Underground Airlines

by Ben Winters

  “Well,” I said, and then—what else was there to say?—“Thank you.”

  “Yes, sir, Counselor,” said Ada on my behalf. “Elijah is on his way. On his way to the promised land.”

  “God bless you, boy,” said the lawyer. “God protect you.”

  And then just like that he fell asleep: tilted his head to one side, and his eyes clicked shut like a doll’s.

  “Sir?” said Ada. “Mr. Russell?”

  “Oh, he out,” said Marlon, easing past, a beer bottle in his fist.

  “Yeah.” Ada patted the old man on his hand. “Think you’re right.”

  “One of these times, you know, he gonna just die.”

  “Hush your mouth,” said Ada. She smiled with undeniable tenderness at the lawyer as Marlon wandered away. “He’s right, though. He comes and goes. One of these days he won’t come back.”

  The group was getting quieter around us: people talking in low voices, murmuring. Big Otis and little Maryellen had settled into the chair I was in before, she on his lap, cuddling close.

  “We just tell him everybody’s named Elijah. Makes things easier is all.”

  I scratched my forehead. “I’m supposed to be talking to him. That’s what they told me.”

  “Well, go on,” Ada said. “Talk.”

  I looked at the lawyer, then at her, and I saw that she was laughing, and I laughed, too.

  “Yeah, how about that, huh?” Ada shook her head. She draped a blanket across the old man’s lap, eased a few strands of white hair out of his eyes. “But you try telling the Holy Ghost up there it’s a bunch of Negroes running the show.”

  Cook had said much the same thing, laughing but not smiling, as we drove down Meridian Street to the monument: that Mockingbird mentality.

  “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 fuck 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.”

  “All right,” I said. “Who’s your cousin?”

  “Didn’t I just say don’t ask me questions?”

  “Yeah.”

  “So? I tell you what I tell you, you listen.”

  Ada and I outside the house as the sun came up. The mansion at our backs was sparkling white, gabled and turreted, with polished glass doors sliding open onto the slate patio, where we sat drinking coffee. After the cramped raucousness of the night, the big quiet morning world was soft and cool. A rolling valley of a backyard, the grass true green, dew-dappled, endless.

  “Now. You’re wanting to know about this contract, completed a week ago now, week ago Sunday. You’re wondering what went wrong.”

  “What do you mean, a contract?”

  Ada scowled. “Are you fooling? Are you still doped up? I said stop asking me questions.” She hissed, shook her head. But she couldn’t help herself. “Goddamn right it’s a contract. What do you
think we’re playing at down here? We’re doing the good Lord’s work, but we’re no dummies. Cash on the barrel. Pay in advance or no one going nowhere.” She sipped coffee, ran her tongue over her teeth. “But this one now, this one…thing is, nothing went wrong with this one. This one went just exactly right. Everything how it was clocked.”

  “Something went wrong,” I said.

  “Listen: shut up. Okay? Listen.”

  I loved Ada’s face. It was wide, with a strong African nose and a broad forehead. She had hidden her short dreadlocks again under the orange kerchief. I wondered if that was for the benefit of the neighbors. A line of high thick hedges shielded the lawyer’s property, but those neighbors would presumably be dismayed if they caught a glimpse of two black people on his patio, sitting on his tasteful outdoor furniture, talking urgently about a runaway’s route.

  “This boy. The one you after. He did what we told him. We got a message in to him four months ago. Told him the night, told him how to do it. Told him get sick. He did it.”

  I had more questions, but I held on to them for now. Ada was rolling now, talking fast. Word had come from the northern friends about a boy who needed to come out along with a package he was working to obtain. Payment was arranged.

  “And we had the bay, see.”

  “The bay?”

  A sharp glance—No questions, dummy—then she answered my question. “Sick bay. Two girls are assigned to western section worker care on Sundays, and that night both of them were us.”

