The Underground Railroad

The white men left him alone now. Old man Randall said nothing about his birthdays, and neither did James when he took over. Connelly, the overseer, made himself scarce every Sunday, when he summoned whatever slave gal he’d made his wife that month. The white men were silent. As if they’d given up or decided that a small freedom was the worst punishment of all, presenting the bounty of true freedom into painful relief.

One day Jockey was bound to choose the correct day of his birth. If he lived long enough. If that was true, then if Cora picked a day for her birthday every now and then she might hit upon hers as well. In fact, today might be her birthday. What did you get for that, for knowing the day you were born into the white man’s world? It didn’t seem like the thing to remember. More like to forget.

“Cora.”

Most of the northern half had moved to the kitchen to get fed but Caesar dallied. Here he was. She’d never had occasion to speak to the man since he arrived at the plantation. New slaves were quickly warned against the Hob women. It saved time.

“Can I talk with you?” he asked.

James Randall had bought him and three other slaves from a traveling agent after the fever deaths a year and a half ago. Two women to work the laundry, and Caesar and Prince to join the field gangs. She had seen him whittling, worrying blocks of pine with his curved carving knives. He didn’t mix with the more bothersome element on the plantation, and she knew that he sometimes went off with Frances, one of the housemaids. Were they still laying together? Lovey would know. She was a girl, but Lovey kept track of man-and-woman business, the impending arrangements.

Cora felt proper. “What can I do for you, Caesar?”

He didn’t bother to see if anyone was in earshot. He knew there was no one because he had planned. “I’m going back north,” he said. “Soon. Running away. I want you to come.”

Cora tried to think of who put him up to this prank. “You going north and I’m going to eat,” she said.

Caesar held her arm, gently and insistent. His body was lean and strong, like any field hand his age, but he carried his strength lightly. His face was round, with a flat button nose-she had a quick memory of dimples when he laughed. Why had she kept that in her head?

“I don’t want you to tell on me,” he said. “Have to trust you on that. But I’m going soon, and I want you. For good luck.”

Then she understood him. It was not a trick being played on her. It was a trick he was playing on himself. The boy was simple. The smell of the raccoon meat brought her back to the celebration and she pulled her arm away. “I ain’t trying to get killed by Connelly, or patrollers, or snakes.”

Cora was still squinting over his idiocy when she got her first bowl of the soup. White man trying to kill you slow every day, and sometimes trying to kill you fast. Why make it easy for him? That was one kind of work you could say no to.

She found Lovey, but did not ask her what the girls whispered about Caesar and Frances. If he was serious about his plan, Frances was a widow.

It was the most any young man had talked to her since she moved to Hob.

They lit the torches for the wrestling matches. Someone had unearthed a stash of corn whiskey and cider, which circulated in due course and fed the spectators’ enthusiasm. By now, the husbands who lived on other plantations had come for their Sunday-night visits. Walking miles, time enough to fantasize. Some wives were happier at the prospect of marital relations than others.

Lovey giggled. “I’d wrestle with him,” she said, nodding at Major.

Major looked up as if he heard her. He was turning out to be a prime buck. Worked hard and rarely forced the bosses to raise the whip. He was respectful to Lovey because of her age and it wouldn’t surprise if Connelly arranged a match one day. The young man and his opponent twisted in the grass. Take it out on each other if you cannot take it out on the ones who deserve it. The children peeked between their elders, making bets they had nothing to back up with. They pulled weeds and worked in trash gangs now, but one day the field work would make them as big as the men grappling and pinning each other to the grass. Get him, get that boy, teach him what he needs to learn.

When the music started and the dancing commenced, they appreciated the extent of their gratitude for Jockey. Once again he picked the right day for a birthday. He had been attuned to a shared tension, a communal apprehension beyond the routine facts of their bondage. It had built up. The last few hours had dispelled much of the ill feeling. They could face the morning toil and the following mornings and the long days with their spirits replenished, however meagerly, by a fond night to look back on and the next birthday feast to look forward to. By making a circle of themselves that separated the human spirits within from the degradation without.