The Underground Railroad

by Colson Whitehead

  Cora called for Molly. She didn’t see anyone she recognized; their faces had been transformed by fear. The heat from the fires washed over her. Valentine’s house was ablaze. A jar of oil exploded against the second floor and John and Gloria’s bedroom caught. The windows of the library shattered and Cora saw the books burning on the shelves inside. She made two steps toward it before Ridgeway grabbed her. They struggled and his big arms encircled her, her feet kicking against the air like those of one hanging from a tree.

  Homer was at his side—he was the boy she’d seen in the pews, winking at her. He wore suspenders and a white blouse, looking like the innocent child he would have been in a different world. At the sight of him, Cora added her voice to the chorus of lamentation that echoed across the farm.

  “There’s a tunnel, sir,” Homer said. “I heard him say it.”

  Mabel

  THE first and last things she gave to her daughter were apologies. Cora slept in her stomach, the size of a fist, when Mabel apologized for what she was bringing her into. Cora slept next to her in the loft, ten years later, when Mabel apologized for making her a stray. Cora didn’t hear either one.

  At the first clearing Mabel found the north star and reoriented. She gathered herself and resumed her escape through the black water. Kept her eyes forward because when she looked back she saw the faces of those she left behind.

  She saw Moses’s face. She remembered Moses when he was little. A twitching bundle so frail no one expected him to survive until he was old enough for pickaninny work, the trash gang, or offering a ladle of water in the cotton. Not when most children on Randall died before their first steps. His mother used the witch-woman cures, the poultices and root potions, and sang to him every night, crooning in their cabin. Lullabies and work tunes and her own maternal wishes in singsong: Keep the food in your stomach, break the fever, breathe until morning. He outlived most of the boys born that year. Everybody knew it was his mother, Kate, who saved him from affliction and the early winnowing that is every plantation slave’s first trial.

  Mabel remembered when Old Randall sold off Kate once her arm went numb and wasn’t fit for labor. Moses’s first whipping for stealing a potato, and his second whipping for idleness, when Connelly had the boy’s wounds washed out with hot pepper until he howled. None of that made Moses mean. It made him silent and strong and fast, faster than any other picker in his gang. He wasn’t mean until Connelly made him a boss, the master’s eyes and ears over his own kind. That’s when he became Moses the monster, Moses who made the other slaves quake, black terror of the rows.

  When he told her to come to the schoolhouse she scratched his face and spat at him and he just smiled and said if you’re not game I’ll find someone else—how old is your Cora now? Cora was eight. Mabel didn’t fight him after that. He was quick and he wasn’t rough after that first time. Women and animals, you only have to break them in once, he said. They stay broke.

  All those faces, living and dead. Ajarry twitching in the cotton, bloody foam on her lips. She saw Polly swinging on a rope, sweet Polly, who she’d come up with in the quarter, born the same month. Connelly transferred them from the yard to the cotton fields the same day. Always in tandem until Cora lived but Polly’s baby didn’t—the young women delivered within two weeks of each other, with one baby girl crying when the midwife pulled her out and the other making no sound at all. Stillborn and stone. When Polly hung herself in the barn with a loop of hemp, Old Jockey said, You did everything together. Like Mabel was supposed to hang herself now, too.

  She started to see Cora’s face and she looked away. She ran.

  Men start off good and then the world makes them mean. The world is mean from the start and gets meaner every day. It uses you up until you only dream of death. Mabel wasn’t going to die on Randall, even if she’d never been a mile away from the grounds in her life. One midnight she decided, up in the sweltering loft, I am going to survive—and the next midnight she was in the swamp, tracking after the moon in stolen shoes. She turned her escape over in her head all day, let no other thought intrude or dissuade. There were islands in the swamp—follow them to the continent of freedom. She took the vegetables she raised, flint and tinder, a machete. Everything else she left behind, including her girl.

