The Underground Railroad

by Colson Whitehead

  “But my mother wouldn’t let them touch her field,” Mabel told her daughter. Field in jest, as Ajarry’s stake was scarcely three yards square. “Said she’d dig a hammer in they heads if they so much as looked at it.”

  The image of her grandmother assaulting another slave didn’t jibe with Cora’s recollections of the woman, but once she started tending to the plot she understood the truth of the portrait. Ajarry kept watch over her garden through prosperity’s transformations. The Randalls bought out the Spencer spread to the north, once that family decided to try their luck out west. They bought the next plantation south and switched the crop from rice to cotton, adding two more cabins to each row, but Ajarry’s plot remained in the middle of it all, immovable, like a stump that reached down too deep. After Ajarry’s death, Mabel assumed care of the yams and okra, whatever struck her fancy. The fuss started when Cora took it over.

  —

  WHEN Mabel vanished Cora became a stray. Eleven years old, ten years, thereabouts—there was no one now to tell for sure. In Cora’s shock, the world drained to gray impressions. The first color to return was the simmering brown-red of the soil in her family’s plot. It reawakened her to people and things, and she decided to hold on to her stake, even though she was young and small and had nobody to look after her anymore. Mabel was too quiet and stubborn to be popular but people had respected Ajarry. Her shadow had provided protection. Most of the original Randall slaves were in the ground now or sold, some variety of gone. Was there anyone left who was loyal to her grandmother? Cora made a canvass of the village: Not a soul. They were all dead.

  She fought for the dirt. There were the small pests, the ones too young for real work. Cora shooed off those children trampling her sprouts and yelled at them for digging up her yam slips, using the same tone she used at Jockey’s feasts to corral them into footraces and games. She handled them with good nature.

  But pretenders stepped from the wings. Ava. Cora’s mother and Ava grew up on the plantation at the same time. They were treated to the same Randall hospitality, the travesties so routine and familiar that they were a kind of weather, and the ones so imaginative in their monstrousness that the mind refused to accommodate them. Sometimes such an experience bound one person to another; just as often the shame of one’s powerlessness made all witnesses into enemies. Ava and Mabel did not get along.

  Ava was wiry and strong, with hands as quick as a cottonmouth. Speed that was good for picking and for clopping her little ones across the face for idleness and other sins. She cherished her chickens more than those children and coveted Cora’s land to expand her coop. “It’s a waste,” Ava said, ticking her tongue against her teeth. “All that for her.” Ava and Cora slept next to each other every night in the loft and even though they were crammed up there with eight other people Cora could distinguish Ava’s every frustration as it moved through the wood. The woman’s breath was humid with rage, sour. She made a point of knocking Cora whenever she got up to make water.

  “You in Hob now,” Moses told Cora one afternoon when she came in from helping with the baling. Moses had made a deal with Ava, using some form of currency. Ever since Connelly had promoted the field hand to boss, to one of the overseer’s enforcers, Moses had set himself up as a broker of cabin intrigues. Order in the rows, such as it was, needed to be preserved, and there were things a white man could not do. Moses accepted his role with enthusiasm. Cora thought he had a mean face, like a burl sprouting from a squat, sweaty trunk. She wasn’t surprised when his character revealed itself—if you waited long enough, it always did. Like the dawn. Cora slunk over to Hob, where they banished the wretched. There was no recourse, were no laws but the ones rewritten every day. Someone had already moved her things over.

  No one remembered the unfortunate who had lent his name to the cabin. He lived long enough to embody qualities before being undone by them. Off to Hob with those who had been crippled by the overseers’ punishments, off to Hob with those who had been broken by the labor in ways you could see and in ways you could not see, off to Hob with those who had lost their wits. Off to Hob with strays.

