Underground Airlines(81)
“No, sir,” she was saying. “Oh, no. We’re up from the Birmingham office, but the company is headquartered in Georgia.”
“Georgia, huh?” said Newell. “And how are things in the State of Surrender?”
“Oh, stop,” she said, and slapped him on the arm.
He laughed, eyed her nervously, hoping not to have offended, and rushed to reassure her. “I’m only teasing, of course. Bygones be bygones and all that. Every state free to choose its own path. The American way.”
While Newell mouthed these wooden platitudes I had another quick flash of Batlisch, flying forward, arms out, the panic of the crowd. I wondered what Martha was thinking about. The elevator dinged, and we stepped directly out into sunlight; the whole top floor was taken up by one room with windows for walls, the sun streaming in gloriously on a bright open penthouse with marble floors.
“This is my office,” said Mr. Newell, and immediately snorted and waved his hands. “Just kiddin’, of course. This is the observation deck, what we call the perch. I love taking folks up here. Just gives a real strong sense of the place.”
He walked up to the glass and gestured for us to follow—well, for Martha to follow. My presence he had more or less forgotten: I was the rolling suitcase. I did what I was told. I was not worth thinking of.
He stood at Martha’s elbow. “Really something, huh?”
“It sure is.”
From inside my cloak of invisibility, I looked, too. Most of the buildings were like the one we were in, made of glass, beaming and winking at each other across wide green lawns. The buildings were gathered in clusters, divided into regions, separated by winding walkways and black-paved service roads and high chain-link fences. I was in both places at once. I was back there in the Capital City Crossroads Hotel, staring at the satellite image from the full file, and I was here for real on this plantation, in the presence of the real thing. Everything getting realer and realer, the closer you get to it, like flesh on bones.
I got busy correlating, matching up the buildings I was looking at with the blurry images I’d seen in the file: the offices, the outbuildings, the shipping and receiving center, the machine shop. The five brick towers of the population center, gathered around a tall tower with a glass cupola.
My mind saw that something was missing before I knew what it was. Where were all the people? At Bell’s the yards were always full of us, hustling and hollering, singing sometimes, yelling at each other or getting yelled at by the guards and the working whites. Down there on the green lawn of GGSI, I saw not a soul. Everybody inside, I figured. Shift in progress. Slaving away. And yet…
“Now, okay, so those right there are the garment factories,” said Matty Newell, pointing down at industrial buildings as big as football stadiums, scaffolded with exterior piping and drums, sending up streams of dark smoke. “That right there is kind of the heart of the place.”
Newell was looking down at the pristine lawn and the handsome facilities with clear satisfaction, giving us his overhead tour with almost proprietary pride, as though GGSI belonged to him instead of the other way around.
“Inside there are the ginning operations,” Newell added. “The cleaners and the dryers and so on. We’ve got the largest set of high-capacity round-base cotton gins in the state.”
“Well, I’ll be,” said Martha. “No kidding.”
My eye, meanwhile, had found it, that one abstract rectangle, shaded by the Institute for Agricultural Innovation, the small dark building that bore no number or name on the aerial picture.
I couldn’t ask Newell what it was, of course. I couldn’t ask Martha to ask. I was black. I wasn’t there.
“Now, this is a twenty-four-hour-a-day operation, just by the way,” Newell was saying, Martha still nodding, eyes big with amazement. “Twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. We run in shifts here, morning, afternoon, night, and late night. Never a dull moment. Sabbath comes every day for one-seventh of the population, so we never have to stop the plants. We got seven Easters, too. Seven Christmases. Only thing shuts us down is a bad accident, and”—he made a fist and knocked gently, ha-ha, on his bald forehead—“none of those in twenty-nine months.”
He grinned, nice and broad, and gave me a wink. “None of your cousins got a thing to complain about down here, son. And I mean it.”
It seemed he wanted me to respond, so I responded. “I bet you right, Mr. Newell. I bet you right.”
Newell laughed nervously, inside his throat.
“I mean it, son. This is not the slavery of fifty or even ten years ago. People think about slavery, and they still think—still!—about the whips and the dogs and the spiky neck chains, all of that nasty business. But this is now. This is the twenty-first century. You see there”—pointing again with that fat finger, a gold ring between the second and third knuckles, forcing me to look—“that there is the population center. Four thousand head in those buildings right there. We got a rec center in there, gymnasium equipment that every one of our team members is not just encouraged but also required to use. And you see that building in the center, with the turret-looking thing on the top? From up in there the guards can see into every single cell, and every single cell can see the guards, too. So everybody knows they’re safe. Everybody’s looking after each other. That goes back to Jefferson, by the way, that design. So you’re looking at a proud tradition here.”