  Cora, sleeping back in the cabin she was born in, that Mabel was born in. Still a girl, before the worst of it, before she learns the size and heft of a woman’s burdens. If Cora’s father had lived, would Mabel be here now, tramping through the marsh? Mabel was fourteen when Grayson arrived on the southern half, sold down south by a drunken indigo farmer in North Carolina. Tall and black, sweet-tempered with a laughing eye. Swaggering even after the hardest toil. They couldn’t touch him.

  She picked him out that first day and decided: him. When he grinned it was the moon shining down on her, a presence in the sky blessing her. He scooped her up and twirled her when they danced. I’m going to buy our freedom, he said, hay in his hair from where they lay down. Old Randall didn’t go in for that, but he’d convince him. Work hard, be the best hand on the plantation—he’d earn his way out of bondage and take her, too. She said, You promise? Half believing he could do it. Grayson the Sweet, dead of fever before she knew she carried their child. His name never again crossed her lips.

  Mabel tripped over a cypress root and went sprawling into the water. She staggered through the reeds to the island ahead and flattened on the ground. Didn’t know how long she had been running. Panting and tuckered out.

  She took a turnip from her sack. It was young and tender-soft, and she took a bite. The sweetest crop she’d ever raised in Ajarry’s plot, even with the taste of marsh water. Her mother had left that in her inheritance, at least, a tidy plot to watch over. You’re supposed to pass on something useful to your children. The better parts of Ajarry never took root in Mabel. Her indomitability, her perseverance. But there was a plot three yards square and the hearty stuff that sprouted from it. Her mother had protected it with all her heart. The most valuable land in all of Georgia.

  She lay on her back and ate another turnip. Without the sound of her splashing and huffing, the noises of the swamp resumed. The spadefoot toads and turtles and slithering creatures, the chattering of black insects. Above—through the leaves and branches of the black-water trees—the sky scrolled before her, new constellations wheeling in the darkness as she relaxed. No patrollers, no bosses, no cries of anguish to induct her into another’s despair. No cabin walls shuttling her through the night seas like the hold of a slave ship. Sandhill cranes and warblers, otters splashing. On the bed of damp earth, her breathing slowed and that which separated herself from the swamp disappeared. She was free.

  This moment.

  She had to go back. The girl was waiting on her. This would have to do for now. Her hopelessness had gotten the best of her, speaking under her thoughts like a demon. She would keep this moment close, her own treasure. When she found the words to share it with Cora, the girl would understand there was something beyond the plantation, past all that she knew. That one day if she stayed strong, the girl could have it for herself.

  The world may be mean, but people don’t have to be, not if they refuse.

  Mabel picked up her sack and got her bearings. If she kept a good pace, she’d be back well before first light and the earliest risers on the plantation. Her escape had been a preposterous idea, but even a sliver of it amounted to the best adventure of her life.

  Mabel pulled out another turnip and took a bite. It really was sweet.

  The snake found her not long into her return. She was wending through a cluster of stiff reeds when she disturbed its rest. The cottonmouth bit her twice, in the calf and deep in the meat of her thigh. No sound but pain. Mabel refused to believe it. It was a water snake, it had to be. Ornery but harmless. When her mouth went minty and her leg tingled, she knew. She made it another mile. She had dropped her sack along the way, lost her course in the black water. She could have made it farther—work
ing Randall land had made her strong, strong in body if nothing else—but she stumbled onto a bed of soft moss and it felt right. She said, Here, and the swamp swallowed her up.

  The North

  RAN AWAY

  from her legal but not rightful master fifteen months past, a slave girl called CORA; of ordinary height and dark brown complexion; has a star-shape mark on her temple from an injury; possessed of a spirited nature and devious method. Possibly answering to the name BESSIE.

  Last seen in Indiana among the outlaws of John Valentine Farm.

  She has stopped running.

  Reward remains unclaimed.

  SHE WAS NEVER PROPERTY.