  The damaged men, the half men, lived in Hob first. Then the women took up residence. White men and brown men had used the women’s bodies violently, their babies came out stunted and shrunken, beatings had knocked the sense out of their heads, and they repeated the names of their dead children in the darkness: Eve, Elizabeth, N’thaniel, Tom. Cora curled on the floor of the main room, too afraid to sleep up there with them, those abject creatures. Cursing herself for her small-mindedness even as she was powerless before it. She stared at dark shapes. The fireplace, the beams undergirding the loft, the tools dangling off nails on the walls. The first time she had spent a night outside the cabin she’d been born in. A hundred paces and as many miles.

  It was only a matter of time before Ava implemented the next stage of her scheme. And there was Old Abraham to contend with. Old Abraham, who was not old at all but who had comported himself in the manner of an elderly misanthrope since he first learned to sit up. He had no designs but wanted the plot gone on principle. Why should he and everyone else respect this little girl’s claim just because her grandmother had kicked the dirt over once? Old Abraham was not one for tradition. He’d been sold too many times for the proposition to have much weight. On numerous occasions as she passed on errands, Cora overheard him lobby for the redistribution of her parcel. “All that for her.” All three square yards of it.

  —

  THEN Blake arrived. That summer young Terrance Randall assumed duties to prepare for the day he and his brother took over the plantation. He bought a bunch of niggers out of the Carolinas. Six of them, Fanti and Mandingo if the broker was to be believed, their bodies and temperament honed for labor by nature. Blake, Pot, Edward, and the rest made a tribe of themselves on Randall land and were not above helping themselves to that which was not theirs. Terrance Randall made it known they were his new favorites, and Connelly made sure that everyone remembered it. You learned to step aside when the men were in a mood, or on a Saturday night once they’d emptied all the cider.

  Blake was a big oak, a double-ration man who quickly proved a testament to Terrance Randall’s investment acumen. The price they’d get for the offspring of such a stud alone. Blake wrassled his buddies and any other comers in a frequent spectacle, kicking up the dust, inevitably emerging the conqueror. His voice boomed through the rows as he worked and even those who despised him couldn’t help but sing along. The man had a miserable personality but the sounds that came from his body made the labor fly.

  After a few weeks of sniffing around and assessing the northern half, Blake decided that Cora’s spread would be a nice place to tie up his dog. Sun, breeze, proximity. Blake had coaxed the mutt to his side during a trip to town. The dog stayed, lingering around the smokehouse when Blake worked and barking at every noise in the busy Georgia night. Blake knew some carpentry—it was not, as was often the case, a lie put out by the trader to bump up his price. He built a little house for his mutt and tried to induce compliments. The kind words were genuine, for the doghouse was a handsome piece of work, of nice proportion, with clean angles. There was a door on a hinge and sun and moon cutouts along the back wall.

  “Ain’t this a nice mansion?” Blake asked Old Abraham. Blake had come to value the man’s sometimes bracing candor since his arrival.

  “Mighty fine work. That a little bed in there?”

  Blake had sewn a pillowcase and stuffed it with moss. He decided that the patch outside his cabin was the most appropriate spot for his dog’s home. Cora had been invisible to him but now he sought her eyes when she was close, to warn her that she was invisible no more.

  She tried to call in a few debts owed her mother, the ones she knew about. They rebuffed her. Like Beau, the seamstress Mabel had nursed back to health when she was struck with fever. Mabel had given the girl her own supper portion and spooned potlikker and roots into her trembling lips until she opene
d her eyes again. Beau said she had paid that debt and then some and told Cora to get back to Hob. Cora remembered that Mabel had extended an alibi to Calvin when some planting tools went missing. Connelly, who had an aptitude for the cat-o’-nine-tails, would have stripped the meat off Calvin’s back if she hadn’t concocted his defense. Would have done the same to Mabel if he’d found she was lying. Cora crept on Calvin after supper: I need help. He waved her away. Mabel had said that she never discovered to what purpose he used those instruments.

  Not soon after Blake made his intentions known, Cora woke one morning to the violation. She left Hob to check her garden. It had been a cool dawn. Wisps of white moisture hovered over the ground. There she saw it—the remains of what would have been her first cabbages. Heaped by the steps of Blake’s cabin, the tangled vines already drying out. The ground had been turned and tamped to make a nice yard for the mutt’s house, which sat in the center of her plot like a grand mansion in the heart of a plantation.

