The Underground Railroad

Sam huffed and leaned back in the creaky chair. “It made me happy to see you skipping the trains and making a go of things here,” the station agent said. “But you may reconsider after my story.”

Sam offered them some sweetmeats-he was a faithful customer of Ideal Bakery off Main Street-and revealed his purpose. “I want to warn you away from Red’s,” Sam said.

“You scared of the competition?” Caesar joked. There was no question on that front. Sam’s saloon did not serve colored patrons. No, Red’s had exclusive claim to the residents of the dormitories with a hankering for drink and dance. It didn’t hurt that they took scrip.

“More sinister,” Sam said. “I’m not sure what to make of it, to be honest.” It was a strange story. Caleb, the owner of the Drift, possessed a notoriously sour disposition; Sam had a reputation as the barkeep who enjoyed conversation. “You get to know the real life of a place, working there,” Sam liked to say. One of Sam’s regulars was a doctor by the name of Bertram, a recent hospital hire. He didn’t mix socially with the other northerners, preferring the atmosphere and salty company at the Drift. He had a thirst for whiskey. “To drown out his sins,” Sam said.

On a typical night, Bertram kept his thoughts close until his third drink, when the whiskey unstoppered him and he rambled animatedly about Massachusetts blizzards, medical-school hazing rituals, or the relative intelligence of Virginia opossum. His discourse the previous evening had turned to female companionship, Sam said. The doctor was a frequent visitor at Miss Trumball’s establishment, preferring it to the Lanchester House, whose girls had a saturnine disposition in his opinion, as if imported from Maine or other gloom-loving provinces.

“Sam?” Cora said.

“I’m sorry, Cora.” He abridged. Dr. Bertram enumerated some of the virtues of Miss Trumball’s, and then added, “Whatever you do, man, keep out of Red’s Café, if you have a taste for nigger gals.” Several of his male patients frequented the saloon, carrying on with the female patrons. His patients believed they were being treated for blood ailments. The tonics the hospital administered, however, were merely sugar water. In fact, the niggers were participants in a study of the latent and tertiary stages of syphilis.

“They think you’re helping them?” Sam asked the doctor. He kept his voice neutral, even as his face got hot.

“It’s important research,” Bertram informed him. “Discover how a disease spreads, the trajectory of infection, and we approach a cure.” Red’s was the only colored saloon in the town proper; the proprietor got a break on the rent for a watchful eye. The syphilis program was one of many studies and experiments under way at the colored wing of the hospital. Did Sam know that the Igbo tribe of the African continent is predisposed to nervous disorders? Suicide and black moods? The doctor recounted the story of forty slaves, shackled together on a ship, who jumped overboard en masse rather than live in bondage. The kind of mind that could conceive of and execute such a fantastic course! What if we performed adjustments to the niggers’ breeding patterns and removed those of melancholic tendency? Managed other attitudes, such as sexual aggression and violent natures? We could protect our women and daughters from their jungle urges, which Dr. Bertram understood to be a particular fear of southern white men.

The doctor leaned in. Had Sam read the newspaper today?

Sam shook his head and topped off the man’s drink.

Still, the barkeep must have seen the editorials over the years, the doctor insisted, expressing anxiety over this very topic. America has imported and bred so many Africans that in many states the whites are outnumbered. For that reason alone, emancipation is impossible. With strategic sterilization-first the women but both sexes in time-we could free them from bondage without fear that they’d butcher us in our sleep. The architects of the Jamaica uprisings had been of Beninese and Congolese extraction, willful and cunning. What if we tempered those bloodlines carefully over time? The data collected on the colored pilgrims and their descendants over years and decades, the doctor said, will prove one of the boldest scientific enterprises in history. Controlled sterilization, research into communicable diseases, the perfection of new surgical techniques on the socially unfit-was it any wonder the best medical talents in the country were flocking to South Carolina?

A group of rowdies stumbled in and crowded Bertram to the end of the bar. Sam was occupied. The doctor drank quietly for a time and then slipped out. “You two are not the sort that goes to Red’s,” Sam said, “but I wanted you to know.”

“Red’s,” Cora said. “This is more than the saloon, Sam. We have to tell them they’re being lied to. They’re sick.”

Caesar was in agreement.