The Underground Railroad

Any noise from Fiona sent her stock-still. She could only imagine what the Irish girl looked like. Occasionally Fiona dragged junk up to the attic. The stairs complained loudly at the slightest pressure, an efficient alarm. Once the maid moved on, Cora returned to her tiny range of activities. The girl’s vulgarities reminded Cora of the plantation and the stream of oaths delivered by the hands when master’s eye was not on them. The small rebellion of servants everywhere. She assumed Fiona spat in the soup.

The maid’s route home did not include a cut across the park. Cora never saw her face even as she became a student of the girl’s sighs. Cora pictured her, scrappy and determined, a survivor of famine and the hard relocation. Martin told her she’d come to America on a Carolina charter with her mother and brother. The mother got lung sickness and died a day out from land. The boy was too young to work and had a puny constitution overall; older Irish ladies passed him around most days. Was Irishtown similar to the colored streets in South Carolina? Crossing a single street transformed the way people talked, determined the size and condition of the homes, the dimension and character of the dreams.

In a few months it would be the harvest. Outside the town, in the fields, the cotton would pop into bolls and travel into sacks, picked this time by white hands. Did it bother the Irish and Germans to do nigger work, or did the surety of wages erase dishonor? Penniless whites took over the rows from penniless blacks, except at the end of the week the whites were no longer penniless. Unlike their darker brethren, they could pay off their contracts with their salaries and start a new chapter.

Jockey used to talk on Randall about how the slavers needed to roam deeper and deeper into Africa to find the next bunch of slaves, kidnapping tribe after tribe to feed the cotton, making the plantations into a mix of tongues and clans. Cora figured that a new wave of immigrants would replace the Irish, fleeing a different but no less abject country, the process starting anew. The engine huffed and groaned and kept running. They had merely switched the fuel that moved the pistons.

The sloping walls of her prison were a canvas for her morbid inquiries, particularly between sundown and Martin’s late-night visit. When Caesar had approached her, she envisioned two outcomes: a contented, hard-won life in a northern city, or death. Terrance would not be content to merely discipline her for running away; he would make her life an ornate hell until he got bored, then have her dispatched in a gory exhibition.

Her northern fantasy, those first weeks in the attic, was a mere sketch. Glimpses of children in a bright kitchen-always a boy and a girl-and a husband in the next room, unseen but loving. As the days stretched, other rooms sprouted off the kitchen. A parlor with simple but tasteful furniture, things she had seen in the white shops of South Carolina. A bedroom. Then a bed covered in white sheets that shone in the sun, her children rolling on it with her, the husband’s body half visible at the edges. In another scene, years hence, Cora walked down a busy street in her city and came across her mother. Begging in the gutter, a broken old woman bent into the sum of her mistakes. Mabel looked up but did not recognize her daughter. Cora kicked her beggar’s cup, the few coins flew into the hubbub, and she continued on her afternoon errand to fetch flour for her son’s birthday cake.

In this place to come, Caesar occasionally came for supper and they laughed ruefully about Randall and the travails of their escape, their eventual freedom. Caesar told the children how he got the small scar over his eyebrow, dragging a finger across it: He was caught by a slave catcher in North Carolina but got free.

Cora rarely thought of the boy she had killed. She did not need to defend her actions in the woods that night; no one had the right to call her to account. Terrance Randall provided a model for a mind that could conceive of North Carolina’s new system, but the scale of the violence was hard to settle in her head. Fear drove these people, even more than cotton money. The shadow of the black hand that will return what has been given. It occurred to her one night that she was one of the vengeful monsters they were scared of: She had killed a white boy. She might kill one of them next. And because of that fear, they erected a new scaffolding of oppression on the cruel foundation laid hundreds of years before. That was Sea Island cotton the slaver had ordered for his rows, but scattered among the seeds were those of violence and death, and that crop grew fast. The whites were right to be afraid. One day the system would collapse in blood.