The Underground Railroad

They got to it. Cora hadn’t picked up a needle apart from simple mending since Mabel left. Some of the Hob women tried to teach her to no avail. As she did in the classroom, Cora kept looking over at her companions for guidance. She cut out a bird, a cardinal; it came out looking like something dogs had fought over. Sybil and Molly encouraged her-they had badgered her into their pastime-but the quilt was botched. Fleas had found the batting, she insisted. The seams puckered, her corners unjoined. The quilt betrayed a crookedness in her thinking: run it up a pole as the flag of her wild country. She wanted to set it aside but Sybil forbid her. “You start something else when this one finished,” Sybil said. “But this ain’t finished yet.”

Cora needed no advice on the virtues of perseverance. But she picked up the creature in her lap and picked at where she’d left off.

Sybil was twelve years her senior. Her dresses made her look slightly built, but Cora knew that it was merely her time away from the plantation working on the woman in the best way: Her new life required a different sort of strength. She was meticulous in her posture, a walking spear, in the manner of those who’d been made to bend and will bend no more. Her master had been a terror, Sybil told Cora, a tobacco man who competed with the neighboring planters every year over the biggest crop. His poor showing stirred him to malice. “He work us hard,” she’d say, her thoughts lighting out to old miseries. Molly would come over from wherever she was and sit on her lap, nuzzling.

The three of them worked wordlessly for a while. A cheer went up over by the barbecue pit, as it did each time they turned the hogs. Cora was too distracted to reverse her mistakes in the quilt. The silent theater of Sybil and Molly’s love moved her always. The way the child asked for assistance without speaking and the mother pointed, nodded, and pantomimed her child out of a fix. Cora wasn’t accustomed to a quiet cabin-on Randall there was always a shriek or cry or sigh to break a moment-and certainly not accustomed to this type of maternal performance.

Sybil had absconded with Molly when her daughter was only two, toting her child all the way. Rumors from the big house held that their master meant to dispose of some property to cover debts from the disappointing crop. Sybil faced a public sale. She left that night-the full moon gave its blessing and guidance through the forest. “Molly didn’t make no sound,” Sybil said. “She knew what we were up to.” Three miles over the Pennsylvania border they risked a visit to the cottage of a colored farmer. The man fed them, whittled toys for the little girl, and, through a line of intermediaries, contacted the railroad. After a spell in Worcester working for a milliner, Sybil and Molly made their way to Indiana. Word had spread of the farm.

So many fugitives had passed through Valentine-there was no telling who might have spent time there. Did Sybil happen to make the acquaintance of a woman from Georgia? Cora asked her one evening. Cora had been with them for a few weeks. Slept the night through once or twice, put back some of the weight she’d lost in the attic. The dry flies cut out their noise, leaving an opening in the night for a question. A woman from Georgia, maybe went by the name of Mabel, maybe not?

Sybil shook her head.

Of course she hadn’t. A woman who leaves her daughter behind becomes someone else to hide the shame of it. But Cora asked everyone on the farm sooner or later, the farm being its own kind of depot, attracting people who were between places. She asked those who’d been on Valentine for years, she asked all the new people, pestered the visitors who came to the farm to see if what they’d heard was true. The free men and women of color, the fugitives who stayed and the ones who moved on. She asked them in the cornfield between a work song, rumbling in the back of a buggy on the way to town: gray eyes, scar across the back of her right hand from a burn, maybe went by the name of Mabel, maybe not?

“Maybe she in Canada,” Lindsey answered when Cora decided it was her turn. Lindsey being a slim, hummingbird woman fresh out of Tennessee, who maintained a demented cheer that Cora couldn’t understand. From what she saw, Tennessee was fire, disease, and violence. Even if it was there that Royal and them had rescued her. “Lot of folks, they fond of Canada now,” Megan said. “Though it’s awful cold.”

Cold nights for the coldhearted.

Cora folded her quilt and retired to her room. She curled up, too distracted thinking on mothers and daughters. Fretting over Royal, three days overdue. Her headache approached like a thunderhead. She turned her face to the wall and did not move.

–