The Underground Railroad

by Colson Whitehead

  Martin’s father had needed the almanacs to plan for the full moon—the books held prayers for runaways. The moon grew fat and thin, there were solstices, first frosts, and spring rains. All these things proceeded without the interference of men. She tried to imagine what the tide looked like, coming in and going out, nipping at the sand like a little dog, heedless of people and their machinations. Her strength returned.

  On her own, she couldn’t understand all the words. Cora asked Ethel, “Can you read some to me?”

  Ethel growled. But she opened an almanac where the spine broke and in compromise with herself used the same cadences she used for the Bible. “ ‘Transplanting the Evergreens. It seems not very material whether evergreen trees are transplanted in April, May, or June…’ ”

  When Friday arrived, Cora was much improved. Fiona was set to come back on Monday. They agreed that in the morning Cora should return to the nook. Martin and Ethel would invite a neighbor or two for cake to dispel any gossip or speculation. Martin practiced a wan demeanor. Perhaps even host someone for the Friday Festival. Their porch had a perfect view.

  That evening Ethel let Cora stay in the extra bedroom, provided she kept the room dark and stayed away from the window. Cora had no intention of watching the weekly spectacle but looked forward to one last stretch in the bed. In the end, Martin and Ethel thought better of inviting people over, so the only guests were the uninvited ones that stepped out of the crowd at the start of the coon show.

  The regulators wanted to search the house.

  The performance stopped, the town buzzing at the commotion at the side of the park. Ethel tried to stall the night riders. They pushed past her and Martin. Cora started for the stairs but they complained reliably, warning her so often these last few months, that she knew she wouldn’t be able to make it. She crawled under Martin’s old bed and that’s where they found her, snatching her ankles like irons and dragging her out. They tossed her down the stairs. She jammed her shoulder into the banister at the bottom. Her ears rang.

  She laid eyes on Martin and Ethel’s porch for the first time. It was the stage for her capture, a second bandstand for the town’s amusement as she lay on the planks at the feet of four regulators in their white and black uniforms. Another four restrained Martin and Ethel. One more man stood on the porch, dressed in a worsted plaid vest and gray trousers. He was one of the tallest men Cora had ever seen, solidly built with an arresting gaze. He surveyed the scene and smiled at a private joke.

  The town filled the sidewalk and the street, jostling each other for a view of this new entertainment. A young redheaded girl pushed through. “Venezuelan pox! I told you they had someone up there!”

  So here was Fiona, finally. Cora propped herself up for a look at the girl she knew so well but had never seen.

  “You’ll get your reward,” the night rider with the beard said. He’d been to the house on the previous search.

  “You say, you lummox,” Fiona said. “You said you checked the attic last time, but you didn’t, did you?” She turned to the town to establish witnesses for her claim. “You all see—it’s my reward. All that food missing?” Fiona kicked Cora lightly with her foot. “She’d make a big roast and then the next day it was gone. Who was eating all that food? Always looking up at the ceiling. What were they looking at?”

  She was so young, Cora thought. Her face was a round and freckled apple, but there was hardness in her eyes. It was difficult to believe the grunts and cusses she’d heard over the months had come out of that little mouth, but the eyes were proof enough.

  “We treated you nice,” Martin said.

  “You have an awful queer way, both of you,” Fiona said. “And you deserve whatever you get.”

  The town had seen justice served too many times to count, but the rendering of the verdict was a new experience. It made them uneasy. Were they a jury now, in addition to the gallery? They looked at each other for cues. An old-timer made his hand into a cone and hollered nonsense through it. A half-eaten apple hit Cora’s stomach. On the bandstand, the coon-show players stood with their disheveled hats in their hands, deflated.

  Jamison appeared, rubbing his forehead with a red handkerchief. Cora had not seen him since the first night, but she had heard every speech of the Friday-night finales. Every joke and grandiose claim, the appeals to race and statehood, and then the order to kill the sacrifice. The interruption in the proceedings confounding him. Absent its usual bluster, Jamison’s voice squeaked. “This is something,” he said. “Aren’t you Donald’s son?”

  Martin nodded, his soft body quivering with quiet sobs.

  “I know your daddy would be ashamed,” Jamison said.

  “I had no idea what he was up to,” Ethel said. She tugged against the night riders who gripped her tight. “He did it himself! I didn’t know anything!”

  Martin looked away. From the people on the porch, from the town. He turned his face north toward Virginia, where he had been free of his hometown for a time.

  Jamison gestured and the night riders pulled Martin and Ethel to the park. The planter looked Cora over. “A nice treat,” Jamison said. Their scheduled victim was in the wings somewhere. “Should we do both?”

  The tall man said, “This one is mine. I’ve made it clear.”

  Jamison’s expression curdled. He was not accustomed to ignorance of his status. He asked for the stranger’s name.

  “Ridgeway,” the man said. “Slave catcher. I go here, I go there. I’ve been after this one for a long time. Your judge knows all about me.”

  “You can’t just come in here, muscling about.” Jamison was aware that his usual audience, milling outside the property, observed him with undefined expectations. At the new tremor in his words two night riders, young bucks both, stepped forward to crowd Ridgeway.

