The Underground Railroad

“The trick of it is, they’re not going to the same place,” Lumbly said. “One’s going one way and the other…”

“To where?” Cora asked.

“Away from here, that’s all I can tell you. You understand the difficulties in communicating all the changes in the routes. Locals, expresses, what station’s closed down, where they’re extending the heading. The problem is that one destination may be more to your liking than another. Stations are discovered, lines discontinued. You won’t know what waits above until you pull in.”

The runaways didn’t understand. From the station agent’s words, one route might be more direct but more dangerous. Was he saying one route was longer? Lumbly would not elaborate. He had told them all he knew, he maintained. In the end, the slave’s choice lay before them, as ever: anyplace but where they had escaped. After consulting with his partner Caesar said, “We’ll take the next one.”

“It’s up to you,” Lumbly said. He motioned toward the bench.

They waited. At Caesar’s request the station agent told of how he came to work for the underground railroad. Cora couldn’t pay attention. The tunnel pulled at her. How many hands had it required to make this place? And the tunnels beyond, wherever and how far they led? She thought of the picking, how it raced down the furrows at harvest, the African bodies working as one, as fast as their strength permitted. The vast fields burst with hundreds of thousands of white bolls, strung like stars in the sky on the clearest of clear nights. When the slaves finished, they had stripped the fields of their color. It was a magnificent operation, from seed to bale, but not one of them could be prideful of their labor. It had been stolen from them. Bled from them. The tunnel, the tracks, the desperate souls who found salvation in the coordination of its stations and timetables-this was a marvel to be proud of. She wondered if those who had built this thing had received their proper reward.

“Every state is different,” Lumbly was saying. “Each one a state of possibility, with its own customs and way of doing things. Moving through them, you’ll see the breadth of the country before you reach your final stop.”

At that, the bench rumbled. They hushed, and the rumbling became a sound. Lumbly led them to the edge of the platform. The thing arrived in its hulking strangeness. Caesar had seen trains in Virginia; Cora had only heard tell of the machines. It wasn’t what she envisioned. The locomotive was black, an ungainly contraption led by the triangular snout of the cowcatcher, though there would be few animals where this engine was headed. The bulb of the smokestack was next, a soot-covered stalk. The main body consisted of a large black box topped by the engineer’s cabin. Below that, pistons and large cylinders engaged in a relentless dance with the ten wheels, two sets of small ones in front and three behind. The locomotive pulled one single car, a dilapidated boxcar missing numerous planks in its walls.

The colored engineer waved back at them from his cabin, grinning toothlessly. “All aboard,” he said.

To curtail Caesar’s annoying interrogations, Lumbly quickly unhooked the boxcar door and slid it wide. “Shall we proceed?”

Cora and Caesar climbed into the car and Lumbly abruptly shut them in. He peered between the gaps in the wood. “If you want to see what this nation is all about, I always say, you have to ride the rails. Look outside as you speed through, and you’ll find the true face of America.” He slapped the wall of the boxcar as a signal. The train lurched forward.

The runaways lost their balance and stumbled to the nest of hay bales that was to serve as seating. The boxcar creaked and shuddered. It was no new model, and on numerous occasions during their trip Cora feared it was on the verge of collapse. The car was empty apart from hay bales, dead mice, and bent nails. She later discovered a charred patch where someone had started a fire. Caesar was numb from the series of curious events and he curled up on the floor. Following Lumbly’s final instructions, Cora looked through the slats. There was only darkness, mile after mile.

When they next stepped into the sunlight, they were in South Carolina. She looked up at the skyscraper and reeled, wondering how far she had traveled.

Ridgeway

ARNOLD Ridgeway’s father was a blacksmith. The sunset glow of molten iron bewitched him, the way the color emerged in the stock slow and then fast, overtaking it like an emotion, the sudden pliability and restless writhing of the thing as it waited for purpose. His forge was a window into the primitive energies of the world.