The Underground Railroad

Ridgeway laid his big hands on the uneven table, tilting it to his side. Stew ran over the rim of the bowls. “They should fix this,” he said.

The stew was lumpy with the thickening flour. Cora mashed the lumps with her tongue the way she did when one of Alice’s helpers had prepared the meal and not the old cook herself. Through the wall the piano player bit into an upbeat ditty. A drunken couple dashed next door to dance.

“Jasper wasn’t killed by no mob,” Cora said.

“There are always unexpected expenses,” Ridgeway said. “I’m not going to get reimbursed for all the food I fed it.”

“You go on about reasons,” Cora said. “Call things by other names as if it changes what they are. But that don’t make them true. You killed Jasper in cold blood.”

“That was more of a personal matter,” Ridgeway conceded, “and not what I’m talking about here. You and your friend killed a boy. You have your justifications.”

“I was going to escape.”

“That’s all I’m talking about, survival. Do you feel awful about it?”

The boy’s death was a complication of her escape, like the absence of a full moon or losing the head start because Lovey had been discovered out of her cabin. But shutters swung out inside her and she saw the boy trembling on his sickbed, his mother weeping over his grave. Cora had been grieving for him, too, without knowing it. Another person caught in this enterprise that bound slave and master alike. She moved the boy from the lonely list in her head and logged him below Martin and Ethel, even though she did not know his name. X, as she signed herself before she learned her letters.

Nonetheless. She told Ridgeway, “No.”

“Of course not-it’s nothing. Better weep for one of those burned cornfields, or this steer swimming in our soup. You do what’s required to survive.” He wiped his lips. “It’s true, though, your complaint. We come up with all sorts of fancy talk to hide things. Like in the newspapers nowadays, all the smart men talking about Manifest Destiny. Like it’s a new idea. You don’t know what I’m talking about, do you?” Ridgeway asked.

Cora sat back. “More words to pretty things up.”

“It means taking what is yours, your property, whatever you deem it to be. And everyone else taking their assigned places to allow you to take it. Whether it’s red men or Africans, giving up themselves, giving of themselves, so that we can have what’s rightfully ours. The French setting aside their territorial claims. The British and the Spanish slinking away.

“My father liked his Indian talk about the Great Spirit,” Ridgeway said. “All these years later, I prefer the American spirit, the one that called us from the Old World to the New, to conquer and build and civilize. And destroy that what needs to be destroyed. To lift up the lesser races. If not lift up, subjugate. And if not subjugate, exterminate. Our destiny by divine prescription-the American imperative.”

“I need to visit the outhouse,” Cora said.

The corners of his mouth sank. He gestured for her to walk in front. The steps to the back alley were slippery with vomit and he grabbed her elbow to steady her. Closing the outhouse door, shutting him out, was the purest pleasure she’d had in a long while.

Ridgeway continued his address undeterred. “Take your mother,” the slave catcher said. “Mabel. Stolen from her master by misguided whites and colored individuals in a criminal conspiracy. I kept an eye out all this time, turned Boston and New York upside down, all the colored settlements. Syracuse. Northampton. She’s up in Canada, laughing at the Randalls and me. I take it as a personal injury. That’s why I bought you that dress. To help me picture her wrapped like a present for her master.”

He hated her mother as much as she did. That, and the fact they both had eyes in their head, meant they had two things in common.

Ridgeway paused-a drunk wanted to use the privy. He shooed him away. “You absconded for ten months,” he said. “Insult enough. You and your mother are a line that needs to be extinguished. A week together, chained up, and you sass me without end, on your way to a bloody homecoming. The abolitionist lobby loves to trot out your kind, to give speeches to white people who have no idea how the world works.”

The slave catcher was wrong. If she’d made it north she would have disappeared into a life outside their terms. Like her mother. One thing the woman had passed on to her.