Underground Airlines(74)
“So he…” I looked warily at the sleeping old man. “He owns you.”
She laughed again. She had a deep, musical laugh. “Yes, he does, Elijah. The house and the yard, everything and everyone in it.”
“You trust him.”
“Oh, we got to. Got to. Him more’n anyone. You heard of something called the Gulliver case?”
I had. It rang a bell. I knew this stuff. I looked at the old man again, trying to find familiar features under the layers of age. For a time I had become obsessed with the history of slavery law, studied all the Supreme Court arguments, memorized long chunks of decisions and dissents. Hospital Corporation v. Mississippi. Schools of Florida. Conroy v. Wilson.
Ada refreshed my memory on the Gulliver case. The PB in question, service name Gulliver, had been a Louisiana slave in service to a small farmer named Peabody, who took him to New York State for the wedding of a Peabody cousin. Gulliver was threatened by some local boys outside the nightclub, waiting for the wedding reception to end, and defended himself—ended up in federal prison on a gun charge. After he served his eight months, a local abolitionist group showed up to claim him before Peabody could, and then they sued for his freedom, making the sly argument that federal prisons were free territory, like national parks and landmarks, and that being housed in one for more than six months triggered the domicile clause: under the law, the boy had relocated, so the boy was free.
The New York circuit court agreed, and the Supreme Court might have, too, if not for the efforts of a silver-tongued lawyer from Alabama. One of these graceful southern gentlemen of the bar, with goatee and white suit and red suspenders—nothing like this haunted old husk across from me at the little table, withered hands clawed around his rocks glass.
“It was looking to be one of the landmark cases, you know?” Ada said. “A major blow to the possessor-travel rules. But then this firecracker lawyer rolls up out of the slave lands, talking about how—ah, what was it, now?—how it’s not the duration of the trip that matters but the…” She snapped her fingers, trying to remember. “Marlon? Hey, what—”
“Intent,” said the lawyer softly, opening one eye. “Not the duration of possession but the intent of the possessor that is determinative under the statute.”
“That’s right. That’s right, Counselor.”
The one eye fluttered shut again. The old man breathed softly, slowly, in and out.
“That did it. Supreme Court liked that,” said Ada. “Gulliver came home in chains. Peabody turned around and sold the man offshore.”
This thought brought me to a blur of sadness, a sour taste of regret. Everybody ends up somewhere. I thought of Martha, sitting primly at the Cotyledon Café. She must be gone by now. Long gone. I hoped so, and I hoped not.
Both of the lawyer’s eyes opened, small and inky and wet. He raised his glass. “To Gulliver.”
The slaves all raised their bottles, too, all together, and spoke in unison. “To Gulliver!” Then they drank and went right back to their conversations while the lawyer’s eyes slipped back closed.
“I gotta say, Ada, I don’t get it,” I said, watching the old man, his chin slipping slowly forward onto his chest. “I don’t quite understand.”
“Let me guess.” Ada laughed. “You don’t understand why we don’t get the f*ck out.”
“Yeah. I mean…” I pointed at the shrunken figure of the lawyer, half drunk, half sleeping. No dogs around, so far as I could see. No guards.
“Get out and do what?” She patted the lawyer on top of his head, went over to the counter, and started to fix coffee. “Go north? Put my life in the hands of that crazy-ass priest of yours? Get followed around in stores the rest of my life? Otis, baby, we got milk?”
Otis lumbered over, cracked open the fridge, while Ada scooped coffee into the machine.
“Get pulled over every time I’m driving? Get shot by some cop, walking down the street?”
“Or in your house,” said Otis.
Ada nodded. “Y’all hear shit about down here,” she said. “We hear shit about up there.”
She flicked on the coffeepot, and it bubbled away, doing its thing. Ada leaned on the edge of the counter. “Listen: of all the lives I could have led, all the places I coulda been born? Born here, into this household? Massa, this deaf old cracker, a hundred years old already when I got born, so sick with guilt he can’t sleep one sober night. Shit-ton of money, big old mansion, perfect hideout for runners on the way. Yeah, man, yeah. We could walk anytime. Any one of us. Right, Otis?”
“Yeah.” He nodded, stirring sugar into his cup. “That’s right.”
“But we’re doing some good work down here, okay? Some real good work.”
When we had our coffee I followed Ada to the stairs, passing Marlon, who was wheeling the old judge away from the table, wheeling him past Shai and Otis and Maryellen, past the empty boxes of wine piling up on the counter—a tottering cardboard skyscraper threatening to fall onto the sticky tile of the floor.
4.
“Listen. My cousin says you are to be trusted. My cousin says, this man coming down, you let him know what you can.” Ada talked fast. She didn’t look at me while she was talking. “So what I’m gonna do is, I tell you what I tell you. You don’t ask any questions.”