The Underground Railroad

One day over lunch Ethel announced that when she was old enough, she intended to spread the Christian word to African primitives. Her parents scoffed. It was not something that good young women from Virginia did. If you want to help savages, her father said, teach school. The brain of a five-year-old is more savage and unruly than the oldest jungle darky, he said. Her course was set. Ethel filled in for the regular teacher when she was under the weather. Little white children were primitive in their own way, chirping and undeveloped, but it wasn’t the same. Her thoughts of the jungle and a ring of dark admirers remained in her private preserve.

Resentment was the hinge of her personality. The young women in her circle comported themselves in a foreign ritual, undecipherable. She had little use for boys and, later, men. When Martin appeared, introduced by one of her cousins who worked at the shipping company, she had tired of the gossip and long relinquished an interest in happiness. A panting badger, Martin wore her down. The game of husband and wife was even less fun than she supposed. Jane, at least, turned out to be an unexpected mercy, a tidy bouquet in her arms, even if conception proved yet another humiliation. Over the years life on Orchard Street passed with a tedium that eventually congealed into comfort. She pretended not to see Jasmine when they passed on the street, especially when her former playmate was in the company of her son. His face was a dark mirror.

Then Martin was summoned to North Carolina. He arranged Donald’s funeral on the hottest day of the year; they thought she fainted from sadness when it was just the barbaric humidity. Once they got a taker for the feed shop, they were done, he assured her. The place was backward. If it wasn’t the heat, it was the flies; if not the mice, then the people. At least in Virginia, lynch mobs maintained a pretext of spontaneity. They didn’t string up people practically on your front lawn, the same time every week, like church. North Carolina was to be a brief interlude, or so she thought until she came across the nigger in her kitchen.

George had dropped out of the attic for some food, the lone slave Martin helped before the girl arrived. It was a week before the race laws went into effect and violence against the colored population was on the rise in rehearsal. A note on their doorstep had directed Martin to the mica mine, he told her. George waited for him, hungry and irritated. The tobacco picker thumped around the attic for a week before a railroad agent took him on the next leg, boxing him up in a crate and shoving the thing through the front door. Ethel was livid, then despairing-George acted as Donald’s executor, illuminating Martin’s secret inheritance. He’d lost three fingers on his hand cutting cane.

Slavery as a moral issue never interested Ethel. If God had not meant for Africans to be enslaved, they wouldn’t be in chains. She did, however, have firm ideas about not getting killed for other people’s high-minded ideas. She and Martin argued over the underground railroad as they hadn’t argued in a long time, and that was before the murderous fine print of the race laws manifested itself. Through Cora-that termite in the attic-Donald reached from beyond the grave to punish her for her joke those many years before. When their families met for the first time, Ethel made a remark about Donald’s simple country suit. She was trying to call attention to the two families’ different ideas of proper attire, to get it out of the way so they could all enjoy the meal Ethel had spent so much time planning. But Donald had never forgiven her, she told Martin, she was sure of it, and now they were going to swing from the branches of the tree right outside their front door.

When Martin went upstairs to help the girl it was not in the same way her father had gone upstairs, but both men came down transformed. They reached across the biblical rift for a selfish purpose.

If they could, why not her?

Everything had been denied Ethel her whole life. To mission, to help. To give love in the way she wanted. When the girl got sick, the moment Ethel awaited for so long had finally arrived. In the end she had not gone to Africa, Africa had come to her. Ethel went upstairs, as her father had done, to confront the stranger who lived in her house as family. The girl lay on the sheets, curved like a primeval river. She cleaned the girl, washing her filth from her. She kissed the girl on her forehead and neck in her restless slumber with two kinds of feeling mixed up in those kisses. She gave her the Holy Word.

A savage to call her own, at last.

Tennessee

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