  The dog poked his head out of the door as if it knew it had been her land and wanted to signal his indifference.

  Blake stepped out of the cabin and crossed his arms. He spat.

  People moved in the corners of Cora’s vision: shadows of gossips and scolds. Watching her. Her mother was gone. She’d been moved into the wretch house and no one had come to her aid. Now this man three times her size, a bruiser, had taken her stake.

  Cora had been mulling strategy. In later years she could have turned to the Hob women, or Lovey, but this was then. Her grandmother had warned that she would knock open the head of anyone who messed with her land. That seemed out of proportion to Cora. In a spell, she walked back to Hob and plucked a hatchet off the wall, the hatchet she stared at when she could not sleep. Left by one of the previous residents who came to one bad end or another, lung sickness or peeled open by a whip or shitting their insides out on the floor.

  By now word had spread and bystanders lingered outside the cabins, heads tilted in anticipation. Cora marched past them, bent as if burrowing her body into a gale. No one moved to stop her, so strange was this display. Her first blow brought down the roof of the doghouse, and a squeal from the dog, who had just had his tail half severed. He scrambled to a hidey-hole beneath his owner’s cabin. Her second blow wounded the left side of the doghouse gravely and her last put it out of its misery.

  She stood there, heaving. Both hands on the hatchet. The hatchet wavered in the air, in a tug-of-war with a ghost, but the girl did not falter.

  Blake made fists and stepped toward Cora. His boys behind him, tensing. Then he stopped. What happened between those two figures in that moment—the burly young man and the slender girl in white shift—became a matter of vantage. To those watching by the first line of cabins Blake’s face distorted in surprise and worry, that of a man stumbling into a kingdom of hornets. Those standing by the new cabins saw Cora’s eyes dart to and fro, as if she took the measure of an advancing host, not just one man. An army she was nonetheless prepared to meet. Regardless of perspective, what was important was the message imparted by one through posture and expression and interpreted by the other: You may get the better of me, but it will cost you.

  They stood a few moments until Alice sounded the bell for breakfast. Nobody was going to forgo their mash. When they came in from the fields, Cora cleaned up the mess that had been made of her plot. She rolled over the block of sugar maple, a castoff from someone’s construction project, and it became her perch whenever she had a spare moment.

  If Cora didn’t belong in Hob before Ava’s maneuvering, she did now. Its most infamous occupant, and the most long-term. Eventually the work broke the crippled—it always did—and those in a state of unreason were sold off cheap or took a knife to their own throats. Vacancies were brief. Cora remained. Hob was her home.

  She used the doghouse for firewood. It kept her and the rest of Hob warm one night, but its legend marked her for the rest of her time on the Randall plantation. Blake and his friends started telling tales. Blake recounted how he woke from a nap behind the stables to find Cora standing over him with her hatchet, blubbering. He was a natural mimic and his gestures sold the story. Once Cora’s chest started to sprout, Edward, the most wicked of Blake’s gang, bragged of how Cora flapped her dress at him while she made lascivious suggestions and threatened to scalp him when he refused her. Young women whispered how they watched her slink away from the cabins on the full moon, to the woods, where she fornicated with donkeys and goats. Those who found this last story less than credible nonetheless recognized the usefulness of keeping the strange girl outside the circle of respectability.

  Not long after it became known that Cora’s womanhood had come into flower, Edward, Pot, and two hands from the southern half dragged her behind the smokehouse. If anyone heard or saw, they did not intervene. The Hob women sewed her up. Blake was gone by then. Perhaps having looked into her face that day, he had counseled his companions against revenge: It will cost you. But he was gone. He ran off three years after she busted up the doghouse, hiding in the swamp for weeks. It was his mutt’s barking that gave away his location to the patrollers. Cora would have said it served him right, had his punishment not made her shiver to think about.

