The Underground Railroad

THE excitement over Jockey’s birthday allowed Caesar to visit his only refuge on Randall. The dilapidated schoolhouse by the stables was generally empty. At night lovers sneaked in, but he never went there at night-he required light, and he was not going to risk lighting a candle. He went to the schoolhouse to read the book Fletcher gave him after much protest; he went when feeling low, to weep over his burdens; he went to watch the other slaves move about the plantation. From the window it was as if he were not one of their unlucky tribe but only observing their commerce, as one might watch strangers stroll past one’s front door. In the schoolhouse it was as if he were not there at all.

Enslaved. In fear. Sentenced to death.

If his scheme came to fruition, this would be the last time he celebrated Jockey’s birthday. God willing. Knowing him, the old man was apt to announce another one next month. The quarter was so jubilant over the tiny pleasures they scavenged together on Randall. A made-up birthday, a dance after toiling under the harvest moon. In Virginia the celebrations were spectacular. Caesar and his family rode in the widow’s buggy to the farms of freemen, they visited relatives on estates for the Lord’s holidays and New Year’s Day. The pigs and venison steaks, ginger pies and corn-bread cakes. The games went all day long, until Caesar and his companions fell in panting collapse. The masters in Virginia kept their distance those festival days. How could these Randall slaves truly enjoy themselves with that dumb menace waiting at the sidelines, poised to swoop? They didn’t know their birthdays so had to invent them. Half these folks didn’t know their mothers and fathers.

I was born on August 14th. My mother’s name is Lily Jane. My father is Jerome. I don’t know where they are.

Through the schoolhouse window, framed by two of the older cabins-their whitewash smeared to gray, worn down like those who slept inside them-Cora huddled with her favorite at the starting line. Chester, the boy who prowled the quarter with such enviable cheer. Obviously he’d never been beaten.

The boy turned his head shyly from something Cora said. She smiled-quickly. She smiled at Chester, and Lovey and the women from her cabin, with brevity and efficiency. Like when you see the shadow of a bird on the ground but look up and nothing’s there. She subsisted on rations, in everything. Caesar had never spoken to her but had this figured out about her. It was sensible: She knew the preciousness of what little she called her own. Her joys, her plot, that block of sugar maple she perched on like a vulture.

He was drinking corn whiskey with Martin in the barn loft one night-the boy wouldn’t say where he got the jug-when they started talking about the women of Randall. Who was most likely to mush your face into their titties, who’d scream so loud the whole quarter would know, and who would never tell. Caesar asked about Cora.

“Nigger don’t fool with no Hob woman,” Martin said. “They cut your thing off and make soup with it.” He told him the old story of Cora and her garden and Blake’s doghouse, and Caesar thought, That sounds about right. Then Martin said she liked to sneak out to fornicate with swamp animals, and Caesar realized the cotton picker was dumber than he thought.

None of the Randall men was that bright. The place had undone them. They joked and they picked fast when the bosses’ eyes were on them and they acted big, but at night in the cabin after midnight they wept, they screamed from nightmares and wretched memories. In Caesar’s cabin, in the next cabins over, and in every slave village near and far. When the work was done, and the day’s punishments, the night waited as an arena for their true loneliness and despair.

Cheers and shouts-another race done. Cora set her hands on her hips, head tilted as if hunting after a tune hidden in the noise. How to capture that profile in wood, preserve her grace and strength-he didn’t trust himself not to botch it. Picking had ruined his hands for delicate woodwork. The slope of a woman’s cheek, lips in the midst of a whisper. His arms trembled at the end of the day, muscles throbbing.

How the old white bitch had lied! He should have been living with his mother and father in their cottage, rounding off barrels for the cooper or apprenticed to another of the town’s craftsmen. His prospects were limited by his race, to be sure, but Caesar had grown up believing he was free to choose his own fate. “You can be whatever you want to be,” his father said.

“Even go to Richmond?” From all reports, Richmond sounded far away and splendid.

“Even Richmond, if you like.”