  DECEMBER 23

  HER point of departure that final voyage on the underground railroad was a tiny station beneath an abandoned house. The ghost station.

  Cora led them there after her capture. The posse of bloodthirsty whites still rampaged across the Valentine farm when they left. The gunfire and screams came from farther away, deeper in the property. The newer cabins, the mill. Perhaps as far as the Livingston spread, the mayhem encompassing the neighboring farms. The whites meant to rout the entirety of colored settlers.

  Cora fought and kicked as Ridgeway carried her to the wagon. The burning library and farmhouse illuminated the grounds. After a barrage to his face, Homer finally gathered her feet together and they got her inside, chaining her wrists to her old ring in the wagon floor. One of the young white men watching the horses cheered and asked for a turn when they were done. Ridgeway clopped him in the face.

  She relinquished the location to the house in the woods when the slave catcher put his pistol to her eye. Cora lay down on the bench, seized by one of her headaches. How to snuff her thoughts like a candle? Royal and Lander dead. The others who were cut down.

  “One of the deputies said it reminded him of the old days of proper Indian raids,” Ridgeway said. “Bitter Creek and Blue Falls. I think he was too young to remember that. Maybe his daddy.” He sat in the back with her on the bench opposite, his outfit reduced to the wagon and the two skinny horses that pulled it. The fire danced outside, showing the holes and long tears in the canvas.

  Ridgeway coughed. He had been diminished since Tennessee. The slave catcher was completely gray, unkempt, skin gone sallow. His speech was different, less commanding. Dentures replaced the teeth Cora ruined in their last encounter. “They buried Boseman in one of the plague cemeteries,” he said. “He would have been appalled, but he didn’t have much of a say. The one bleeding on the floor—that was the uppity bastard who ambushed us, yes? I recognized his spectacles.”

  Why had she put Royal off for so long? She thought they had time enough. Another thing that might have been, snipped at the roots as if by one of Dr. Stevens’s surgical blades. She let the farm convince her the world is other than what it will always be. He must have known she loved him even if she hadn’t told him. He had to.

  Night birds screeched. After a time Ridgeway told her to keep a lookout for the path. Homer slowed the horses. She missed it twice, the fork in the road signaling they’d gone too far. Ridgeway slapped her across the face and told her to mind him. “It took me awhile to find my footing after Tennessee,” he said. “You and your friends did me a bad turn. But that’s done. You’re going home, Cora. At last. Once I get a look-see at the famous underground railroad.” He slapped her again. On the next circuit she found the cottonwoods that marked the turn.

  Homer lit a lantern and they entered the mournful old house. He had changed out of his costume and back into his black suit and stovepipe hat. “Below the cellar,” Cora said. Ridgeway was wary. He pulled up the door and jumped back, as if a host of black outlaws waited in a trap. The slave catcher handed her a candle and told her to go down first.

  “Most people think it’s a figure of speech,” he said. “The underground. I always knew better. The secret beneath us, the entire time. We’ll uncover them all after tonight. Every line, every one.”

  Whatever animals lived in the cellar were quiet this night. Homer checked the corners of the cellar. The boy came up with the spade and gave it to Cora.

  She held out her chains. Ridgeway nodded. “Otherwise we’ll be here all night.” Homer undid the shackles. The white man was giddy, his former authority easing into his voice. In North Carolina, Martin had thought he was onto his father’s buried treasure in the mine and discovered a tunnel instead. For the slave catcher the tunnel was all the gold in the world.

  “Your master is dead,” Ridgeway said as Cora dug. “I wasn’t surprised to hear the news—he had a degenerate nature. I don’t know if the current master of Randall will pay your reward. I don’t rightly care.” He was surprised at his words. “It wasn’t going to be easy, I should have seen that. You’re your mother’s daughter through and through.”

