The Underground Railroad(17)

Ultimately the pigs did them in. They were following the rut of a hog trail when the white men rushed from the trees. There were four of them. Bait laid on the trail, the hog hunters waited for their quarry, which turned nocturnal in the hot weather. The runaways were a different sort of beast but more remunerative.

There was no mistaking the identity of the trio, given the specificity of the bulletins. Two of the hog hunters tackled the smallest of the party, pinning her to the ground. After being so quiet for so long—the slaves to escape the detection of hunters, and the hunters to escape the detection of their prey—all of them cried out and shrieked with their exertions. Caesar grappled with a heavyset man with a long dark beard. The fugitive was younger and stronger, but the man held his ground and seized Caesar by the waist. Caesar fought like he had struck many a white man, an impossible occurrence or else he would have been in the grave long ago. It was the grave the runaways fought against, for that was their destination if these men prevailed and returned them to their master.

Lovey howled as the two men dragged her into the darkness. Cora’s assailant was boyish and slender, perhaps the son of one of the other hunters. She was taken unawares but the moment he laid hands on her person, her blood quickened. She was brought back to the night behind the smokehouse when Edward and Pot and the rest brutalized her. She battled. Strength poured into her limbs, she bit and slapped and bashed, fighting now as she had not been able to then. She realized she had dropped her hatchet. She wanted it. Edward was in the dirt and this boy would join him, too, before she was taken.

The boy yanked Cora to the ground. She rolled over and bashed her head against a stump. He scrambled to her, pinning her. Her blood was hot—she reached out and came up with a rock that she slammed into the boy’s skull. He reeled and she repeated her assault. His groans ceased.

Time was a figment. Caesar called her name, pulling her up. The bearded man had fled, as much as the darkness allowed her to see. “This way!”

Cora cried after her friend.

There was no sign of her, no way to tell where they had gone. Cora hesitated and he tugged her roughly forward. She followed his instructions.

They stopped running when they realized they had no inkling of where they were headed. Cora saw nothing for the darkness and her tears. Caesar had rescued his waterskin but they had lost the rest of their provisions. They had lost Lovey. He oriented himself with the constellations and the runaways stumbled on, impelled into the night. They didn’t speak for hours. From the trunk of their scheme, choices and decisions sprouted like branches and shoots. If they had turned the girl back at the swamp. If they had taken a deeper route around the farms. If Cora had taken the rear and been the one grabbed by the two men. If they had never left at all.





Caesar scouted a promising spot and they climbed trees, sleeping like raccoons.

When she stirred, the sun was up and Caesar paced between two pines, talking to himself. She descended from her roost, numb in her arms and legs from her entanglement in the rough limbs. Caesar’s face was serious. By now the word had spread about last night’s altercation. The patrollers knew the direction they traveled. “Did you tell her about the railroad?”

“I don’t think so.”

“I don’t think I did. We were foolish not to think on this.”

The creek they waded at noon was a landmark. They were close, Caesar said. After a mile, he left her to scout. On his return they adopted a more shallow track in the woods that permitted them to barely see houses through the brush.

“That’s it,” Caesar said. It was a tidy one-story cottage that looked out on a pasture. The land had been cleared but lay fallow. The red weathervane was Caesar’s sign that this was the house, the yellow curtains pulled shut in the back window the signal that Fletcher was home but his wife was not.

“If Lovey told them,” Cora said.

They saw no other houses from their vantage, and no people. Cora and Caesar sprinted through the wild grass, exposed for the first time since the swamp. It was unnerving out in the open. She felt like she had been thrown into one of Alice’s big black skillets, fires licking below. They waited at the back door for Fletcher to answer their knock. Cora imagined the posses massing in the woods, girding themselves for a dash into the field. Or perhaps they lay wait inside. If Lovey told them. Fletcher finally ushered them into the kitchen.

The kitchen was small but comfortable. Favorite pots showed their dark bottoms from hooks and gaily colored flowers from the pasture leaned out of thin glassware. An old red-eyed hound didn’t stir from his corner, indifferent to the visitors. Cora and Caesar drank greedily from the pitcher Fletcher offered them. The host was unhappy to see the extra passenger, but so many things had gone wrong from the very start.

The shopkeeper caught them up. First, Lovey’s mother, Jeer, noticed her daughter’s absence and left their cabin to make a quiet search. The boys liked Lovey, and Lovey liked the boys. One of the bosses stopped Jeer and got the story out of her.

Cora and Caesar looked at each other. Their six-hour head start had been a fantasy. The patrollers had been deep in the hunt the whole time.

By midmorning, Fletcher said, every spare hand in the county and from all around enlisted in the search. Terrance’s reward was unprecedented. Advertisements were posted at every public place. The worst sort of scoundrels took up the chase. Drunkards, incorrigibles, poor whites who didn’t even own shoes delighted in this opportunity to scourge the colored population. Patrol bands marauded through the slave villages and ransacked the homes of freemen, stealing and committing assaults.