  Ridgeway exhibited no bother over the display. “You all have your local customs going on here—I get that. Having your fun.” He pronounced fun like a temperance preacher. “But it doesn’t belong to you. The Fugitive Slave Law says I have a right to return this property to its owner. That’s what I aim to do.”

  Cora whimpered and felt her head. She was dizzy, like she’d been after Terrance struck her. This man was going to return her to him.

  The night rider who threw Cora down the stairs cleared his throat. He explained to Jamison that the slave catcher had led them to the house. The man had visited Judge Tennyson that afternoon and made an official request, although the judge had been enjoying his customary Friday whiskey and might not remember. No one was keen on executing the raid during the festival, but Ridgeway had insisted.

  Ridgeway spat tobacco juice on the sidewalk, at the feet of some onlookers. “You can keep the reward,” he told Fiona. He bent slightly and lifted Cora by her arm. “You don’t have to be afraid, Cora. You’re going home.”

  A little colored boy, about ten years old, drove a wagon up the street through the crowd, shouting at the two horses. On any other occasion the sight of him in his tailored black suit and stovepipe hat would have been a cause of bewilderment. After the dramatic capture of the sympathizers and the runaway, his appearance nudged the night into the realm of the fantastical. More than one person thought what had just transpired was a new wrinkle in the Friday entertainment, a performance arranged to counter the monotony of the weekly skits and lynchings, which, to be honest, had grown predictable.

  At the foot of the porch, Fiona held forth to a group of girls from Irishtown. “A girl’s got to look after her interests if she’s going to get ahead in this country,” she explained.

  Ridgeway rode with another man in addition to the boy, a tall white man with long brown hair and a necklace of human ears around his neck. His associate shackled Cora’s ankles, and then ran the chains through a ring in the floor of the wagon. She arranged herself on the bench, her head pulsing in agony with every heartbeat. As they pulled away, she saw Martin and Ethel. They had been tied to the hanging tree. They sobbed and heaved at their bo
nds. Mayor ran in mad circles at their feet. A blond girl picked up a rock and threw it at Ethel, hitting her in the face. A segment of the town laughed at Ethel’s piteous shrieks. Two more children picked up rocks and threw them at the couple. Mayor yipped and jumped as more people bent to the ground. They raised their arms. The town moved in and then Cora couldn’t see them anymore.

  Ethel

  EVER since she saw a woodcut of a missionary surrounded by jungle natives, Ethel thought it would be spiritually fulfilling to serve the Lord in dark Africa, delivering savages to the light. She dreamed of the ship that would take her, a magnificent schooner with sails like angel wings, cutting across the violent sea. The perilous journey into the interior, up rivers, wending mountain passes, and the dangers escaped: lions, serpents, man-killing plants, duplicitous guides. And then the village, where the natives receive her as an emissary of the Lord, an instrument of civilization. In gratitude the niggers lift her to the sky, praising her name: Ethel, Ethel.

  She was eight years old. Her father’s newspapers contained tales of explorers, unknown lands, pygmy peoples. The nearest she could get to the image in the newspaper was playing missionary and native with Jasmine. Jasmine was like a sister to her. The game never lasted long before they switched to husband and wife, practicing kisses and arguments in the cellar of Ethel’s house. Given the color of their skins, there was never any doubt over their roles in either game, Ethel’s habit of rubbing soot onto her face notwithstanding. Her face blackened, she practiced expressions of amazement and wonder in front of the mirror so she’d know what to expect when she met her heathens.

  Jasmine lived in the upstairs room with her mother, Felice. The Delany family owned Felice’s mother, and when little Edgar Delany turned ten, he received Felice as a present. Now that he was a man, Edgar recognized that Felice was a miracle, tending to the affairs of his house as if she were born to it. He recounted her darky wisdom as a matter of routine, sharing her parables about human nature with guests whenever she disappeared into the kitchen so that when she returned their faces glowed with affection and jealousy. He gave her passes to visit the Parker plantation every New Year’s Day feast; Felice’s sister was a washwoman there. Jasmine was born nine months after one such visit, and now the Delanys owned two slaves.

  Ethel thought that a slave was someone who lived in your house like family but was not family. Her father explained the origin of the negro to disabuse her of this colorful idea. Some maintained that the negro was the remnant of a race of giants who had ruled the earth in an ancient time, but Edgar Delany knew they were descendants of cursed, black Ham, who had survived the Flood by clinging to the peaks of a mountain in Africa. Ethel thought that if they were cursed, they required Christian guidance all the more.

  On her eighth birthday, Ethel’s father forbid her to play with Jasmine so as not to pervert the natural state of relations between the races. Ethel did not make friends easily, even then. She sobbed and stomped for days; Jasmine was more adaptable. Jasmine assumed simple duties around the household and took over her mother’s position when Felice’s heart seized and she fell mute and paralyzed. Felice lingered for months, her mouth open and pink, eyes foggy, until Ethel’s father had her removed. Ethel observed no disturbance in her old playmate’s face when they loaded her mother into the cart. By then the two did not speak outside of household matters.

