The Underground Railroad

by Colson Whitehead

  The revolts were quashed, but the immensity of the colored population remained. The verdict of the census lay in glum columns and rows.

  “We know it, but don’t say it,” Cora told Martin.

  The crate creaked as Martin shifted.

  “And if we say, we don’t say it for anyone to hear,” Cora said. “How big we are.”

  On a chilly evening last autumn, the powerful men of North Carolina convened to solve the colored question. Politicians attuned to the shifting complexities of the slavery debate; wealthy farmers who drove the beast of cotton and felt the reins slipping; and the requisite lawyers to fire the soft clay of their schemes into permanence. Jamison was present, Martin told Cora, in his capacities as a senator and local planter. It was a long night.

  They assembled in Oney Garrison’s dining room. Oney lived atop Justice Hill, so named because it allowed one to see everything below for miles and miles, placing the world in proportion. After this night their meeting would be known as the Justice Convention. Their host’s father had been a member of the cotton vanguard and a savvy proselytizer of the miracle crop. Oney grew up surrounded by the profits of cotton, and its necessary evil, niggers. The more he thought about it—as he sat there in his dining room, taking in the long, pallid faces of the men who drank his liquor and overstayed their welcome—what he really wanted was simply more of the former and less of the latter. Why were they spending so much time worrying about slave uprisings and northern influence in Congress when the real issue was who was going to pick all this goddamned cotton?

  In the coming days the newspapers printed the numbers for all to see, Martin said. There were almost three hundred thousand slaves in North Carolina. Every year that same number of Europeans—Irish and Germans mostly, fleeing famine and political unpleasantness—streamed into the harbors of Boston, New York, Philadelphia. On the floor of the state house, in the editorial pages, the question was put forth: Why cede this supply to the Yankees? Why not alter the course of that human tributary so that it fed southward? Advertisements in overseas papers promoted the benefits of term labor, advance agents expounded in taverns and town meetings and poorhouses, and in due course the charter ships teemed with their willing human cargo, bringing dreamers to the shores of a new country. Then they disembarked to work the fields.

  “Never seen a white person pick cotton,” Cora said.

  “Before I came back to North Carolina, I’d never seen a mob rip a man limb from limb,” Martin said. “See that, you stop saying what folks will do and what they won’t.”

  True, you couldn’t treat an Irishman like an African, white nigger or no. There was the cost of buying slaves and their upkeep on one hand and paying white workers meager but livable wages on the other. The reality of slave violence versus stability in the long term. The Europeans had been farmers before; they would be farmers again. Once the immigrants finished their contracts (having paid back travel, tools, and lodging) and took their place in American society, they would be allies of the southern system that had nurtured them. On Election Day when they took their turn at the ballot box, theirs would be a full vote, not three-fifths. A financial reckoning was inevitable, but come the approaching conflict over the race question, North Carolina would emerge in the most advantageous position of all the slave states.

  In effect, they abolished slavery. On the contrary, Oney Garrison said in response. We abolished niggers.

  “All the women and children, the men—where did they go?” Cora asked. Someone shouted in the park, and the two in the attic were still for a while.

  “You saw,” Martin said.

  The North Carolina government—half of which crowded into Garrison’s dining room that night—purchased existing slaves from farmers at favorable rates, just as Great Britain had done when it abolished slavery decades ago. The other states of the cotton empire absorbed the stock; Florida and Louisiana, in their explosive growth, were particularly famished for colored hands, especially the seasoned variety. A short tour of Bourbon Street forecast the result to any observer: a repulsive mongrel state in which the white race is, through amalgamation with negro blood, made stained, obscured, confused. Let them pollute their European bloodlines with Egyptian darkness, produce a river of half-breeds, quadroons, and miscellaneous dingy yellow bastards—they forge the very blades that will be used to cut their throats.

  The new race laws forbid colored men and women from setting foot on North Carolina soil. Freemen who refused to leave their land were run off or massacred. Veterans of the Indian campaigns earned generous mercenary coin for their expertise. Once the soldiers finished their work, the former patrollers took on the mantle of night riders, rounding up strays—slaves who tried to outrun the new order, dispossessed freemen without the means to make it north, luckless colored men and women lost in the land for any number of reasons.

  When Cora woke up that first Saturday morning, she put off looking through the spy hole. When she finally steeled herself, they had already cut down Louisa’s body. Children skipped underneath the spot where she had dangled. “The road,” Cora said, “the Freedom Trail, you called it. How far does it go?”

  It extended as far as there were bodies to feed it, Martin said. Putrefying bodies, bodies consumed by carrion eaters were constantly replaced, but the heading always advanced. Every town of any real size held their Friday Festival, closing with the same grim finale. Some places reserved extra captives in the jail for a fallow week when the night riders returned empty-handed.

  Whites punished under the new legislation were merely hung, not put on display. Although, Martin qualified, there was the case of a white farmer who had sheltered a gang of colored refugees. When they combed through the ashes of the house it was impossible to pick his body from those he had harbored, as the fire had eliminated the differences in their skin, leveling them. All five bodies were hung on the trail and nobody made much of a fuss over the breach in protocol.

