Underground Airlines

by Ben Winters

  It explained why I’d seen no actual people at work from way up there in the perch, where Newell had taken us so he could crow. The slaves were way out in the far-flung acreage of the cotton fields; the slaves were laboring in the high floors of the stitch houses; the slaves were transported belowground, where they couldn’t be seen. Not past the headquarters buildings full of happy Matty Newells, meeting in conference rooms and making calls, doing no harm to any Negro person.

  You’ll take the service elevator, Newell had said. The door will open directly onto the platform. So down I went. Shirtless and shoeless, disguised in my five feet of bandage and bright green wristband and my own black skin, I rode the service elevator down from Newell’s fourteenth-floor office with my head slightly lowered, my brain on fire.

  As it descended I began to hear music, loud and martial music, and when the elevator door opened I was in a gigantic room full of men singing.

  The men were shirtless and shoeless, as I was, and they were facing away from me, just backs and heads, rows and rows of backs and heads, hundreds of men standing totally still, their voices raised.

  “These strong hands belong to you,” they sang in chorus. “Hands and back and spirit, too.” The melody was simple, a childish four-note singsong. “Every day in all I do”—I shouldered my way forward, finding a spot in the crowd—“GGSI, my heart is true.”

  Now I was in among them, and nobody looked at me, nobody said who the fuck are you: I was one more shirtless man with a wristband and black pants, with mummy strips of bandage covering my neck and shoulder.

  “As Thou hast done in days gone by…” I listened to the lyrics. I got it by heart. “Oh, Lord, protect GGSI.”

  That was it. After that the song just started again, and now I sang it, too. “These strong hands belong to you…”

  I found a place between two men. The first was about my age, maybe a little younger, with high cheekbones and small eyes. The other was middle-aged, with a wide forehead and bulb nose, and beside him was a man with a striking face, a square, dimpled chin and high cheekbones…and then there was another, and another—all the kinds of faces in all the colors the world calls black: brown and tan and yellow and orange, copper and bronze and gold.

  “These strong hands belong to you…”

  They sang—we sang—with no enthusiasm or joy. We used to sing at Bell’s, crossing the yard or working on the pile, just like slaves used to sing in Old Slavery, spirituals and work songs, sly lyrics, silly lyrics, yearning for freedom or roasting Massa in nonsense words he couldn’t understand. This, though—this was a different kind of singing. I looked from man to man, and they were singing mechanically, eyes front, mouths moving like puppets. Singing this dumb refrain about how much they loved their bosses and loved their work.

  Nothing spiritual about this. This was something else altogether.

  There were no women. The women were somewhere else. Where were the women? Things were coming loose in me, being down here with all these men. Things were coming loose. I felt like I might fall down, but I could not do that—none of these men was wavering. They stood completely still, staring straight ahead, only singing.

  What I did was, I focused on the room. Focused on noticing things. I was in a subway station, a platform, a kind of place familiar to me from New York, from Washington, DC, from a hundred different hunts. A cavernous room lit dimly by overhead fixtures hanging from a high domed roof. A concrete floor ending like a cliff edge above the sunken well of the tracks. I focused on the room and the sound of my own voice, singing along. “These strong hands…”

  I kept it in, I kept it all in, I had to keep it in, so I kept it in, made my face like their faces, expressionless, only the mouth moving. But I was too close, too close to their faces. For my whole career under Bridge I had always dreaded the page of the file that showed the photograph, the real human face of the man I was seeking, and now here I was among them—none of this peeb shit, none of this “Persons Bound,” no slaves down here, all that abstraction torn away like skin coming off a body, and these were people—human fucking beings, each with the one life he was given, and this was the life they had.

  The music stopped in the middle of a line—“and back and spir”—and we stopped singing.

  “Arms out.” A voice came through from on high, burred and flattened by the intercom. “Hands up.”

