The Underground Railroad

“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.