  With the topic of white persecution, they had arrived at the reason for her term in the nook. “You understand our predicament,” Martin said.

  Abolitionists had always been run off here, he said. Virginia or Delaware might tolerate their agitating, but no cotton state. Owning the literature was enough for a spell in jail, and when you were released you did not stay in town long. In the amendments to the state’s constitution, the punishment for possessing seditious writings, or for aiding and abetting a colored person, was left to the discretion of local authorities. In practice, the verdict was death. The accused were dragged from their homes by their hair. Slave owners who refused to comply—from sentiment or a quaint notion about property rights—were strung up, as well as kindhearted citizens who hid niggers in their attics and cellars and coal bins.

  After a lull in white arrests, some towns increased the rewards for turning in collaborators. Folks informed on business rivals, ancient nemeses, and neighbors, recounting old conversations where the traitors had uttered forbidden sympathies. Children tattled on their parents, taught by schoolmistresses the hallmarks of sedition. Martin related the story of a man in town who had been trying to rid himself of his wife for years, to no avail. The details of her crime did not hold up under scrutiny, but she paid the ultimate price. The gentleman remarried three months later.

  “Is he happy?” Cora asked.

  “What?”

  Cora waved her hand. The severity of Martin’s account had sent her down an avenue of odd humor.

  Before, slave patrollers searched the premises of colored individuals at will, be they free or enslaved. Their expanded powers permitted them to knock on anyone’s door to pursue an accusation and for random inspections as well, in the name of public safety. The regulators called at all hours, visiting the poorest trapper and wealthiest magistrate alike. Wagons and carriages were stopped at checkpoints. The mica mine was only a few miles away—even if Martin had the grit to run with Cora, they would not make it to the next county without an examination.

  Cora
thought that the whites would be loath to give up their freedoms, even in the name of security. Far from instilling resentment, Martin told her, the patrollers’ diligence was a point of pride from county to county. Patriots boasted of how often they’d been searched and given a clean bill. A night rider’s call on the home of a comely young woman had led to more than one happy engagement.

  They twice searched Martin and Ethel’s house before Cora appeared. The riders were perfectly pleasant, complimenting Ethel on her ginger cake. They did not look askance at the attic hatch, but that was no guarantee that next time things would proceed along the same lines. The second visit caused Martin to resign from his duties with the railroad. There were no plans for the next leg of Cora’s journey, no word from associates. They would have to wait for a sign.

  Once again, Martin apologized for his wife’s behavior. “You understand she’s scared to death. We’re at the mercy of fate.”

  “You feel like a slave?” Cora asked.

  Ethel hadn’t chosen this life, Martin said.

  “You were born to it? Like a slave?”

  That put an end to their conversation that night. Cora climbed up into the nook with fresh rations and a clean chamber pot.

  Her routine established itself quickly. It could not have been otherwise, given the constraints. After she knocked her head into the roof a dozen times, her body remembered the limits on her movement. Cora slept, nestled between the rafters as if in the cramped hold of a ship. She watched the park. She worked on her reading, making the best of the education that had been cut short in South Carolina, squinting in the spy hole’s dim light. She wondered why there were only two kinds of weather: hardship in the morning, and tribulation at night.

  Every Friday the town held its festival and Cora retreated to the opposite side of the nook.

  The heat was impossible most days. On the worst she gulped at the hole like a fish in a bucket. Sometimes she neglected to ration her water, imbibing too much in the morning and staring with bitterness at the fountain the rest of the day. That damned dog cavorting in the spray. When the heat made her faint, she awoke with her head smeared into a rafter, her neck feeling like a chicken’s after Alice the cook tried to wring it for supper. The meat she put on her bones in South Carolina melted away. Her host replaced her soiled dress with one his daughter had left behind. Jane was scarce-hipped and Cora now fit into her clothes with room.

  Near midnight, after all the lights in the houses facing the park were extinguished and Fiona had long gone home, Martin brought food. Cora descended into the attic proper, to stretch and breathe different air. They talked some, then at a certain point Martin would stand with a solemn expression and Cora clambered back into the nook. Every few days Ethel permitted Martin to give her a brief visit to the washroom. Cora always fell asleep following Martin’s visit, sometimes after an interval of sobbing and sometimes so quickly she was like a candle being blown out. She returned to her violent dreams.

  She tracked the regulars on their daily transits through the park, assembling notes and speculations like the compilers of her almanacs. Martin kept abolitionist newspapers and pamphlets in the nook. They were a danger; Ethel wanted them gone, but they had been his father’s and predated their residence in the house so Martin figured they could deny ownership. Once Cora had gleaned what she could from the yellowed pamphlets, she started on the old almanacs, with their projections and ruminations about the tides and stars, and bits of obscure commentary. Martin brought her a Bible. On one of her short interludes down in the attic, she saw a copy of The Last of the Mohicans that had been warped and swollen by water. She huddled by the spy hole for reading light, and in the evening curled around a candle.