  The spade struck the trapdoor. She cleared out a square. Cora had stopped listening to him, to Homer’s unwholesome snickering. She and Royal and Red may have diminished the slave catcher when they last met, but it was Mabel who first laid him low. It flowed from her mother, his mania over their family. If not for her, the slave catcher wouldn’t have obsessed so over Cora’s capture. The one who escaped. After all it cost her, Cora didn’t know if it made her proud or more spiteful toward the woman.

  This time Homer lifted the trapdoor. The moldy smell gusted up.

  “This is it?” Ridgeway asked.

  “Yes, sir,” Homer said.

  Ridgeway waved Cora on with his pistol.

  He would not be the first white man to see the underground railroad, but the first enemy. After all that had befallen her, the shame of betraying those who made possible her escape. She hesitated on the top step. On Randall, on Valentine, Cora never joined the dancing circles. She shrank from the spinning bodies, afraid of another person so close, so uncontrolled. Men had put a fear in her, those years ago. Tonight, she told herself. Tonight I will hold him close, as if in a slow dance. As if it were just the two of them in the lonesome world, bound to each other until the end of the song. She waited until the slave catcher was on the third step. She spun and locked her arms around him like a chain of iron. The candle dropped. He attempted to keep his footing with her weight on him, reaching out for leverage against the wall, but she held him close like a lover and the pair tumbled down the stone steps into the darkness.

  They fought and grappled in the violence of their fall. In the jumble of collisions, Cora’s head knocked across the stone. Her leg was ripped one way, and her arm twisted under her at the bottom of the steps. Ridgeway took the brunt. Homer yelped at the sounds his employer made as he fell. The boy descended slowly, the lantern light shakily drawing the station from shadow. Cora untwined herself from Ridgeway and crawled toward the handcar, left leg in agony. The slave catcher didn’t make a sound. She looked for a weapon and came up empty.

  Homer crouched next to his boss. His hand covered in blood from the back of Ridgeway’s head. The big bone in the man’s thigh stuck out of his trousers and his other leg bent in a gruesome arrangement. Homer leaned his face in and Ridgeway groaned.

  “Are you there, my boy?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “That’s good.” Ridgeway sat up and howled in anguish. He looked over the station’s gloom, recognizing nothing. His gaze passed over Cora without interest. “Where are we?”

  “On the hunt,” Homer said.

  “Always more niggers to hunt. Do you have your journal?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “I have a thought.”

  Homer removed his notes from the satchel and opened to a fresh page.

  “The imperative is…no, no. That’s not it. The American imperative is a splendid thing…a beacon…a shining beacon.” He coughed and a spasm overtook his body. “Born of necessity and virtue, between the hammer…and the anvil…Are you there, Homer?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Let me start again…”

  Cora leaned into the pump of the handcar. It didn
’t move, no matter how much weight she heaved on it. At her feet on the wooden platform was a small metal buckle. She snapped it and the pump squeaked. She tried the lever again and the handcar crawled forward. Cora looked back at Ridgeway and Homer. The slave catcher whispered his address and the black boy recorded his words. She pumped and pumped and rolled out of the light. Into the tunnel that no one had made, that led nowhere.

  She discovered a rhythm, pumping her arms, throwing all of herself into movement. Into northness. Was she traveling through the tunnel or digging it? Each time she brought her arms down on the lever, she drove a pickax into the rock, swung a sledge onto a railroad spike. She never got Royal to tell her about the men and women who made the underground railroad. The ones who excavated a million tons of rock and dirt, toiled in the belly of the earth for the deliverance of slaves like her. Who stood with all those other souls who took runaways into their homes, fed them, carried them north on their backs, died for them. The station masters and conductors and sympathizers. Who are you after you finish something this magnificent—in constructing it you have also journeyed through it, to the other side. On one end there was who you were before you went underground, and on the other end a new person steps out into the light. The up-top world must be so ordinary compared to the miracle beneath, the miracle you made with your sweat and blood. The secret triumph you keep in your heart.