Underground Airlines(87)

“You…” She looked at me. Shirtless, shoeless. Wrapped with gauze. The simple black slacks now looking dingy, pathetic. Slave garb. “What are you doing?”

“I gotta finish this up.”

“And then how are you going to get out?”

“I’ll figure it out.”

Her eyes at last were back in focus. She was back in the room.

“How? How are you going to figure it out?”





7.



Poor Mr. Newell, inarticulate with fear though he was, had managed to answer my questions one by one, even the one question I hadn’t known to ask—what is the line around the property, the broken black line that had puzzled me when I first got a look at the full file? It was a train. A subway. Not an electric fence or a utility pipe, but an underground train. Delivering Persons Bound to Labor from the population center to their shifts.

It explained why I’d seen no actual people at work from way up there in the perch, where Newell had taken us so he could crow. The slaves were way out in the far-flung acreage of the cotton fields; the slaves were laboring in the high floors of the stitch houses; the slaves were transported belowground, where they couldn’t be seen. Not past the headquarters buildings full of happy Matty Newells, meeting in conference rooms and making calls, doing no harm to any Negro person.

You’ll take the service elevator, Newell had said. The door will open directly onto the platform. So down I went. Shirtless and shoeless, disguised in my five feet of bandage and bright green wristband and my own black skin, I rode the service elevator down from Newell’s fourteenth-floor office with my head slightly lowered, my brain on fire.

As it descended I began to hear music, loud and martial music, and when the elevator door opened I was in a gigantic room full of men singing.

The men were shirtless and shoeless, as I was, and they were facing away from me, just backs and heads, rows and rows of backs and heads, hundreds of men standing totally still, their voices raised.

“These strong hands belong to you,” they sang in chorus. “Hands and back and spirit, too.” The melody was simple, a childish four-note singsong. “Every day in all I do”—I shouldered my way forward, finding a spot in the crowd—“GGSI, my heart is true.”

Now I was in among them, and nobody looked at me, nobody said who the f*ck are you: I was one more shirtless man with a wristband and black pants, with mummy strips of bandage covering my neck and shoulder.

“As Thou hast done in days gone by…” I listened to the lyrics. I got it by heart. “Oh, Lord, protect GGSI.”

That was it. After that the song just started again, and now I sang it, too. “These strong hands belong to you…”

I found a place between two men. The first was about my age, maybe a little younger, with high cheekbones and small eyes. The other was middle-aged, with a wide forehead and bulb nose, and beside him was a man with a striking face, a square, dimpled chin and high cheekbones…and then there was another, and another—all the kinds of faces in all the colors the world calls black: brown and tan and yellow and orange, copper and bronze and gold.

“These strong hands belong to you…”

They sang—we sang—with no enthusiasm or joy. We used to sing at Bell’s, crossing the yard or working on the pile, just like slaves used to sing in Old Slavery, spirituals and work songs, sly lyrics, silly lyrics, yearning for freedom or roasting Massa in nonsense words he couldn’t understand. This, though—this was a different kind of singing. I looked from man to man, and they were singing mechanically, eyes front, mouths moving like puppets. Singing this dumb refrain about how much they loved their bosses and loved their work.

Nothing spiritual about this. This was something else altogether.

There were no women. The women were somewhere else. Where were the women? Things were coming loose in me, being down here with all these men. Things were coming loose. I felt like I might fall down, but I could not do that—none of these men was wavering. They stood completely still, staring straight ahead, only singing.

What I did was, I focused on the room. Focused on noticing things. I was in a subway station, a platform, a kind of place familiar to me from New York, from Washington, DC, from a hundred different hunts. A cavernous room lit dimly by overhead fixtures hanging from a high domed roof. A concrete floor ending like a cliff edge above the sunken well of the tracks. I focused on the room and the sound of my own voice, singing along. “These strong hands…”

I kept it in, I kept it all in, I had to keep it in, so I kept it in, made my face like their faces, expressionless, only the mouth moving. But I was too close, too close to their faces. For my whole career under Bridge I had always dreaded the page of the file that showed the photograph, the real human face of the man I was seeking, and now here I was among them—none of this peeb shit, none of this “Persons Bound,” no slaves down here, all that abstraction torn away like skin coming off a body, and these were people—human f*cking beings, each with the one life he was given, and this was the life they had.

The music stopped in the middle of a line—“and back and spir”—and we stopped singing.

“Arms out.” A voice came through from on high, burred and flattened by the intercom. “Hands up.”

Everybody did as instructed: extended their arms, raised their hands. I did it, too. This was it. My rushing emotion was subsumed in a sudden heat of panic. Newell had untied himself somehow, stumbled, screaming, into the carpeted hallway. Or it was Martha—they’d stopped her in the lobby. They’d stopped her in the car. She was in no shape…