Underground Airlines(79)
The lobby was vaultlike and chilly after the early-autumn warmth of the parking lot. The words GARMENTS OF THE GREATER SOUTH, INCORPORATED were six feet high on the back wall, cotton-white letters on a wall of blue-sky blue, alongside a gigantic photomontage of happy Asian children kicking soccer balls, turning cartwheels, shouldering their sturdy backpacks in their brightly colored cotton clothes.
“Yes?” The receptionist was waiting at a desk big as a spaceship between two banks of elevators. Red lipstick, blond hair, blue eyes, a tasteful gold necklace. “How can I help y’all?”
I ducked my head while Martha smiled.
“How are you this morning? My name is Ms. Jane Reynolds, from Peach Tree Management Systems. I am here to see Mr. Matthew Newell.”
“O-kay,” said the woman behind the big semicircular desk, lingering on the kay, teasing the word out into a question while she typed, pulling up a calendar. “And did you have an appointment?”
“Well, yes and no,” said Martha, and my head was still down, eyes down, but I could hear in her voice that she winked as she said it. “We met down at the CSO, back in June? And Matty—I’m sorry: Matthew; Mr. Newell—he was sweet enough to say that if I was ever in the area I should feel free to stop by.”
“Oh,” said the blonde. “I see.”
CSO was the Conference of Slaveholding Organizations. It was a safe bet that a plantation the size of GGSI would have sent a sizable contingent; it was an open question whether Matthew R. Newell, assistant vice president of transport operations, would have been among them. We were out on the wire here, me and Martha. Out there together.
“So would you mind just ringing up, see if he’s around? Of course I should have called first—I just had an appointment right down in Blessing, and I thought…”
The blonde was already in motion, offering Martha an empty smile and a wait-just-amoment forefinger. She tucked the telephone receiver under her ear and pressed a button on her console. The elevator doors opened on the far side of the lobby, but no one got out. We had gone over everything on the way, discussed every detail, various contingencies and possibilities, but Martha was in charge now—she would have to be. My job was to walk with my eyes pointed downward at about forty-five degrees. My job was to smile and keep smiling.
There was no security in the lobby. No powerfully built men with keen eyes and bulges at their hips. Probably a panic button under the woman’s desk or a panic switch at her feet. Maybe a gun down there, too. And there were cameras, unhidden: one above the reception desk, angled down; one above each bank of elevators. Cameras in the public spaces, Ada had said, but not in the private areas. Not in the executive offices. That was as far as she knew; that was according to the latest reckoning. We were counting on it, but we didn’t know.
The receptionist cupped one palm over the mouthpiece. “Excuse me? Hi. Where did you say you were from again?”
“Peach Tree, ma’am,” I said. “Peach Tree Management Systems.”
“We’re consultants,” said Martha, flicking an irritated look at me, servant speaking out of turn. “Workplace efficiency. But like I said, it’s as much a personal call as anything. I just wanted to say hi.”
I pressed my hands together while the blonde said “Hmm” a couple more times and went back to murmuring into her phone.
I stood and waited and grinned and looked at the floor, fighting back against the simple, sick, vertiginous awareness of where I was, where exactly. I was tottering on the rim of it. Through those doors. Up those elevators. Behind these three towers…
I was breathing very slowly. Martha stared into the expanse of the lobby, and I could not guess what she was thinking. We were deep in character, and I’d taken us into this place, and I could feel the terrible weight of it pressing my flesh, and when the receptionist looked up again and smiled, her red-lip smile was the wide, burning grin of the devil.
“You’re in luck,” she said to Martha. “He is here, and he’ll be right out.”
“Oh, isn’t that nice,” said Martha. “That’s just perfect.”
“Yes.” She sniffed. “Your Negro will need to be cleared.”
Again, as at the border. Scalp and armpits, teeth and tongue; pants down, shirt up. They had a room for it, just off the lobby, and an attendant, a tired-looking free black man who scowled and said nothing as he ran his clumsy fingers over my body. I stood absolutely still. I held my arms out. It would have been the school at Bell’s, the first time, the first of such searches I had endured in my life. Lesson 1: your body is not your own.
This place, this plantation, was on a different order from Bell’s. Physical size and scope of work, a different universe of slavery from the little three dozen acres where I’d been raised. Green grass, farm country, pig lots, cattle pens, silos. The world I was about to enter was a twenty-four-hour operation, ultramodern and ultraefficient, with computerized inventory tracking and comprehensive worker-control protocols. There was a camera in the upper left corner of the room, bearing cold witness to the man and me. I was here and I was there at the same time, feeling this tired guard’s hands on my chest at the same time as I was feeling the rough hands of the guards at Bell’s, a lifetime ago.
This is so much worse, I thought, and immediately thought, No, no, nothing could be worse. But it’s a waste anyway, isn’t it, the idea of comparison, just in general. Holding up one kind of horror against another.