  Everybody did as instructed: extended their arms, raised their hands. I did it, too. This was it. My rushing emotion was subsumed in a sudden heat of panic. Newell had untied himself somehow, stumbled, screaming, into the carpeted hallway. Or it was Martha—they’d stopped her in the lobby. They’d stopped her in the car. She was in no shape…

  “Heads back.”

  We tilted back our heads. Stared at the ceiling. The men around me followed the instructions dully, robotically. This seemed to be an everyday occurrence. This was protocol.

  On my left hand was the green wristband the guard had fitted me for. In my right hand was a piece of paper that Newell had filled out and stamped under my command. Temporary Intracampus Travel Certificate. Permission slip. Travel papers. Some of the men around me, I noticed, carried similar passes; others had none. Some wore, along with the green band, other bands of different colors in various places up and down their arms. A whole world of systems, of rules and regulations.

  The intercom voice again: “Hold pose.” A frozen moment. A room cramped with shirtless men, all of us with heads tilted back, arms up and out. People like trees.

  “Forty-five and under, hands down.”

  Most of the men lowered their arms to their sides. I did, too. The older men kept their arms up.

  There was a man moving through the platform. The slaves parted to let him through. He was black, as we were, but wearing a shirt and boots. He came within a few feet of me but did not look in my direction, did not see me, the infiltrator, where I stood with my eyes lowered like everybody else. The train was coming—I felt the familiar stale breeze being pushed forward along the tunnel—but nobody moved.

  This guard or trusty, whatever he was, moved from man to man, all those with their hands still up, checking for something in their mouths. Push his index finger between their lips, force open their teeth, then worm his finger around, upper palate, lower palate, then out. His face was set; mean; like Harbor, the hard boy who’d haunted my childhood at Bell’s. Thinking of Harbor, I thought of Castle, and I felt a dizzy sense of the world collapsing, of my lifetimes flattening together into one plane—and meanwhile this overseer type appeared to have found who he was looking for among the forty-five-plus men. He took his finger from the man’s mouth, had him bend over, and began to pat down the length of his body.

  The train pulled into the station, and its doors pulsed open. Nobody moved.

  “Up,” said the overseer or trusty to the man. “Let’s go.”

  The forty-five-plus nodded and lowered his hands and allowed himself to be led through the crowd, toward the exit at the end of the platform, and his face remained as impassive as all the other faces. But his eyes: I saw it, a flickering in his eyes—I saw it—a slight widening. Absolute and abject terror. I had read about the up-to-date disincentive programs that were run in plantations now; all that shit that had come online since my days at Bell’s. They were permitted now to tie you to a plank, pour water in your mouth to simulate drowning. They were permitted now to employ electric shocks; the science was in place to precisely measure out the voltage. All the uses of darkness. Of noise. Everything was carefully regulated, of course, BLP officials on hand at all times.

  That man, that forty-five-plus, they took him away. At no clear signal, we all got on the train.

  It was twenty-four men to a train car, twelve on either side. There were no seats. We stood, staring straight ahead. The train pulled away from the station, and we all began to sing again: endless choruses of the same song, no variation. There were no windows on the train. The man across from me was barrel-chested, with a th
ick bull neck and deep-set eyes. The train was loud in the tunnel, rushing and roaring through the darkness. It was hard to think with the singing and the rattle of the train.

  The train ran in a simple circle around the plantation, fourteen stops in all, but I just had to make it through four of them: headquarters to facilities maintenance; facilities maintenance to stitch house 1; stitch house 1 to stitch house 2; stitch house 2 to Free White Housing. I looked past the big barrel-chested man. Behind him, in small letters, where one metal plate of the car’s structure met the next, were the words STIPELY FABRICATING SERVICE, LOUISVILLE, KENTUCKY. Just beneath the word Kentucky, one tiny machine screw was coming loose—I saw its head, a flat silver insect, poking like a secret from the surface of the train wall. I watched the screw as we juddered along.

