The Underground Railroad(60)

Homer climbed in the wagon whistling one of Jasper’s more monotonous ditties. The dead slave still among them. The boy held a bundle wrapped in brown paper. “This is for you,” he said.

The dress was dark blue with white buttons, soft cotton that gave off a medicinal smell. She held up the dress so that it blocked the blood stains on the canvas, which were stark on the fabric from the streetlamps outside.

“Put it on, Cora,” Homer said.

Cora raised her hands, the chains making a noise.

He unlocked her ankles and wrists. As she did every time, Cora considered the chances of escape and came up with the dead result. A town like this, rough and wild, made good mobs, she figured. Had news of the boy in Georgia reached here? The accident she never thought about and which she didn’t include in her list of transgressions. The boy belonged on his own list—but what were its terms?

Homer watched her as she dressed, like a valet who had waited on her since the cradle.

“I’m caught,” Cora said. “You choose to be with him.”

Homer looked puzzled. He took out his notebook, turned to the last page, and scribbled. When he was finished, the boy fixed her manacles again. He gave her ill-fitting wooden shoes. He was about to chain Cora to the wagon when Ridgeway said to bring her outside.

Boseman was still out after a barber and a bath. The slave catcher handed Homer the gazettes and the fugitive bulletins he’d collected from the deputy in the jail. “I’m taking Cora for some supper,” Ridgeway said, and led her into the racket. Homer dropped her filthy shift into the gutter, the brown of the dried blood seeping into the mud.

The wooden shoes pinched. Ridgeway didn’t alter his stride to accommodate Cora’s hindered pace, walking ahead of her and unconcerned that she might run. Her chains were a cowbell. The white people of Tennessee took no notice of her. A young negro leaned against the wall of a stable, the only person to register her presence. A freeman from his appearance, dressed in striped gray trousers and a vest of cowhide. He watched her move as she had watched the coffles trudge past Randall. To see chains on another person and be glad they are not your own—such was the good fortune permitted colored people, defined by how much worse it could be any moment. If your eyes met, both parties looked away. But this man did not. He nodded before passersby took him from view.

Cora had peeked inside Sam’s saloon in North Carolina but never crossed the threshold. If she was an odd vision in their midst, one look from Ridgeway made the patrons return to their own business. The fat man tending the bar rolled tobacco and stared at the back of Ridgeway’s head.

Ridgeway led her to a wobbly table against the rear wall. The smell of stewed meat rose above that of the old beer soaked into the floorboards and the walls and the ceiling. The pigtailed maid was a broad-shouldered girl with the thick arms of a cotton loader. Ridgeway ordered their food.

“The shoes were not my first choice,” he told Cora, “but the dress suits you.”

“It’s clean,” Cora said.

“Now, well. Can’t have our Cora looking like the floor of a butcher’s shop.”

He meant to elicit a reaction. Cora declined. From the saloon next door, a piano started up. It sounded as if a raccoon ran back and forth, mashing on the keys.

“All this time you haven’t asked about your accomplice,” Ridgeway said. “Caesar. Did it make the newspapers up in North Carolina?”

This was going to be a performance then, like one of the Friday-night pageants on the park. He had her dress up for night at the theater. She waited.

“It’s so strange going to South Carolina,” Ridgeway said, “now that they have their new system. Had many a caper there in the old days. But the old days aren’t that far off. For all their talk of negro uplift and civilizing the savage, it’s the same hungry place it always was.”

The maid delivered bread heels and bowls full of beef and potato stew. Ridgeway whispered to her while looking at Cora, something she couldn’t hear. The girl laughed. Cora realized he was drunk.

Ridgeway slurped. “We caught up with it at the factory at the end of its shift,” he said. “These big colored bucks around it, finding their old fear again after thinking they’d put it behind them. At first, wasn’t no big fuss. Another runaway caught. Then word spread that Caesar was wanted for the murder of a little boy—”

“Not little,” Cora said.

Ridgeway shrugged. “They broke into the jail. The sheriff opened the door, to be honest, but that’s not as dramatic. They broke into the jail and ripped its body to pieces. The decent people of South Carolina with their schoolhouses and Friday credit.”

News of Lovey had broken her down in front of him. Not this time. She was prepared—his eyes brightened when he was on the verge of a cruelty. And she had known Caesar was dead for a long time now. No need to ask after his fate. It appeared before her one night in the attic like a spark, a small and simple truth: Caesar did not make it out. He was not up north wearing a new suit, new shoes, new smile. Sitting in the dark, nestled into the rafters, Cora understood that she was alone again. They had got him. She had finished mourning him by the time Ridgeway came knocking on Martin’s door.

Ridgeway plucked gristle from his mouth. “I made a little silver for the capture at any rate, and returned another boy to its master along the way. Profit in the end.”