  The house had been built fifty years before and the stairs creaked. A whisper in one room carried into the next two. Most nights after supper and prayers, Ethel heard her father going up the crooked stairs, guided by the bobbing light of the candle. Sometimes she sneaked to her bedroom door and caught a glimpse of his white bedclothes disappearing around the corner.

  “Where are you going, Father?” she asked one night. Felice had been gone two years. Jasmine was fourteen.

  “Going upstairs,” he said, and both experienced a strange relief now that they had a term for his nocturnal visits. He was going upstairs—where else did the stairs lead? Her father had given one explanation for the separation of the races in fratricidal punishment. His nighttime trips elaborated on the arrangement. Whites lived downstairs and blacks lived upstairs, and to bridge that separation was to heal a biblical wound.

  Her mother held a low opinion about her husband going upstairs but was not without resources. When their family sold Jasmine to the coppersmith on the other side of town, Ethel knew it was her mother’s doing. There was no more going upstairs when the new slave took residence. Nancy was a grandmother, slow in her steps and half blind. Now it was her wheezing that penetrated the walls, not footsteps and squeals. The house had not been so clean and orderly since Felice; Jasmine had been efficient but distracted. Jasmine’s new home was across the way in colored town. Everyone whispered that the child had his father’s eyes.

  One day over lunch Ethel announced that when she was old enough, she intended to spread the Christian word to African primitives. Her parents scoffed. It was not something that good young women from Virginia did. If you want to help savages, her father said, teach school. The brain of a five-year-old is more savage and unruly than the oldest jungle darky, he said. Her course was set. Ethel filled in for the regular teacher when she was under the weather. Little white children were primitive in their own way, chirping and undeveloped, but it wasn’t the same. Her thoughts of the jungle and a ring of dark admirers remained in her private preserve.

  Resentment was the hinge of her personality. The young women in her circle comported themselves in a foreign ritual, undecipherable. She had little use for boys and, later, men. When Martin appeared, introduced by one of her cousins who worked at the shipping company, she had tired of the gossip and long relinquished an interest in happiness. A panting badger, Martin wore her down. The game of husband and wife was even less fun than she supposed. Jane, at least, turned out to be an unexpected mercy, a tidy bouquet in her arms, even if conception proved yet another humiliation. Over the years life on Orchard Street passed with a tedium that eventually congealed into comfort. She pretended not to see Jasmine when they passed on the street, especially when her former playmate was in the company of her son. His face was a dark mirror.

  Then Martin was summoned to North Carolina. He arranged Donald’s funeral on the hottest day of the year; they thought she fainted from sadness when it was just the barbaric humidity. Once they got a taker for the feed shop, they were done, he assured her. The place was backward. If it wasn’t the heat, it was the flies; if not the mice, then the people. At least in Virginia, lynch mobs maintained a pretext of spontaneity. They didn’t string up people practically on your front lawn, the same time every week, like church. North Carolina was to be a brief interlude, or so she thought until she came across the nigger in her kitchen.

  George had dropped out of the attic for some food, the lone slave Martin helped before the girl arrived. It was a week before the race laws went into effect and violence against the colored population was on the rise in rehearsal. A note on their doorstep had directed Martin to the mica mine, he told her. George waited for him, hungry and irritated. The tobacco picker thumped around the attic for a week before a railroad agent took him on the next leg, boxing him up in a crate and shoving the thing through the front door. Ethel was livid, then despairing—George acted as Donald’s executor, illuminating Martin’s secret inheritance. He’d lost three fingers on his hand cutting cane.

  Slavery as a moral issue never interested Ethel. If God had not meant for Africans to be enslaved, they wouldn’t be in chains. She did, however, have firm ideas about not getting killed for other people’s high-minded ideas. She and Martin argued over the underground railroad as they hadn’t argued in a long time, and that was before the murderous fine print of the race laws manifested itself. Through Cora—that termite in the attic—Donald reached from beyond the grave to punish her for her joke those many years before. When their families met for the first time, Ethel made a remark about Donald’s simple country suit. She was trying t
o call attention to the two families’ different ideas of proper attire, to get it out of the way so they could all enjoy the meal Ethel had spent so much time planning. But Donald had never forgiven her, she told Martin, she was sure of it, and now they were going to swing from the branches of the tree right outside their front door.

  When Martin went upstairs to help the girl it was not in the same way her father had gone upstairs, but both men came down transformed. They reached across the biblical rift for a selfish purpose.

  If they could, why not her?

  Everything had been denied Ethel her whole life. To mission, to help. To give love in the way she wanted. When the girl got sick, the moment Ethel awaited for so long had finally arrived. In the end she had not gone to Africa, Africa had come to her. Ethel went upstairs, as her father had done, to confront the stranger who lived in her house as family. The girl lay on the sheets, curved like a primeval river. She cleaned the girl, washing her filth from her. She kissed the girl on her forehead and neck in her restless slumber with two kinds of feeling mixed up in those kisses. She gave her the Holy Word.

  A savage to call her own, at last.

  Tennessee