The Underground Railroad

Royal joined the singing to change the subject and to remind her that there were things a body could feel good about. A community that had come together, from seeding to harvest to the bee. But the song was a work song Cora knew from the cotton rows, drawing her back to the Randall cruelties and making her heart thud. Connelly used to start the song as a signal to go back to picking after a whipping.

How could such a bitter thing become a means of pleasure? Everything on Valentine was the opposite. Work needn’t be suffering, it could unite folks. A bright child like Chester might thrive and prosper, as Molly and her friends did. A mother raise her daughter with love and kindness. A beautiful soul like Caesar could be anything he wanted here, all of them could be: own a spread, be a schoolteacher, fight for colored rights. Even be a poet. In her Georgia misery she had pictured freedom, and it had not looked like this. Freedom was a community laboring for something lovely and rare.

Mingo won. His men chaired him around the piles of naked cobs, hoarse with cheers. Jimmy said he’d never seen a white man work so hard and Sam beamed with pleasure. Georgina remained unswayed, however.

On the day of Sam’s departure, Cora embraced him and kissed his whiskered cheek. He said he’d send a note when he settled, wherever that was.

They were in the time of short days and long nights. Cora visited the library frequently as the weather turned. She brought Molly when she could coax the girl. They sat next to each other, Cora with a history or a romance, and Molly turning the pages of a fairy tale. A teamster stopped them one day as they were about to enter. “Master said the only thing more dangerous than a nigger with a gun,” he told them, “was a nigger with a book. That must be a big pile of black powder, then!”

When some of the grateful residents proposed building an addition to Valentine’s house for his books, Gloria suggested a separate structure. “That way, anyone with a mind to pick up a book can do so at their leisure.” It also gave the family more privacy. They were generous, but there was a limit.

They put up the library next to the smokehouse. The room smelled pleasantly of smoke when Cora sat down in one of the big chairs with Valentine’s books. Royal said it was the biggest collection of negro literature this side of Chicago. Cora didn’t know if that was true, but she certainly didn’t lack for reading material. Apart from the treatises on farming and the cultivation of various crops, there were rows and rows of histories. The ambitions of the Romans and the victories of the Moors, the royal feuds of Europe. Oversize volumes contained maps of lands Cora had never heard of, the outlines of the unconquered world.

And the disparate literature of the colored tribes. Accounts of African empires and the miracles of the Egyptian slaves who had erected pyramids. The farm’s carpenters were true artisans-they had to be to keep all those books from jumping off the shelves, so many wonders did they contain. Pamphlets of verse by negro poets, autobiographies of colored orators. Phillis Wheatley and Jupiter Hammon. There was a man named Benjamin Banneker who composed almanacs-almanacs! she devoured them all-and served as a confidant to Thomas Jefferson, who composed the Declaration. Cora read the accounts of slaves who had been born in chains and learned their letters. Of Africans who had been stolen, torn from their homes and families, and described the miseries of their bondage and then their hair-raising escapes. She recognized their stories as her own. They were the stories of all the colored people she had ever known, the stories of black people yet to be born, the foundations of their triumphs.

People had put all that down on paper in tiny rooms. Some of them even had dark skin like her. It put her head in a fog each time she opened the door. She’d have to get started if she was going to read them all.

Valentine joined her one afternoon. Cora was friendly with Gloria, who called Cora “the Adventuress,” owing to the many complications of her journey, but she hadn’t spoken to Gloria’s husband beyond greetings. The enormity of her debt was inexpressible, so she avoided him altogether.

He regarded the cover of her book, a romance about a Moorish boy who becomes the scourge of the Seven Seas. The language was simple and she was making quick work of it. “I never did read that,” Valentine said. “I heard you like to spend time here. You’re the one from Georgia?”

She nodded.

“Never been there-the stories are so dismal, I’m liable to lose my temper and make my wife a widow.”