Underground Airlines(61)
It was exactly that consolation, that comfort, that Father Barton was intending to tear away.
He had sent in Kevin, and Kevin had come out with evidence of the collusion between GGSI and Townes Stores: a hard drive bristling with incriminating information, six months’ worth of internal data—shipment tracking records, transaction records, the numbers of bank accounts in four different countries. All documenting a commercial connection between a massive retailer and a slave-state factory that would (Barton thought…Barton hoped…Barton dreamed…and Barton had persuaded Kevin to dream, too) scandalize northern sensibilities. It would demonstrate the fecklessness of the federal regulatory scheme. It would prove the whole edifice of compromise to be rotten to its very foundation. It would show northerners who liked to believe, who needed to believe, that they were not personally touched by the cruel hand of slavery that they were in fact touched by it every day. Were wearing it on their feet, were lining up for it the day after Thanksgiving.
He would splash his evidence on the front page of every northern newspaper, deliver it himself to prosecutors in the Southern District of Illinois, which had jurisdiction over Townes’s headquarters, and the world would change.
This was the idea that had so gripped Kevin when first he heard it, the plan he had agreed to with a rapidity that was like a fever. It was this possibility that had persuaded him to take the hideous risk, allow himself to be costumed and tattooed and sold.
Barton thought the world would change, and his lieutenants thought so, and Kevin had thought so, too.
I didn’t believe it for a second. I could see the future. I knew what would happen, and what would happen was nothing.
They’d been talking about freedom in Old Abe’s time, but then they shot Old Abe, and what changed? Nothing changed.
A hundred years later Dr. King was dreaming his dream, telling America it was time to finish its unfinished business. Northerners, black and white, went south for Freedom Summer, crisscrossing the remaining slave states, bearing witness. A huge crowd of abolitionists gathered in newly free Georgia and marched all the way to Selma, Alabama. A brave slave woman in Montgomery refused to eat until conditions were improved, sparking hunger strikes all over the South. The president got on board: the Voting Rights Act, the New Agenda, “abolition in our time.”
And then what? Then the BLP officially condoned the force-feeding of Persons Bound to Labor. Then LBJ got distracted from the New Agenda, drawn deeper and deeper into the swamp of the Texas War. The movement cut itself up, violence versus nonviolence, “rights for us” versus “freedom for them.” The Panthers were declared a terrorist organization. Dr. King, celebrating his great victory—legislated abolition in Tennessee—was shot outside his hotel room.
Nothing changed, not really. The Eighteenth Amendment remained the Eighteenth Amendment. America stayed America.
So what was he thinking now, this zealous priest, this radical child, wild with self-delusion? All of them, Maris glowering and righteous, Cook talking about the new era that they were about to bust loose. I knew better. I knew what would happen. Of course it would be shocking if all those Iowans and Idahoans found out that the cheap T-shirts they’ve been buying have blood on them. It would grab some headlines. The chairman of Townes would give a press conference, shake his head and purse his lips and say, “I accept full responsibility.” GGSI would be shuttered—maybe, maybe not, or maybe just temporarily—while an inspection could be undertaken. Townes Stores would pay a big fine, and they’d have a bad quarter.
In time, people would go back to Townes, because their shit is pretty cheap, wherever it’s coming from. It’s pretty cheap, and it’s pretty good. Nothing would change. People shaking their heads, shrugging their shoulders, slaves suffering somewhere far away, the earth turning around the sun.
And that, honey, is how I justified what I did next. That’s how I thought it through to myself as I drove back to the Capital City Crossroads, even then, even with Kevin’s broken, bleeding body lying fresh in my memory like a chastisement.
I believed—I truly believed; I allowed myself to believe—that if I found that envelope filled with stolen data and turned it over to Father Barton, that not a goddamn thing would change. The three million would not be set free.
But there was a way that envelope could get one person free, and that one person was me.
I went out onto my hotel-room balcony and lit a cigarette. And then I called Mr. Bridge.
25.
“I don’t know what you thought you were doing, son. I don’t know what you thought you were up to.”
Mr. Bridge spoke slowly but firmly, projecting control. I listened to him, standing out on my balcony, smoking my cigarette, waiting for him to get it out of his system. I thought about other things. I saw the streetlamps blink on. I gazed at the faded twilight ghost of the sun.
“By placing that call to my office, and by playing false with a federal law enforcement official, you have committed a serious violation of the law. Not to mention a serious violation of our agreement.”
Mr. Bridge, scolding a wayward child. Mr. Bridge, enumerating my sins. Federal law enforcement official took me a second. Janice—he meant Janice.
“Impersonation of an agent. Illegal possession of classified information.”
This bill of indictment I didn’t even bother to answer. I didn’t even take the time to say, “Fuck you.” Sunday sunset had brought something like a peaceful calm to the gray city, a wan beauty. I was exhausted. The pain in my shoulder was a buried throb. I still had dirt on my boots, on the palms of my hands, on my knees—the mud stains of the underground.