  They had already dragged the big table from the kitchen and covered it with food for Jockey’s celebration. At one end a trapper skinned his raccoons and at the other Florence scraped dirt from a mound of sweet potatoes. The fire under the big cauldron cracked and whistled. The soup roiled within the black pot, bits of cabbage chasing around the hog’s head that bobbed up and down, the eye roving in the gray foam. Little Chester ran up and tried to grab a handful of cowpeas, but Alice swatted him away with her ladle.

  “Nothing today, Cora?” Alice said.

  “Too early,” Cora said.

  Alice made a brief show of disappointment and returned to supper.

  That’s what a lie looks like, Cora thought, and marked it. It was just as well her garden had refused. On Jockey’s last birthday she had donated two heads of cabbage, which were graciously received. Cora made the mistake of turning back as she departed the kitchen and caught Alice tossing the heads into the slop bucket. She staggered into the sunlight. Did the woman think her food tainted? Is that how Alice had got rid of everything Cora had contributed these past five years, treated every turnip knob and bunch of sour greens? Had it started with Cora, or Mabel, or her grandmother? There was no point in confronting the woman. Alice had been beloved of Randall, and now James Randall, who had grown tall on her mincemeat pies. There was an order of misery, misery tucked inside miseries, and you were meant to keep track.

  The Randall brothers. Since he was a young boy, James could be placated by a treat from Alice’s kitchen, the sugar apple that cut short a fit or tantrum. His younger brother, Terrance, was a different sort. The cook still had a knot next to her ear where Master Terrance expressed his displeasure over one of her broths. He had been ten years old. The signs had been there since he could walk, and he perfected the more distasteful aspects of his personality as he lurched into manhood and assumed his responsibilities. James had a nautilus disposition, burrowing into his private appetites, but Terrance inflicted every fleeting and deep-seated fancy on all in his power. As was his right.

  Around Cora, pots clanged and pickaninnies squealed over the delights to come. From the southern half: nothing. The Randall brothers had flipped a coin years ago to determine stewardship of each half of the plantation and in doing so made this day possible. Feasts like this didn’t happen in Terrance’s domain, for the younger brother was stingy with slave amusements. The Randall sons managed their inheritances according to their temperaments. James contented himself with the security of a fashionable crop, the slow, inevitable accumulations of his estate. Land and niggers to tend it were a surety beyond what any bank could offer. Terrance took a more active hand, ever scheming for ways to increase the loads sent to New Orleans. He wrung out every possible dollar. When black blood was m
oney, the savvy businessman knew to open the vein.

  The boy Chester and his friends grabbed Cora, startling her. But it was only children. Time for the races. Cora always arranged the children at the starting line, aiming their feet, calming the skittish ones, and graduating some to the older kids’ race if need be. This year she kicked up Chester one slot. He was a stray, like her, his parents sold off before he could walk. Cora looked after him. Burr-headed and red-eyed. He’d shot up the last six months, the rows triggering something in his lithe body. Connelly said he had the makings of a top picker, a rare compliment from him.

  “You run fast,” Cora said.

  He crossed his arms and cocked his head: You don’t need to tell me anything. Chester was half a man, even if he didn’t know it. He wouldn’t race next year, Cora saw, but loll at the sidelines, joking with his friends, devising mischief.

  The young slaves and the old slaves gathered on the sidelines of the horse path. Women who had lost their children drifted over little by little, to mortify themselves with possibilities and never-would-bes. Huddles of men swapped cider jugs and felt their humiliations slip away. Hob women rarely participated in the feasts, but Nag hustled about in her helpful way, rounding up little ones from their distractions.

  Lovey stood at the finish as the judge. Everyone but the children knew that she always proclaimed her darlings the winner, when she could get away with it. Jockey also presided at the finish, in his rickety maple armchair, the one he used to watch the stars most nights. On his birthdays he dragged it up and down the alley, to give proper attention to the amusements held in his name. The runners went to Jockey after they were done with their races, and he dropped a piece of ginger cake onto their palms, no matter what they placed.