The Underground Railroad

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.

Cora called for Molly. She didn’t see anyone she recognized; their faces had been transformed by fear. The heat from the fires washed over her. Valentine’s house was ablaze. A jar of oil exploded against the second floor and John and Gloria’s bedroom caught. The windows of the library shattered and Cora saw the books burning on the shelves inside. She made two steps toward it before Ridgeway grabbed her. They struggled and his big arms encircled her, her feet kicking against the air like those of one hanging from a tree.

Homer was at his side-he was the boy she’d seen in the pews, winking at her. He wore suspenders and a white blouse, looking like the innocent child he would have been in a different world. At the sight of him, Cora added her voice to the chorus of lamentation that echoed across the farm.

“There’s a tunnel, sir,” Homer said. “I heard him say it.”

Mabel

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.