  Monica Smith, age twenty-four, and Angelina Croth, age twenty-seven. Two working-class girls in starched nurse’s whites, fighters in the Cause—willing to take a job in a plantation, pass whatever tests they had to, get the necessary permits from the American Medical Association to do medical care on a PB population. Work down there for however long was required to earn trust, sweeten the scheduling person in HR, get on duty on the preappointed night.

  “That boy came in to worker care, puking his guts out, like we told him to, and our people had him.”

  This time I made my question into a statement. “Must be hard to get yourself sent to the infirmary on a plantation.”

  Ada nodded. “Not hard getting sick. The trick is to get sick enough. They see a lot of injuries in these places. You’re working with needles, band knives. You fall; you get a sleeve tangled in a drive shaft. I knew a man who had his face burned with a hot iron: they sent him down to worker care and turned him out again in an hour. Most injuries they handle in population or on the floor. They wrap you up, maybe a steroid shot, and you’re back on the floor.

  “The thing you want, you want to get sent down, is poison. At a garment factory, you know, you’re working the floor, there’s a lot of industrial strength lying around. Sealants. Chemicals and cleaners. You smart, you don’t overdo it, you can get yourself real bad, get it so you almost die. Then they take you down for sure.”

  That sent me back down, back into the tunnel, down below Indianapolis with that boy. The pallor of Kevin’s skin. Chemicals and cleaners. Oh, that boy. That beautiful broken boy.

  Not to be thought of now. Work to do now.

  “All right, so he comes in. He’s sick as hell; he’s got this package.”

  Ada winced, moved her head back and forth. “I don’t know. Some of these details I never had, you know? But the way I understand it, the package went to the driver direct. Never came into the bay. But you’d have to ask one of them nurses, which you will never be able to do. And don’t ask me, by the way, what the fuck was in that envelope, because I do not know, and I do not care.”

  So there’s Jackdaw in the sick bay. The clock is ticking; the delivery is scheduled for 8:49 p.m. onto a forty-five-foot tractor-trailer. Forty-two hundred raw bolts for export, and all the rest of it crated and palleted and headed for a route along the Red Highway.

  The boy is there, and somehow or other the package is, too. It goes into the jacket of the driver. Maybe the driver is playing out a crush on one of those sweet young nurses, Monica or Angelina, and maybe he stops by with flowers and it’s a quick thank-you hug to slip it in his pocket.

  Or maybe one of our nurses junks it out the window while the driver happens to be out for a stroll around the campus, stretching his legs before climbing in the rig.

  Ada doesn’t know all that. Ada says if I want to know how the package got from the girls to the driver, I’d have to ask one of them.

  “Which I’ll never be able to do.”

  “You got it.”

  And as for Jackdaw, Jackdaw’s body, precious cargo: he went out in a barrel.

  The trucks are loaded in a secure area, of course, and plantation security checks and double-checks every single item: they open every crate, shine their lights into every box on every pallet. But see, the good guys are smart, too; the good guys are always working, too. There’s a workshop down in the Great Dismal Swamp, a Panthers-funded research center, with honest-to-God engineers down there, building all kinds of crazy shit, looking for those golden-ticket ideas: how to slide people past all those checks and double checks. Turns out one thing that doesn’t get opened up for a final check after it’s packed is medical waste. So what about a man-size rubber bladder fitted with a thin reed, like the one a scuba diver wears, so a person could survive in there, down in all that waste? What about you get a man to the infirmary, make it look like he burst loose and leaped out a window when really he’s coming out in a barrel?

  Ada described it, and that was a feeling you could feel. A feeling that I could feel. Wrapped up tight and clammy in some kind of rubber suit, folded over and jammed in a bucket, entombed. Rolled end over end, helpless, banging against the sides, the darkness and the heat and the stink. And then with the poison sloshing in your guts, cleaners and chemicals…and add to it the terror, the certainty as you were wheeled out of worker care toward the loading dock: capture was coming. This could not and would not work.