  At the first stop, facilities maintenance, a middle-aged white woman got on in the bright orange jumpsuit of the Bureau of Labor Practices. The singing stopped, but the train began to roll again, and she made her way down the center aisle, counting heads, clicking a small handheld clicker, one click for each of us. She did this while whistling slightly to herself distractedly, the way you might move through a crowd of chickens in a pen. Nobody looked at her. Nobody looked at anybody else. We just kept singing. I stared at the tiny loose metal screw. “All right, folks,” she said brightly. “Thanks very much,” and she moved through to the next car. At stitch house 1 nine slaves got off, and nine new slaves took their places. I did not look at the new faces.

  I was going to find William Smith, and I was going to ask him my questions. Find out where that package was, get the fuck out of there—How? How are you going to figure it out?—and go and get it.

  I should have felt something. I should have been excited, I should have been reveling in a moment, an opportunity that had at long last arrived.

  But there on the train car, surrounded by men who would ride this train forever, I did not feel shit. I just wanted to get this done. Get it over with and get out.

  Between the third and fourth stations the train stopped again.

  “Hands in,” said an intercom voice, and before I could wonder what that meant, a pair of shackles dropped and dangled in front of me and in front of everybody else on the train car. One pair per passenger, they appeared and hung there like oxygen masks coming down when a plane has lost cabin pressure. I followed the others. Did what they did. Raised my hands and stuck them through the holes. The manacles tightened automatically, biting into my wrists. I still had my pass, my Temporary Intracampus Travel Certificate. It was tight between my forefinger and thumb.

  The doors opened at either end, and two men came in, one at each end, black men, like the one from the platform who’d led off the forty-five-plus. Petty authorities, whatever they called them here. One of them had a dog. They wore uniforms, the same color scheme as the one worn by the guard who’d gone over me in the lobby, the same as the carpeting in Newell’s office: cotton white and blue-sky blue.

  “All right, y’all,” said the first, from the forward end of the car. “Who’s feeling good today?” The man talking was the taller of the pair, with a broad chest and dark shining eyes. His voice had a rousing, rolling cadence. “Who’s feeling good?”

  Everybody answered together. “I am.”

  “Good. Who’s feeling strong?”

  This time I was ready. I joined in. “I am!”

  He nodded again, beaming. “Now, you all know this: GGSI loves you.”

  Every man on that car spoke it in unison: “Thank you, GGSI.”

  “Now, GGSI is here to take care of you.”

  “Thank you, GGSI.”

  The other overseer, down at the back end, was nodding heartily at everything, mouthing the answers, too. He stood there holding the dog’s leash. His attentive expression matched the dog’s.

  “Let me ask y’all something.” The overseer who was running the show here, he licked his lips. He bounced on the balls of his feet. The dog poked its nose around. I was scared of that dog. “Who is it that gives us these clothes?”

  “GGSI.”

  “Who puts food in our bellies?”

  “GGSI.”

  “That’s right. Sing it, brothers. Sing it with me now.”

  And we were back into it, hands and backs and spirit, too, everybody singing with noticeably more verve now, in the presence of the law. While we sang the two overseers worked their way down the line, one on either side, checking everybody’s papers. This was not perfunctory, either—they were holding pens, checking carefully, while the singing went on around them.

  “You good.” Looking each man in the eye, then looking at the paperwork, nodding. “You good. You good.”

  My pass was incomplete. As the trusty on my side drew closer, he and his dog, I managed a good, clear look at the Temporary Intracampus Travel Certificate of the man beside me, and I could see how Newell had fucked me. At the bottom, not in any box, just jammed in where there was space for it next to the signature, this man’s pass bore an inky thumbprint. By accident or by design, Newell had left mine off.

  I kept singing. I considered my options. My hands were shackled. The snare was sprung, the lock in place. I had no options. I continued to sing.

  I watched the overseer moving down the line, watched my madman’s game sailing toward its end. I should have felt scared, I knew. I should have felt the horror of the man trapped in his fate.

  Instead I was just thinking I failed you, a quick burst of felt thought, like a prayer—but I wasn’t sure who I was praying to. Whom had I failed?

