The Underground Railroad(81)
Cora, sleeping back in the cabin she was born in, that Mabel was born in. Still a girl, before the worst of it, before she learns the size and heft of a woman’s burdens. If Cora’s father had lived, would Mabel be here now, tramping through the marsh? Mabel was fourteen when Grayson arrived on the southern half, sold down south by a drunken indigo farmer in North Carolina. Tall and black, sweet-tempered with a laughing eye. Swaggering even after the hardest toil. They couldn’t touch him.
She picked him out that first day and decided: him. When he grinned it was the moon shining down on her, a presence in the sky blessing her. He scooped her up and twirled her when they danced. I’m going to buy our freedom, he said, hay in his hair from where they lay down. Old Randall didn’t go in for that, but he’d convince him. Work hard, be the best hand on the plantation—he’d earn his way out of bondage and take her, too. She said, You promise? Half believing he could do it. Grayson the Sweet, dead of fever before she knew she carried their child. His name never again crossed her lips.
Mabel tripped over a cypress root and went sprawling into the water. She staggered through the reeds to the island ahead and flattened on the ground. Didn’t know how long she had been running. Panting and tuckered out.
She took a turnip from her sack. It was young and tender-soft, and she took a bite. The sweetest crop she’d ever raised in Ajarry’s plot, even with the taste of marsh water. Her mother had left that in her inheritance, at least, a tidy plot to watch over. You’re supposed to pass on something useful to your children. The better parts of Ajarry never took root in Mabel. Her indomitability, her perseverance. But there was a plot three yards square and the hearty stuff that sprouted from it. Her mother had protected it with all her heart. The most valuable land in all of Georgia.
She lay on her back and ate another turnip. Without the sound of her splashing and huffing, the noises of the swamp resumed. The spadefoot toads and turtles and slithering creatures, the chattering of black insects. Above—through the leaves and branches of the black-water trees—the sky scrolled before her, new constellations wheeling in the darkness as she relaxed. No patrollers, no bosses, no cries of anguish to induct her into another’s despair. No cabin walls shuttling her through the night seas like the hold of a slave ship. Sandhill cranes and warblers, otters splashing. On the bed of damp earth, her breathing slowed and that which separated herself from the swamp disappeared. She was free.
This moment.
She had to go back. The girl was waiting on her. This would have to do for now. Her hopelessness had gotten the best of her, speaking under her thoughts like a demon. She would keep this moment close, her own treasure. When she found the words to share it with Cora, the girl would understand there was something beyond the plantation, past all that she knew. That one day if she stayed strong, the girl could have it for herself.
The world may be mean, but people don’t have to be, not if they refuse.
Mabel picked up her sack and got her bearings. If she kept a good pace, she’d be back well before first light and the earliest risers on the plantation. Her escape had been a preposterous idea, but even a sliver of it amounted to the best adventure of her life.
Mabel pulled out another turnip and took a bite. It really was sweet.
The snake found her not long into her return. She was wending through a cluster of stiff reeds when she disturbed its rest. The cottonmouth bit her twice, in the calf and deep in the meat of her thigh. No sound but pain. Mabel refused to believe it. It was a water snake, it had to be. Ornery but harmless. When her mouth went minty and her leg tingled, she knew. She made it another mile. She had dropped her sack along the way, lost her course in the black water. She could have made it farther—working Randall land had made her strong, strong in body if nothing else—but she stumbled onto a bed of soft moss and it felt right. She said, Here, and the swamp swallowed her up.
The North
RAN AWAY
from her legal but not rightful master fifteen months past, a slave girl called CORA; of ordinary height and dark brown complexion; has a star-shape mark on her temple from an injury; possessed of a spirited nature and devious method. Possibly answering to the name BESSIE.
Last seen in Indiana among the outlaws of John Valentine Farm.
She has stopped running.
Reward remains unclaimed.
SHE WAS NEVER PROPERTY.
DECEMBER 23
HER point of departure that final voyage on the underground railroad was a tiny station beneath an abandoned house. The ghost station.
Cora led them there after her capture. The posse of bloodthirsty whites still rampaged across the Valentine farm when they left. The gunfire and screams came from farther away, deeper in the property. The newer cabins, the mill. Perhaps as far as the Livingston spread, the mayhem encompassing the neighboring farms. The whites meant to rout the entirety of colored settlers.
Cora fought and kicked as Ridgeway carried her to the wagon. The burning library and farmhouse illuminated the grounds. After a barrage to his face, Homer finally gathered her feet together and they got her inside, chaining her wrists to her old ring in the wagon floor. One of the young white men watching the horses cheered and asked for a turn when they were done. Ridgeway clopped him in the face.
She relinquished the location to the house in the woods when the slave catcher put his pistol to her eye. Cora lay down on the bench, seized by one of her headaches. How to snuff her thoughts like a candle? Royal and Lander dead. The others who were cut down.