The Underground Railroad(22)

Soon he owned three fine coats. Ridgeway fell in with a circle of slave catchers, gorillas stuffed into black suits with ridiculous derbies. He had to prove he was not a bumpkin, but just once. Together they shadowed runaways for days, hiding outside places of work until opportunity announced itself, breaking into their negro hovels at night to kidnap them. After years away from the plantation, after taking a wife and starting a family, they had convinced themselves they were free. As if owners forgot about property. Their delusions made them easy prey. He snubbed the blackbirders, the Five Points gangs who hog-tied freemen and dragged them south for auction. That was low behavior, patroller behavior. He was a slave catcher now.

New York City was a factory of antislavery sentiment. The courts had to sign off before Ridgeway was permitted to take his charges south. Abolitionist lawyers erected barricades of paperwork, every week a new stratagem. New York was a Free State, they argued, and any colored person became magically free once they stepped over the border. They exploited understandable discrepancies between the bulletins and the individual in the courtroom—was there proof that this Benjamin Jones was the Benjamin Jones in question? Most planters couldn’t tell one slave from another, even after taking them to bed. No wonder they lost track of their property. It became a game, prying niggers from jail before the lawyers unveiled their latest gambit. High-minded idiocy pitted against the power of coin. For a gratuity, the city recorder tipped him to freshly jailed fugitives and hurriedly signed them over for release. They’d be halfway through New Jersey before the abolitionists had even gotten out of bed.

Ridgeway bypassed the courthouse when needed, but not often. It was a bother to be stopped on the road in a Free State when the lost property turned out to have a silver tongue. Get them off the plantation and they learned to read, it was a disease.

While Ridgeway waited at the docks for smugglers, the magnificent ships from Europe dropped anchor and discharged their passengers. Everything they owned in sacks, half starving. Hapless as niggers, by any measure. But they’d be called to their proper places, as he had been. His whole world growing up in the south was a ripple of this first arrival. This dirty white flood with nowhere to go but out. South. West. The same laws governed garbage and people. The gutters of the city overflowed with offal and refuse—but the mess found its place in time.

Ridgeway watched them stagger down the gangplanks, rheumy and bewildered, overcome by the city. The possibilities lay before these pilgrims like a banquet, and they’d been so hungry their whole lives. They’d never seen the likes of this, but they’d leave their mark on this new land, as surely as those famous souls at Jamestown, making it theirs through unstoppable racial logic. If niggers were supposed to have their freedom, they wouldn’t be in chains. If the red man was supposed to keep hold of his land, it’d still be his. If the white man wasn’t destined to take this new world, he wouldn’t own it now.

Here was the true Great Spirit, the divine thread connecting all human endeavor—if you can keep it, it is yours. Your property, slave or continent. The American imperative.

Ridgeway gathered renown with his facility for ensuring that property remained property. When a runaway took off down an alley, he knew where the man was headed. The direction and aim. His trick: Don’t speculate where the slave is headed next. Concentrate instead on the idea that he is running away from you. Not from a cruel master, or the vast agency of bondage, but you specifically. It worked again and again, his own iron fact, in alleys and pine barrens and swamps. He finally left his father behind, and the burden of that man’s philosophy. Ridgeway was not working the spirit. He was not the smith, rendering order. Not the hammer. Not the anvil. He was the heat.

His father died and the smith down the road assumed his operation. It was time to return south—back home to Virginia and farther, wherever the work led—and he came with a gang. Too many fugitives to handle by himself. Eli Whitney had run his father into the ground, the old man coughing soot on his deathbed, and kept Ridgeway on the hunt. The plantations were twice as big, twice as numerous, the fugitives more plentiful and nimble, the bounties higher. There was less meddling from the lawmakers and abolitionists down south, the planters saw to that. The underground railroad maintained no lines to speak of. The decoys in negro dress, the secret codes in the back pages of newspapers. They openly bragged of their subversion, hustling a slave out the back door as the slave catchers broke down the front. It was a criminal conspiracy devoted to theft of property, and Ridgeway suffered their brazenness as a personal slur.

One Delaware merchant particularly galled him: August Carter. Robust in the Anglo-Saxon tradition, with cool blue eyes that made the lesser sort pay attention to his mealy arguments. That worst sort, an abolitionist with a printing press. “A Mass Meeting of the Friends of Freedom Will Be Held at Miller’s Hall at 2 p.m. to Testify Against the Iniquitous Slave Power That Controls the Nation.” Everyone knew the Carter home was a station—only a hundred yards separated it from the river—even when raids came up empty. Runaways turned activists saluted his generosity in their Boston speeches. The abolitionist wing of the Methodists circulated his pamphlets on Sunday morning and London periodicals published his arguments without rebuttal. A printing press, and friends among the judges, who forced Ridgeway to relinquish his charges on no less than three occasions. Passing Ridgeway outside the jail, he’d tip his hat.

The slave catcher had little choice but to call upon the man after midnight. He daintily sewed their hoods from white sacks of flour but could barely move his fingers after their visit—his fists swelled for two days from beating the man’s face in. He permitted his men to dishonor the man’s wife in ways he never let them use a nigger gal. For years after whenever Ridgeway saw a bonfire, the smell reminded him of the sweet smoke of Carter’s house going up and a figment of a smile settled on his mouth. He later heard the man moved to Worcester and became a cobbler.