The Underground Railroad(54)
Then Martin was summoned to North Carolina. He arranged Donald’s funeral on the hottest day of the year; they thought she fainted from sadness when it was just the barbaric humidity. Once they got a taker for the feed shop, they were done, he assured her. The place was backward. If it wasn’t the heat, it was the flies; if not the mice, then the people. At least in Virginia, lynch mobs maintained a pretext of spontaneity. They didn’t string up people practically on your front lawn, the same time every week, like church. North Carolina was to be a brief interlude, or so she thought until she came across the nigger in her kitchen.
George had dropped out of the attic for some food, the lone slave Martin helped before the girl arrived. It was a week before the race laws went into effect and violence against the colored population was on the rise in rehearsal. A note on their doorstep had directed Martin to the mica mine, he told her. George waited for him, hungry and irritated. The tobacco picker thumped around the attic for a week before a railroad agent took him on the next leg, boxing him up in a crate and shoving the thing through the front door. Ethel was livid, then despairing—George acted as Donald’s executor, illuminating Martin’s secret inheritance. He’d lost three fingers on his hand cutting cane.
Slavery as a moral issue never interested Ethel. If God had not meant for Africans to be enslaved, they wouldn’t be in chains. She did, however, have firm ideas about not getting killed for other people’s high-minded ideas. She and Martin argued over the underground railroad as they hadn’t argued in a long time, and that was before the murderous fine print of the race laws manifested itself. Through Cora—that termite in the attic—Donald reached from beyond the grave to punish her for her joke those many years before. When their families met for the first time, Ethel made a remark about Donald’s simple country suit. She was trying to call attention to the two families’ different ideas of proper attire, to get it out of the way so they could all enjoy the meal Ethel had spent so much time planning. But Donald had never forgiven her, she told Martin, she was sure of it, and now they were going to swing from the branches of the tree right outside their front door.
When Martin went upstairs to help the girl it was not in the same way her father had gone upstairs, but both men came down transformed. They reached across the biblical rift for a selfish purpose.
If they could, why not her?
Everything had been denied Ethel her whole life. To mission, to help. To give love in the way she wanted. When the girl got sick, the moment Ethel awaited for so long had finally arrived. In the end she had not gone to Africa, Africa had come to her. Ethel went upstairs, as her father had done, to confront the stranger who lived in her house as family. The girl lay on the sheets, curved like a primeval river. She cleaned the girl, washing her filth from her. She kissed the girl on her forehead and neck in her restless slumber with two kinds of feeling mixed up in those kisses. She gave her the Holy Word.
A savage to call her own, at last.
Tennessee
25 DOLLARS REWARD
RAN AWAY from the subscriber on the 6th of February last, his Negro Girl PEGGY. She is about 16 years of age, and is a bright mulatto, about the ordinary height, with straight hair and tolerable good features—she has a ragged scar on her neck occasioned by a burn. She will no doubt attempt to pass for a free girl, and it is likely she has obtained a free pass. She has a down look when spoken to, and not remarkably intelligent. She speaks quick, with a shrill voice.
JOHN DARK.
CHATHAM COUNTY, MAY 17.
“JESUS, carry me home, home to that land…”
Jasper wouldn’t stop singing. Ridgeway shouted from the head of their little caravan for him to shut his mouth, and sometimes they halted so Boseman could climb into the wagon and clout the runaway on the head. Jasper sucked the scars on his fingers for a short interval, then resumed his crooning. Quietly at first so that only Cora could hear. But soon he’d be singing again, to his lost family, to his god, to everyone they passed on the trail. He’d have to be disciplined again.
Cora recognized some of the hymns. She suspected he made up many of them; the rhymes were crooked. She wouldn’t have minded it so much if Jasper had a better voice, but Jesus had not blessed him in that department. Or with looks—he had a lopsided frog face and oddly thin arms for a field hand—or with luck. Luck least of all.
He and Cora had that in common.
They picked up Jasper three days out of North Carolina. Jasper was a delivery. He absconded from the Florida cane fields and made it to Tennessee before a tinker caught him stealing food from his pantry. After a few weeks the deputy located his owner, but the tinker had no means of transport. Ridgeway and Boseman were drinking in a tavern around the corner from the jail while little Homer waited with Cora and the wagon. The town clerk approached the famous slave catcher, brokered an arrangement, and Ridgeway now had the nigger chained in the wagon. He hadn’t reckoned the man for a songbird.
The rain tapped on the canopy. Cora enjoyed the breeze and then felt ashamed for enjoying something. They stopped to eat when the rain let up. Boseman slapped Jasper, chuckled, and unchained the two fugitives from the wagon floor. He offered his customary vulgar promise as he knelt before Cora, sniffing. Jasper’s and Cora’s wrists and ankles remained manacled. It was the longest she had ever been in chains.
Crows glided over. The world was scorched and harrowed as far as they could see, a sea of ash and char from the flat planes of the fields up to the hills and mountains. Black trees tilted, stunted black arms pointing as if to a distant place untouched by flame. They rode past the blackened bones of houses and barns without number, chimneys sticking up like grave markers, the husked stone walls of ravaged mills and granaries. Scorched fences marked where cattle had grazed; it was not possible the animals survived.