The Underground Railroad

An insurrection of one. She smiled for a moment, before the facts of her latest cell reasserted themselves. Scrabbling in the walls like a rat. Whether in the fields or underground or in an attic room, America remained her warden.

It was a week before the summer solstice. Martin stuffed one of the old quilts into a chair without a seat and sank into it by degrees over the course of his visit. As was her habit, Cora asked for help with words. This time they came from the Bible, through which she made desultory progress: gainsay, ravening, hoar. Martin admitted he didn’t know the meanings of gainsay and ravening. Then, as if to prepare for the new season, Martin reviewed the series of bad omens.

The first had occurred the previous week, when Cora knocked over the chamber pot. She’d been in the nook for four months and made noise before, knocking her head against the roof or her knee against a rafter. Fiona had never reacted. This time the girl was puttering around in the kitchen when Cora kicked the pot against the wall. Once Fiona came upstairs she wouldn’t be able to overlook the dripping sound of the mess leaking between the boards into the attic, or the smell.

The noon whistle had just sounded. Ethel was out. Fortunately, another girl from Irishtown visited after lunch and the two gossiped in the parlor for so long that afterward Fiona had to speed through her chores. She either didn’t notice the odor or pretended not to, shirking the responsibility for cleaning after whatever rodent’s nest was up there. When Martin came that night and they cleaned, he told Cora it was best if he didn’t mention the close call to Ethel. Her nerves were especially brittle with the rise in the humidity.

Informing Ethel was up to Martin. Cora hadn’t seen the woman since the night of her arrival. As far as she could tell, her host didn’t speak of her-even when Fiona was off the premises-beyond infrequent mentions of that creature. The slam of the bedroom door often preceded Martin’s upstairs visit. The only thing that kept Ethel from turning her in, Cora decided, was complicity.

“Ethel is a simple woman,” Martin said, sinking in the chair. “She couldn’t foresee these troubles when I asked for her hand.”

Cora knew that Martin was about to recount his accidental recruitment, which meant extra time outside the nook. She stretched her arms and encouraged him. “How could you, Martin.”

“Lord, how could I,” Martin said.

He was a most unlikely instrument of abolition. In Martin’s recollection, his father, Donald, had never expressed an opinion about the peculiar institution, although their family was rare in their circle in not owning slaves. When Martin was little, the stock boy at the feed store was a wizened, stooped man named Jericho, freed many years previously. To his mother’s dismay, Jericho came over every Thanksgiving bearing a tin of turnip mash. Donald grunted in disapproval or shook his head at newspaper items about the latest slave incident, but it wasn’t clear if he judged the brutality of the master or the intransigence of the slave.

At eighteen, Martin left North Carolina and after a period of lonesome meandering took a position as a clerk in a Norfolk shipping office. The quiet work and sea air suited him. He developed a fondness for oysters and his constitution improved generally. Ethel’s face appeared one day in a crowd, luminous. The Delanys had old ties to the region, pruning the family tree into a lopsided sight: abundant and many-cousined in the north, sparse and faceless in the south. Martin rarely visited his father. When Donald fell while fixing the roof, Martin hadn’t been home in five years.

The men had never communicated easily. Before Martin’s mother passed, it was her lot to translate the ellipses and muttered asides that constituted conversation between father and son. At Donald’s deathbed, there was no interpreter. He made Martin promise to finish his work, and the son assumed the old man meant him to take over the feed store. That was the first misunderstanding. The second was taking the map he discovered in his father’s papers for directions to a cache of gold. In his life, Donald wrapped himself in a kind of quiet that, depending on the observer, signaled imbecility or a reservoir of mystery. It would be just like his father, Martin thought, to comport himself like a pauper while hiding a fortune.