Underground Airlines(60)
“Evidence. Powerful evidence that will bring down the very foundations of slavery.”
I almost laughed: the willful obscurantism, the curtain of mystery. “So I go down into the Four, I chase down this thing, I don’t even know what it is?”
“You will do,” said Maris from his new remove on the far side of the room, “as we have told you to do.” And for once, he and Cook were in agreement.
“Or,” said the cop, “we’ll kill ya.”
But Barton looked at me thoughtfully as he rose. “No, we’ll tell him. We will tell you. Mr. Maris and Mr. Cook, you will tell our friend how to make contact with the lawyer. And you will explain to him what it is he is recovering.” He laid his hand on my head and let it rest there a moment. “Let him understand why it matters so much that he succeed. Not just for his life but for the lives of us all.”
Barton bowed his blond head toward me. “This is a hard situation we are putting you in. But you must see it”—he emphasized the same word he had used with Kevin, that soft and powerful word, must, soft and hard at once, like a hammer wrapped in velvet—“you must see this as your opportunity to undo the evils that you have done. To put a mark in the other column. Here you can be a soldier—you can be good, my son. You can do good.”
24.
It was another hour that I sat there with the Underground Airlines, in the cold company of Mr. Maris and Willie Cook.
I was told everything I would need to know. Told me about the lawyer, where and how to find him, everything I needed to get started chasing down what Kevin had left behind.
They told me all about it, too, the shocking evidence, what was going to shake the very foundations. And I had to work hard, pretending to be impressed with it all. With the enormity of the crime, with the scandal that was to be exposed.
It was Cook who broke it down; Maris was still angry, seething at me from the back corner of the room like lurking death. Garments of the Greater South, Incorporated, was in violation—long-term, systematic violation—of the Clean Hands laws.
Beginning as early as 1994, GGSI had set up a cluster of shell companies in Kuala Lumpur through which they were annually channeling millions of dollars’ worth of cotton goods. Their Alabama plantation exported finished textiles to the Malaysian companies; the companies changed the labels and resold them to a stateside retailer. Even after the shells took their cut, even after the costs of shipping, even after the costs of bribery and permit forging and logistical workarounds, this operation was massively profitable for both sides.
But the kicker—the part that required me to be most impressed—was the identity of the criminal partner on the American side. This ain’t no small potatoes we’re talking about, was how Cook put it. No mom-and-pop operation. GGSI’s partner was none other than Townes Stores, the single largest retailer in the United States: shops in thirty-six states, selling everything from refrigerators to perfume, from small electronics to coloring books. And clothes, of course—aisles and aisles of cheap cotton clothes.
“You believe that, man?” said Cook, but of course I could. He was a city policeman who was secretly moonlighting for the Airlines; I was a retail site analyst and secretly an enforcer of the FPA. I believe anything. Everything happens.
It was Massachusetts that passed the first Clean Hands law, back in the day. Good old radical Mass., where crazy John Brown had passed the hat for his crusades, where Nell and Morris’s League of Freedom was born in the 1850s and reborn in the 1910s. The hunting ground of the Boston Vigilance Committee, hunting for slave catchers till the slave catchers left town.
In 1927 the commonwealth’s legislature declared that the possession, sale, or consumption of slave-made goods within its borders would thenceforth be a criminal act.
Southern interests—in their genteel and eloquent southern manner—said no f*cking way. Why, this was an illegal regulation of trade! Why, this was protectionism! American citizens were being robbed of their God-given and constitutionally protected right to spend their money however they liked! This clash of virtues landed in the Supreme Court in the form of Amalgamated Products v. Hendricks. The attorney general of Massachusetts argued that it was within the police powers of the individual states to safeguard the moral fitness of their respective citizens. Wearing clothing that had been plantation-picked and plantation-sewn did grave harm to the people of the commonwealth. And the Supreme Court, surprise surprise, endorsed this point of view.
Other northern states hurried to pass Clean Hands laws of their own, and Roosevelt’s Democratic majority sealed the deal with the federal version in 1934. If your company wanted to do business in any Clean Hands state, you were required to follow those rules everywhere you operated. Since then, Clean Hands has been an article of faith. All right, says the Righteous North: so we must live with the grievous reality of slavery, we must live with official state racism within our borders. So we are bound up economically and politically with the evil behind the Fence, tied to it and even enriched by it: southern tax dollars go to the national treasury, and southern profits go to Wall Street. And of course Clean Hands only goes one way—there are no laws preventing southern consumers from enjoying the fruits of northern manufacturing.
But at least there is this great conscience-soothing balm: when you go to the store in Milwaukee or Peoria, you are not coming home with blood on your hands.