost in that we don’t like Tennessee much and would rather be home, yes,” the leader said. “You seem lost yourself.”

Boseman coughed and traded a glance with Ridgeway. He sat up and tensed. The two rifles turned to him.

Their leader said, “We’re going to be on our way but we thought we’d ask the lady if she wanted to come with us. We’re a better sort of traveling companion.”

“Where you boys from?” Ridgeway said. He talked in a way that told Cora he was scheming.

“All over,” the man said. The north lived in his voice, his accent from up there, like Caesar. “But we found each other and now we work together. You settle down, Mr. Ridgeway.” He moved his head slightly. “I heard him call you Cora. Is that your name?”

She nodded.

“She’s Cora,” Ridgeway said. “You know me. That’s Boseman, and that’s Homer.”

At his name, Homer threw the lantern at the man holding the knife. The glass didn’t break until it hit the ground after bouncing off the man’s chest. The fire splashed. The leader fired at Ridgeway and missed. The slave catcher tackled him and they both tumbled into the dirt. The red-headed rifleman was a better shot. Boseman flew back, a black flower blooming suddenly on his belly.

Homer ran to get a gun, followed by the rifleman. The boy’s hat rolled into the fire. Ridgeway and his opponent scuffled in the dirt, grunting and hollering. They rolled over to the edge of the burning oil. Cora’s fear from moments ago returned — Ridgeway had trained her well. The slave catcher got the upper hand, pinning the man to the ground.

She could run. She only had chains on her wrists now.

Cora jumped on Ridgeway’s back and strangled him with her chains, twisting them tight against his flesh. Her scream came from deep inside her, a train whistle echoing in a tunnel. She yanked and squeezed. The slave catcher threw his body to smear her into the ground. By the time he shook her off, the man from town had his pistol again.

The runaway helped Cora to her feet. “Who’s that boy?” he said.

Homer and the rifleman hadn’t returned. The leader instructed the man with the knife to have a look, keeping the gun on Ridgeway.

The slave catcher rubbed his thick fingers into his ravaged neck. He did not look at Cora, which made her fearful again.

Boseman whimpered. He burbled, “He’s going to look in your soul and see what you done, sinner…” The light from the burning oil was inconstant, but they had no trouble making out the widening puddle of blood.

“He’s going to bleed to death,” Ridgeway said.

“It’s a free country,” the man from town said.

“This is not your property,” Ridgeway said.

“That’s what the law says. White law. There are other ones.” He addressed Cora in a gentler tone. “If you want, miss, I can shoot him for you.” His face was calm.

She wanted every bad thing for Ridgeway and Boseman. And Homer? She didn’t know what her heart wanted for the strange black boy, who seemed an emissary from a different country.

Before she could speak, the man said, “Though we’d prefer to put irons on them.” Cora retrieved his spectacles from the dirt and cleaned them with her sleeve and the three of them waited. His companions returned empty-handed.

Ridgeway smiled as the men shackled his wrists through the wagon wheel.

“The boy is a devious sort,” the leader said. “I can tell that. We have to go.” He looked at Cora. “Will you come with us?”

Cora kicked Ridgeway in the face three times with her new wooden shoes. She thought, If the world will not stir itself to punish the wicked. No one stopped her. Later she said it was three kicks for three murders, and told of Lovey, Caesar, and Jasper to let them live briefly again in her words. But that was not the truth of it. It was all for her.