Underground Airlines(88)

“Heads back.”

We tilted back our heads. Stared at the ceiling. The men around me followed the instructions dully, robotically. This seemed to be an everyday occurrence. This was protocol.

On my left hand was the green wristband the guard had fitted me for. In my right hand was a piece of paper that Newell had filled out and stamped under my command. Temporary Intracampus Travel Certificate. Permission slip. Travel papers. Some of the men around me, I noticed, carried similar passes; others had none. Some wore, along with the green band, other bands of different colors in various places up and down their arms. A whole world of systems, of rules and regulations.

The intercom voice again: “Hold pose.” A frozen moment. A room cramped with shirtless men, all of us with heads tilted back, arms up and out. People like trees.

“Forty-five and under, hands down.”

Most of the men lowered their arms to their sides. I did, too. The older men kept their arms up.

There was a man moving through the platform. The slaves parted to let him through. He was black, as we were, but wearing a shirt and boots. He came within a few feet of me but did not look in my direction, did not see me, the infiltrator, where I stood with my eyes lowered like everybody else. The train was coming—I felt the familiar stale breeze being pushed forward along the tunnel—but nobody moved.

This guard or trusty, whatever he was, moved from man to man, all those with their hands still up, checking for something in their mouths. Push his index finger between their lips, force open their teeth, then worm his finger around, upper palate, lower palate, then out. His face was set; mean; like Harbor, the hard boy who’d haunted my childhood at Bell’s. Thinking of Harbor, I thought of Castle, and I felt a dizzy sense of the world collapsing, of my lifetimes flattening together into one plane—and meanwhile this overseer type appeared to have found who he was looking for among the forty-five-plus men. He took his finger from the man’s mouth, had him bend over, and began to pat down the length of his body.

The train pulled into the station, and its doors pulsed open. Nobody moved.

“Up,” said the overseer or trusty to the man. “Let’s go.”

The forty-five-plus nodded and lowered his hands and allowed himself to be led through the crowd, toward the exit at the end of the platform, and his face remained as impassive as all the other faces. But his eyes: I saw it, a flickering in his eyes—I saw it—a slight widening. Absolute and abject terror. I had read about the up-to-date disincentive programs that were run in plantations now; all that shit that had come online since my days at Bell’s. They were permitted now to tie you to a plank, pour water in your mouth to simulate drowning. They were permitted now to employ electric shocks; the science was in place to precisely measure out the voltage. All the uses of darkness. Of noise. Everything was carefully regulated, of course, BLP officials on hand at all times.

That man, that forty-five-plus, they took him away. At no clear signal, we all got on the train.



It was twenty-four men to a train car, twelve on either side. There were no seats. We stood, staring straight ahead. The train pulled away from the station, and we all began to sing again: endless choruses of the same song, no variation. There were no windows on the train. The man across from me was barrel-chested, with a thick bull neck and deep-set eyes. The train was loud in the tunnel, rushing and roaring through the darkness. It was hard to think with the singing and the rattle of the train.

The train ran in a simple circle around the plantation, fourteen stops in all, but I just had to make it through four of them: headquarters to facilities maintenance; facilities maintenance to stitch house 1; stitch house 1 to stitch house 2; stitch house 2 to Free White Housing. I looked past the big barrel-chested man. Behind him, in small letters, where one metal plate of the car’s structure met the next, were the words STIPELY FABRICATING SERVICE, LOUISVILLE, KENTUCKY. Just beneath the word Kentucky, one tiny machine screw was coming loose—I saw its head, a flat silver insect, poking like a secret from the surface of the train wall. I watched the screw as we juddered along.

At the first stop, facilities maintenance, a middle-aged white woman got on in the bright orange jumpsuit of the Bureau of Labor Practices. The singing stopped, but the train began to roll again, and she made her way down the center aisle, counting heads, clicking a small handheld clicker, one click for each of us. She did this while whistling slightly to herself distractedly, the way you might move through a crowd of chickens in a pen. Nobody looked at her. Nobody looked at anybody else. We just kept singing. I stared at the tiny loose metal screw. “All right, folks,” she said brightly. “Thanks very much,” and she moved through to the next car. At stitch house 1 nine slaves got off, and nine new slaves took their places. I did not look at the new faces.

I was going to find William Smith, and I was going to ask him my questions. Find out where that package was, get the f*ck out of there—How? How are you going to figure it out?—and go and get it.

I should have felt something. I should have been excited, I should have been reveling in a moment, an opportunity that had at long last arrived.

But there on the train car, surrounded by men who would ride this train forever, I did not feel shit. I just wanted to get this done. Get it over with and get out.

Between the third and fourth stations the train stopped again.

“Hands in,” said an intercom voice, and before I could wonder what that meant, a pair of shackles dropped and dangled in front of me and in front of everybody else on the train car. One pair per passenger, they appeared and hung there like oxygen masks coming down when a plane has lost cabin pressure. I followed the others. Did what they did. Raised my hands and stuck them through the holes. The manacles tightened automatically, biting into my wrists. I still had my pass, my Temporary Intracampus Travel Certificate. It was tight between my forefinger and thumb.