  Cora opened Martin’s visits with the same question. “Any word?”

  After a few months, she stopped.

  The silence from the railroad was complete. The gazettes printed reports of raided depots and station agents brought to raw justice, but those were common slave-state fables. Previously, strangers knocked on Martin’s door with messages concerning routes, and once, news of a confirmed passenger. Never the same person twice. No one had come in a long time, Martin said. By his lights, there was nothing for him to do.

  “You won’t let me leave,” Cora said.

  His reply was a whimper: “The situation is plain.” It was a perfect trap, he said, for everyone. “You won’t make it. They’ll catch you. Then you’ll tell them who we are.”

  “On Randall, when they want you in irons, they put you in irons.”

  “You’ll bring us to ruin,” Martin said. “Yourself, me, and Ethel, and all who helped you up and down the line.”

  She wasn’t being fair but didn’t much care, feeling mulish. Martin gave her a copy of that day’s newspaper and pulled the hatch into place.

  Any noise from Fiona sent her stock-still. She could only imagine what the Irish girl looked like. Occasionally Fiona dragged junk up to the attic. The stairs complained loudly at the slightest pressure, an efficient alarm. Once the maid moved on, Cora returned to her tiny range of activities. The girl’s vulgarities reminded Cora of the plantation and the stream of oaths delivered by the hands when master’s eye was not on them. The small rebellion of servants everywhere. She assumed Fiona spat in the soup.

  The maid’s route home did not include a cut across the park. Cora never saw her face even as she became a student of the girl’s sighs. Cora pictured her, scrappy and determined, a survivor of famine and the hard relocation. Martin told her she’d come to America on a Carolina charter with her mother and brother. The mother got lung sickness and died a day out from land. The boy was too young to work and had a puny constitution overall; older Irish ladies passed him around most days. Was Irishtown similar to the colored streets in South Carolina? Crossing a single street transformed the way people talked, determined the size and condition of the homes, the dimension and character of the dreams.

  In a few months it would be the harvest. Outside the town, in the fields, the cotton would pop into bolls and travel into sacks, picked this time by white hands. Did it bother the Irish and Germans to do nigger work, or did the surety of wages erase dishonor? Penniless whites took over the rows from penniless blacks, except at the end of the week the whites were no longer penniless. Unlike their darker brethren, they could pay off their contracts with their salaries and start a new chapter.

  Jockey used to talk on Randall about how the slavers needed to roam deeper and deeper into Africa to find the next bunch of slaves, kidnapping tribe after tribe to feed the cotton, making the plantations into a mix of tongues and clans. Cora figured that a new wave of immigrants would replace the Irish, fleeing a different but no less abject country, the process starting anew. The engine huffed and groaned and kept running. They had merely switched the fuel that moved the pistons.

  The sloping walls of her prison were a canvas for her morbid inquiries, particularly between sundown and Martin’s late-night visit. When Caesar had approached her, she envisioned two outcomes: a contented, hard-won life in a northern city, or death. Terrance would not be content to merely discipline her for running away; he would make her life an ornate hell until he got bored, then have her dispatched in a gory exhibition.

  Her northern fantasy, those first weeks in the attic, was a mere sketch. Glimpses of children in a bright kitchen—always a boy and a girl—and a husband in the next room, unseen but loving. As the days stretched, other rooms sprouted off the kitchen. A parlor with simple but tasteful furniture, things she had seen in the white shops of South Carolina. A bedroom. Then a bed covered in white sheets that shone in the sun, her children rolling on it with her, the husband’s body half visible at the edges. In another scene, years hence, Cora walked down a busy street in her city and came across her mother. Begging in the gutter, a broken old woman bent into the sum of her mistakes. Mabel looked up but did not recognize her daughter. Cora kicked her beggar’s cup, the few coins flew into the hubbub, and she continued on her af
ternoon errand to fetch flour for her son’s birthday cake.

  In this place to come, Caesar occasionally came for supper and they laughed ruefully about Randall and the travails of their escape, their eventual freedom. Caesar told the children how he got the small scar over his eyebrow, dragging a finger across it: He was caught by a slave catcher in North Carolina but got free.

  Cora rarely thought of the boy she had killed. She did not need to defend her actions in the woods that night; no one had the right to call her to account. Terrance Randall provided a model for a mind that could conceive of North Carolina’s new system, but the scale of the violence was hard to settle in her head. Fear drove these people, even more than cotton money. The shadow of the black hand that will return what has been given. It occurred to her one night that she was one of the vengeful monsters they were scared of: She had killed a white boy. She might kill one of them next. And because of that fear, they erected a new scaffolding of oppression on the cruel foundation laid hundreds of years before. That was Sea Island cotton the slaver had ordered for his rows, but scattered among the seeds were those of violence and death, and that crop grew fast. The whites were right to be afraid. One day the system would collapse in blood.