The Underground Railroad(46)
Whites punished under the new legislation were merely hung, not put on display. Although, Martin qualified, there was the case of a white farmer who had sheltered a gang of colored refugees. When they combed through the ashes of the house it was impossible to pick his body from those he had harbored, as the fire had eliminated the differences in their skin, leveling them. All five bodies were hung on the trail and nobody made much of a fuss over the breach in protocol.
With the topic of white persecution, they had arrived at the reason for her term in the nook. “You understand our predicament,” Martin said.
Abolitionists had always been run off here, he said. Virginia or Delaware might tolerate their agitating, but no cotton state. Owning the literature was enough for a spell in jail, and when you were released you did not stay in town long. In the amendments to the state’s constitution, the punishment for possessing seditious writings, or for aiding and abetting a colored person, was left to the discretion of local authorities. In practice, the verdict was death. The accused were dragged from their homes by their hair. Slave owners who refused to comply—from sentiment or a quaint notion about property rights—were strung up, as well as kindhearted citizens who hid niggers in their attics and cellars and coal bins.
After a lull in white arrests, some towns increased the rewards for turning in collaborators. Folks informed on business rivals, ancient nemeses, and neighbors, recounting old conversations where the traitors had uttered forbidden sympathies. Children tattled on their parents, taught by schoolmistresses the hallmarks of sedition. Martin related the story of a man in town who had been trying to rid himself of his wife for years, to no avail. The details of her crime did not hold up under scrutiny, but she paid the ultimate price. The gentleman remarried three months later.
“Is he happy?” Cora asked.
“What?”
Cora waved her hand. The severity of Martin’s account had sent her down an avenue of odd humor.
Before, slave patrollers searched the premises of colored individuals at will, be they free or enslaved. Their expanded powers permitted them to knock on anyone’s door to pursue an accusation and for random inspections as well, in the name of public safety. The regulators called at all hours, visiting the poorest trapper and wealthiest magistrate alike. Wagons and carriages were stopped at checkpoints. The mica mine was only a few miles away—even if Martin had the grit to run with Cora, they would not make it to the next county without an examination.
Cora thought that the whites would be loath to give up their freedoms, even in the name of security. Far from instilling resentment, Martin told her, the patrollers’ diligence was a point of pride from county to county. Patriots boasted of how often they’d been searched and given a clean bill. A night rider’s call on the home of a comely young woman had led to more than one happy engagement.
They twice searched Martin and Ethel’s house before Cora appeared. The riders were perfectly pleasant, complimenting Ethel on her ginger cake. They did not look askance at the attic hatch, but that was no guarantee that next time things would proceed along the same lines. The second visit caused Martin to resign from his duties with the railroad. There were no plans for the next leg of Cora’s journey, no word from associates. They would have to wait for a sign.
Once again, Martin apologized for his wife’s behavior. “You understand she’s scared to death. We’re at the mercy of fate.”
“You feel like a slave?” Cora asked.
Ethel hadn’t chosen this life, Martin said.
“You were born to it? Like a slave?”
That put an end to their conversation that night. Cora climbed up into the nook with fresh rations and a clean chamber pot.
Her routine established itself quickly. It could not have been otherwise, given the constraints. After she knocked her head into the roof a dozen times, her body remembered the limits on her movement. Cora slept, nestled between the rafters as if in the cramped hold of a ship. She watched the park. She worked on her reading, making the best of the education that had been cut short in South Carolina, squinting in the spy hole’s dim light. She wondered why there were only two kinds of weather: hardship in the morning, and tribulation at night.
Every Friday the town held its festival and Cora retreated to the opposite side of the nook.
The heat was impossible most days. On the worst she gulped at the hole like a fish in a bucket. Sometimes she neglected to ration her water, imbibing too much in the morning and staring with bitterness at the fountain the rest of the day. That damned dog cavorting in the spray. When the heat made her faint, she awoke with her head smeared into a rafter, her neck feeling like a chicken’s after Alice the cook tried to wring it for supper. The meat she put on her bones in South Carolina melted away. Her host replaced her soiled dress with one his daughter had left behind. Jane was scarce-hipped and Cora now fit into her clothes with room.
Near midnight, after all the lights in the houses facing the park were extinguished and Fiona had long gone home, Martin brought food. Cora descended into the attic proper, to stretch and breathe different air. They talked some, then at a certain point Martin would stand with a solemn expression and Cora clambered back into the nook. Every few days Ethel permitted Martin to give her a brief visit to the washroom. Cora always fell asleep following Martin’s visit, sometimes after an interval of sobbing and sometimes so quickly she was like a candle being blown out. She returned to her violent dreams.