The Underground Railroad

But the old woman had lied and now his crossroad was reduced to one destination, a slow death in Georgia. For him, for his entire family. His mother was slight and delicate and not made for field labor, she was too kind to endure the plantation’s battery of cruelties. His father would hold out longer, donkey that he was, but not much. The old woman had destroyed his family so thoroughly it couldn’t have been accidental. It wasn’t her niece’s greed-the old woman had played a trick on them the whole time. Tightening the knots every time she held Caesar in her lap and taught him a word.

Caesar pictured his father cutting cane in a Florida hell, burning his flesh as he stooped over the big kettles of molten sugar. The cat-o’-nine-tails biting into his mother’s back when she failed to keep the pace with her sack. Stubborn breaks when it don’t bend, and his family had spent too much time with the kindly white folks in the north. Kindly in that they didn’t see fit to kill you fast. One thing about the south, it was not patient when it came to killing negroes.

In the old crippled men and women of the plantation he saw what lay in store for his mother and father. In time, what would become of him. At night, he was certain they were dead; in the daylight, merely maimed and half dead. Either way he was alone in the world.

Caesar approached her after the races. Of course she waved him away. She didn’t know him. It could’ve been a prank, or a trap laid by the Randalls in a fit of boredom. Running was too big an idea-you had to let it set a while, turn it around in your head. It took Caesar months to permit it into his thoughts, and he needed Fletcher’s encouragement to let it truly live. You need someone else to help you along. Even if she didn’t know she’d say yes, he did. He’d told her he wanted her for good luck-her mother was the only one to ever make it out. Probably a mistake, if not an insult, to someone like her. She wasn’t a rabbit’s foot to carry with you on the voyage but the locomotive itself. He couldn’t do it without her.

The terrible incident at the dance proved it. One of the house slaves told him the brothers were drinking at the big house. Caesar took it as a bad omen. When the boy carried the lantern down to the quarter, his masters following, violence was assured. Chester had never been beaten. Now he had been, and tomorrow he’d get his first hiding. No more children’s games for him, races and hide-and-seek, but the grim trials of slave men. No one else in the village made a move to help the boy-how could they? They’d seen it a hundred times before, as victim or witness, and would see it a hundred times more until they died. But Cora did. She shielded the boy with her own body and took his blows for him. She was a stray through and through, so far off the path it was like she’d already run from the place long ago.

After the beating Caesar visited the schoolhouse at night for the first time. Just to hold the book in his hands. To make sure it was still there, a souvenir from a time when he had all the books he wanted, and all the time to read them.

What became of my companions in the boat, as well as those who escaped on the rock, or were left in the vessel, I cannot tell; but conclude they were all lost. The book will get him killed, Fletcher warned. Caesar hid Travels into Several Remote Nations in the dirt under the schoolhouse, wrapped in two swatches of burlap. Wait a little longer until we can make the preparations for your escape, the shopkeeper said. Then you can have any book you want. But if he didn’t read, he was a slave. Before the book the only thing to read was what came written on a bag of rice. The name of the firm that manufactured their chains, imprinted in the metal like a promise of pain.

Now a page here and there, in the golden afternoon light, sustained him. Guile and pluck, guile and pluck. The white man in the book, Gulliver, roved from peril to peril, each new island a new predicament to solve before he could return home. That was the man’s real trouble, not the savage and uncanny civilizations he encountered-he kept forgetting what he had. That was white people all over: Build a schoolhouse and let it rot, make a home then keep straying. If Caesar figured the route home, he’d never travel again. Otherwise he was liable to go from one troublesome island to the next, never recognizing where he was, until the world ran out. Unless she came with him. With Cora, he’d find the way home.

Indiana

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