  “So that’s it,” Ada said. “That’s the hard part. Boy’s in the truck, truck clears the gates, clears the Alabama border. Freedomland.”

  Ada clapped her hands together as if knocking dust off of them—like, Mission accomplished.

  “That’s what happened?”

  Ada looked at me sideways. “That was the plan, I’m saying. Far as I know, yes, that’s what happened. We know the truck came out. We know the nurses did their part. That’s what we know.”

  “Okay,” I said. “Okay.”

  But it wasn’t okay. Not even close. I had learned nothing that I needed to know. Kevin leaves in a barrel, and the package is in the driver’s pocket. What then?

  “Where did the boy get out of the truck?”

  “That’s not my part of it. That’s the driver.”

  “Where does the driver give him the package? How does he get the rest of the way north, after he’s off the truck?”

  “You don’t listen, man. I’m telling you, I don’t know.”

  My coffee cup was empty. I stood up. I looked out at the lawn, the sunlight. It wasn’t enough. It wasn’t close to enough. I looked down at Ada, still sitting on the patio chair.

  “I want to talk to the nurses.”

  “Well, that’s gonna be hard, because they don’t exist.” She smiled. “They never existed.”

  I was agitated. I was unhappy. Get to the lawyer, Barton had said, and he will point you in the right direction. So here I was, and what did I have? The sun was slowly rolling out across the lawn, brightening the green of the grass inch by inch. Closer every moment.

  “All right, then, the driver. How do I get in touch with the driver?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Ada. Please.”

  “I’m telling you straight, man, I don’t know. The nurses came from a guy Marlon knew, a guy from Atlanta, and the nurses got to the driver once they were already working there.”

  “How?”

  “Two pretty nurses? How you think? Listen. Okay? I got no connect with the truck driver. I do
n’t have a name or number. You’d have to walk into GGSI and ask.”

  “How do I do that?”

  She barked a laugh. Looked at my face and stopped laughing.

  “We help people out of these places, son. Not in.”

  Ada stood up. We were done. She yawned, spilled the dregs of her coffee onto the ground around one of Counselor Russell’s flowering trees.

  “And what about the girl?” I said quietly.

  Ada waited before she answered; waited so long that when she said, “What girl?” I knew it was a lie.

  “Luna.”

  This time the answer came too fast. “I don’t know that name.”

  “You do. She’s the one who got hold of the package in the first place.”

  I didn’t know how, and Ada sure as hell didn’t know how, but Luna had done the hard part. She was the one who got your precious evidence. Jackdaw, weeping, standing in the river. She took all the fucking risks.

  Ada, though, was shaking her head, setting her chin. “I don’t know who you’re talking about.”

  “Sure you do.”

  I closed my eyes, thinking of Jackdaw, of Kevin, his life flown out of him.

  “And I think you know,” I said to Ada, “that she thought she was getting free.”

  “Yeah, well,” said Ada, and it was a kind of miracle, because even though she said she didn’t know who I was talking about, and even though she said she had never heard the name before, she said, “Well, it wasn’t her time.”

  “I guess not.”

  “Whatever promises were made to that one, they were not made by me, you understand?” Her face now was downright defiant; the face of the woman I’d seen on the square, the one who had scowled and stared while the others were beating me into the car. “Those promises were not made by me.”

  She went toward the door, and I followed her, and now all I could think of was Luna—I bet Kevin had told her what they had told him; I bet she had taken some poison, too, some chemical or cleaner, gotten herself sick and gotten herself taken to worker care, and then she woke to find that Jackdaw was gone and she was still there. Left behind. The only thing worse than a lifetime of slavery: that taunting instant of hope, gone in a flash. And I knew of course what happened to her next. When the package was discovered missing and Luna was found to have helped in its disappearance, she was tortured then, Bridge had said; tortured and killed—that piece of it from Cook.