The Underground Railroad

Ridgeway gathered renown with his facility for ensuring that property remained property. When a runaway took off down an alley, he knew where the man was headed. The direction and aim. His trick: Don’t speculate where the slave is headed next. Concentrate instead on the idea that he is running away from you. Not from a cruel master, or the vast agency of bondage, but you specifically. It worked again and again, his own iron fact, in alleys and pine barrens and swamps. He finally left his father behind, and the burden of that man’s philosophy. Ridgeway was not working the spirit. He was not the smith, rendering order. Not the hammer. Not the anvil. He was the heat.

His father died and the smith down the road assumed his operation. It was time to return south-back home to Virginia and farther, wherever the work led-and he came with a gang. Too many fugitives to handle by himself. Eli Whitney had run his father into the ground, the old man coughing soot on his deathbed, and kept Ridgeway on the hunt. The plantations were twice as big, twice as numerous, the fugitives more plentiful and nimble, the bounties higher. There was less meddling from the lawmakers and abolitionists down south, the planters saw to that. The underground railroad maintained no lines to speak of. The decoys in negro dress, the secret codes in the back pages of newspapers. They openly bragged of their subversion, hustling a slave out the back door as the slave catchers broke down the front. It was a criminal conspiracy devoted to theft of property, and Ridgeway suffered their brazenness as a personal slur.

One Delaware merchant particularly galled him: August Carter. Robust in the Anglo-Saxon tradition, with cool blue eyes that made the lesser sort pay attention to his mealy arguments. That worst sort, an abolitionist with a printing press. “A Mass Meeting of the Friends of Freedom Will Be Held at Miller’s Hall at 2 p.m. to Testify Against the Iniquitous Slave Power That Controls the Nation.” Everyone knew the Carter home was a station-only a hundred yards separated it from the river-even when raids came up empty. Runaways turned activists saluted his generosity in their Boston speeches. The abolitionist wing of the Methodists circulated his pamphlets on Sunday morning and London periodicals published his arguments without rebuttal. A printing press, and friends among the judges, who forced Ridgeway to relinquish his charges on no less than three occasions. Passing Ridgeway outside the jail, he’d tip his hat.

The slave catcher had little choice but to call upon the man after midnight. He daintily sewed their hoods from white sacks of flour but could barely move his fingers after their visit-his fists swelled for two days from beating the man’s face in. He permitted his men to dishonor the man’s wife in ways he never let them use a nigger gal. For years after whenever Ridgeway saw a bonfire, the smell reminded him of the sweet smoke of Carter’s house going up and a figment of a smile settled on his mouth. He later heard the man moved to Worcester and became a cobbler.

The slave mothers said, Mind yourself or Mister Ridgeway will come for you.

The slave masters said, Send for Ridgeway.

When first summoned to the Randall plantation, he was due for a challenge. Slaves eluded him from time to time. He was extraordinary, not supernatural. He failed, and Mabel’s disappearance nagged at him longer than it should have, buzzing in the stronghold of his mind.

On returning, now charged to find that woman’s daughter, he knew why the previous assignment had vexed him so. Impossible as it seemed, the underground railroad had a spur in Georgia. He would find it. He would destroy it.

South Carolina

30 DOLLARS REWARD

will be given to any person who will deliver to me, or confine in any gaol in the state so that I get her again, a likely yellow NEGRO GIRL 18 years of age who ran away nine months past. She is an artfully lively girl, and will, no doubt, attempt to pass as a free person, has a noticeable scar on her elbow, occasioned by a burn. I have been informed she is lurking in and about Edenton.

BENJ. P. WELLS

MURFREESBORO, JAN. 5, 1812