  The overseer was in front of me now, running his eyes over my face. He took the piece of paper from between my fingers and looked at it closely. His expression did not harden; his round cheeks did not change. “As Thou hast done in times gone by,” I sang. “Oh, Lord, protect GGSI.” The man turned very slightly back toward the other overseer, to check where he was, then he took my pass, and when he placed it back in my hand it had a thumbprint on the bottom.

  “You good,” he said and kept moving.

  When the men were done the shackles loosened, just enough for us to withdraw our hands, but they stayed dangling, jostling and swinging in front of our eyes as the train lurched back into motion.

  The next stop was Free White Housing, and I got off.

  That is one of the moments I still think about. Lord, I do.

  I’ve tried to enact it. The small, quick, dangerous motions: to pop his thumb quickly in and out of his mouth, drag it through Newell’s signature, jam the smeary thumb pad into the corner of my paper. Furtive movements. One, two, three.

  I think about that moment all the time, how nice it would have been to say thank you. To say something. This man a stranger to me. My hero. I would have kissed him. I return in my mind to Bell’s, to Chicago, to the thousand small kindnesses with which we armored ourselves against the world.

  Free White Housing area 9 was visible from where the train doors opened, an ugly apartment block surrounded by a high chain-link fence. I booked it over there, hustling quick, eyes front, knees up. I ran past a high guard tower, ran with my back erect and my paper held out in front of me, thinking, One way or another, this is almost over.

  The fence was unlocked. As I was going in, a pair of whites was coming out, rumpled blue work clothes marked GGSI, and I stepped aside, angled my eyes down. They took no notice. The buildings of Free White Housing were pale sandstone apartment houses, the kind of undistinguished clustered residences you see on the outskirts of poor towns—every apartment with a tiny balcony facing squarely forward, overlooking a concrete courtyard below. Four balconies per floor, six floors up. Apartments like cages, like drawers in a rolltop desk, identical and interchangeable, like pigeonholes in a wall.

  I found building B and pressed the button for apartment 8. I had to stand calmly; I had to force my body to be still. Pressed the button again and waited.

  They found him out, I was thinking. William Smith. He made a run for it. He’s dead.
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  But then when I pressed the button again there were footsteps, thumping a thousand miles an hour, coming down the steps inside.

  “Stop buzzing,” said a voice, muffled, through the door. “Stop buzzing!”

  The door of the lobby jerked open. A rag doll of a man, with a thin neck and long greasy heavy-metal hair, jutted his head outside into the courtyard, looked around quickly.

  “Get in, man. Get in. For fuck’s sake get in.”

  8.

  Billy Smith was in a bad, bad way.

  “Oh, man, oh, man, oh, man,” he kept saying, a steady mumble, all the time shaking his head, gritting his teeth, running one hand through his greasy heavy-metal hair. “Oh, man, oh, man.”

  “Why don’t we have a seat, Mr. Smith?” I said—I kept saying—but he couldn’t do it or wouldn’t. He told me to call him Billy, everybody fucking called him Billy, but that was all the sense I got out of him, at least at first. I sat watching him from one of his two folding chairs while he smoked and paced the tiny apartment in caged-tiger loops, trailing ash, stepping over and around Styrofoam food cartons and empty beer bottles. Billy didn’t look like any truck driver I had ever seen: lean and lank, with nervous, edgy eyes that flickered constantly into all corners of the room.

  “You gotta just tell them I’m fucking sorry, man,” he said over and over in our first few minutes together, no matter what I asked, no matter where I tried to start. “You gotta just tell them I’m fucking sorry. Okay?”

  “Sure,” I said. “You bet. But listen. Billy.”

  “You’ll tell them? Please?”

  I couldn’t make him slow down. I couldn’t make him hear me. Billy was operating on some level beyond my reach. The air in the apartment was a low, thick funk, the smell of a scared little man, an addict who had run out of whatever it was that kept him bumping along life’s bottoms.

  “I did what I could, okay? I’m sorry; things don’t always—I did my best, okay?”