The Underground Railroad

EVER since she saw a woodcut of a missionary surrounded by jungle natives, Ethel thought it would be spiritually fulfilling to serve the Lord in dark Africa, delivering savages to the light. She dreamed of the ship that would take her, a magnificent schooner with sails like angel wings, cutting across the violent sea. The perilous journey into the interior, up rivers, wending mountain passes, and the dangers escaped: lions, serpents, man-killing plants, duplicitous guides. And then the village, where the natives receive her as an emissary of the Lord, an instrument of civilization. In gratitude the niggers lift her to the sky, praising her name: Ethel, Ethel.

She was eight years old. Her father’s newspapers contained tales of explorers, unknown lands, pygmy peoples. The nearest she could get to the image in the newspaper was playing missionary and native with Jasmine. Jasmine was like a sister to her. The game never lasted long before they switched to husband and wife, practicing kisses and arguments in the cellar of Ethel’s house. Given the color of their skins, there was never any doubt over their roles in either game, Ethel’s habit of rubbing soot onto her face notwithstanding. Her face blackened, she practiced expressions of amazement and wonder in front of the mirror so she’d know what to expect when she met her heathens.

Jasmine lived in the upstairs room with her mother, Felice. The Delany family owned Felice’s mother, and when little Edgar Delany turned ten, he received Felice as a present. Now that he was a man, Edgar recognized that Felice was a miracle, tending to the affairs of his house as if she were born to it. He recounted her darky wisdom as a matter of routine, sharing her parables about human nature with guests whenever she disappeared into the kitchen so that when she returned their faces glowed with affection and jealousy. He gave her passes to visit the Parker plantation every New Year’s Day feast; Felice’s sister was a washwoman there. Jasmine was born nine months after one such visit, and now the Delanys owned two slaves.

Ethel thought that a slave was someone who lived in your house like family but was not family. Her father explained the origin of the negro to disabuse her of this colorful idea. Some maintained that the negro was the remnant of a race of giants who had ruled the earth in an ancient time, but Edgar Delany knew they were descendants of cursed, black Ham, who had survived the Flood by clinging to the peaks of a mountain in Africa. Ethel thought that if they were cursed, they required Christian guidance all the more.

On her eighth birthday, Ethel’s father forbid her to play with Jasmine so as not to pervert the natural state of relations between the races. Ethel did not make friends easily, even then. She sobbed and stomped for days; Jasmine was more adaptable. Jasmine assumed simple duties around the household and took over her mother’s position when Felice’s heart seized and she fell mute and paralyzed. Felice lingered for months, her mouth open and pink, eyes foggy, until Ethel’s father had her removed. Ethel observed no disturbance in her old playmate’s face when they loaded her mother into the cart. By then the two did not speak outside of household matters.

The house had been built fifty years before and the stairs creaked. A whisper in one room carried into the next two. Most nights after supper and prayers, Ethel heard her father going up the crooked stairs, guided by the bobbing light of the candle. Sometimes she sneaked to her bedroom door and caught a glimpse of his white bedclothes disappearing around the corner.

“Where are you going, Father?” she asked one night. Felice had been gone two years. Jasmine was fourteen.

“Going upstairs,” he said, and both experienced a strange relief now that they had a term for his nocturnal visits. He was going upstairs-where else did the stairs lead? Her father had given one explanation for the separation of the races in fratricidal punishment. His nighttime trips elaborated on the arrangement. Whites lived downstairs and blacks lived upstairs, and to bridge that separation was to heal a biblical wound.

Her mother held a low opinion about her husband going upstairs but was not without resources. When their family sold Jasmine to the coppersmith on the other side of town, Ethel knew it was her mother’s doing. There was no more going upstairs when the new slave took residence. Nancy was a grandmother, slow in her steps and half blind. Now it was her wheezing that penetrated the walls, not footsteps and squeals. The house had not been so clean and orderly since Felice; Jasmine had been efficient but distracted. Jasmine’s new home was across the way in colored town. Everyone whispered that the child had his father’s eyes.