The Underground Railroad

The niggers did not post sentries over their dead. Niggers did not pound on the door of the sheriff, they did not haunt the offices of the newspapermen. No sheriff paid them any mind, no journalist listened to their stories. The bodies of their loved ones disappeared into sacks and reappeared in the cool cellars of medical schools to relinquish their secrets. Every one of them a miracle, in Stevens’s view, providing instruction into the intricacies of God’s design.

Carpenter snarled when he said the word, a mangy dog hoarding his bone: nigger. Stevens never used the word. He disapproved of racial prejudice. Indeed, an uneducated Irishman like Carpenter, steered by society to a life of rummaging graves, had more in common with a negro than a white doctor. If you considered the matter at length. He wouldn’t say that aloud, of course. Sometimes Stevens wondered if his views weren’t quaint, given the temper of the modern world. The other students uttered the most horrible things about the colored population of Boston, about their smell, their intellectual deficiencies, their primitive drives. Yet when his classmates put their blades to a colored cadaver, they did more for the cause of colored advancement than the most high-minded abolitionist. In death the negro became a human being. Only then was he the white man’s equal.

On the outskirts of Concord, they stopped at the small wooden gate and waited for the custodian’s signal. The man waved his lantern back and forth and Carpenter drove the cart inside the cemetery. Cobb paid the man’s fee and he directed them to this night’s bounty: two large, two medium, and three infants. The rain had softened the earth. They’d be done in three hours. After they refilled the graves, it would be as if they were never there.

“Your surgeon’s knife.” Carpenter handed Stevens a spade.

He’d be a medical student again in the morning. Tonight he was a resurrection man. Body snatcher was an accurate name. Resurrection man was a bit florid, but it held a truth. He gave these people a second chance to contribute, one denied them in their previous life.

And if you could make a study of the dead, Stevens thought from time to time, you could make a study of the living, and make them testify as no cadaver could.

He rubbed his hands to stir the blood and started to dig.

North Carolina

Runaway or conveyed off, From the subscriber’s residence, near Henderson, on the 16th inst. a negro girl named MARTHA, belonging to the Subscriber. Said girl is of a dark brown complexion, slightly made, and very free spoken, about 21 years of age; she wore a black silk bonnet with feathers; and had in her possession two calico bed quiltings. I understand she will try to pass as a free girl.

RIGDON BANKS

GRANVILLE COUNTY, AUGUST 28, 1839

SHE lost the candles. One of the rats woke Cora with its teeth and when she settled herself, she crawled across the dirt of the platform in her search. She came up with nothing. It was the day after Sam’s house collapsed, though she couldn’t be sure. Best to measure time now with one of the Randall plantation’s cotton scales, her hunger and fear piling on one side while her hopes were removed from the other in increments. The only way to know how long you are lost in the darkness is to be saved from it.

By then Cora only needed the candlelight for company, having collected the particulars of her prison. The platform was twenty-eight paces long, and five and a half from wall to tracks’ edge. It was twenty-six steps up to the world above. The trapdoor was warm when she placed her palm against it. She knew which step snagged her dress when she crawled up (the eighth) and which liked to scrape her skin if she scrabbled down too fast (the fifteenth). Cora remembered seeing a broom in a corner of the platform. She used it to tap the ground like the blind lady in town, the way Caesar had probed the black water during their flight. Then she got clumsy or cocky and fell onto the tracks, losing both the broom and any desire beyond huddling on the ground.