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 afternoon 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.
An insurrection of one. She smiled for a moment, before the facts of her latest cell reasserted themselves. Scrabbling in the walls like a rat. Whether in the fields or underground or in an attic room, America remained her warden.
~ ~ ~
It was a week before the summer solstice. Martin stuffed one of the old quilts into a chair without a seat and sank into it by degrees over the course of his visit. As was her habit, Cora asked for help with words. This time they came from the Bible, through which she made desultory progress: gainsay, ravening, hoar. Martin admitted he didn’t know the meanings of gainsay and ravening. Then, as if to prepare for the new season, Martin reviewed the series of bad omens.
The first had occurred the previous week, when Cora knocked over the chamber pot. She’d been in the nook for four months and made noise before, knocking her head against the roof or her knee against a rafter. Fiona had never reacted. This time the girl was puttering around in the kitchen when Cora kicked the pot against the wall. Once Fiona came upstairs she wouldn’t be able to overlook the dripping sound of the mess leaking between the boards into the attic, or the smell.
The noon whistle had just sounded. Ethel was out. Fortunately, another girl from Irishtown visited after lunch and the two gossiped in the parlor for so long that afterward Fiona had to speed through her chores. She either didn’t notice the odor or pretended not to, shirking the responsibility for cleaning after whatever rodent’s nest was up there. When Martin came that night and they cleaned, he told Cora it was best if he didn’t mention the close call to Ethel. Her nerves were especially brittle with the rise in the humidity.
Informing Ethel was up to Martin. Cora hadn’t seen the woman since the night of her arrival. As far as she could tell, her host didn’t speak of her — even when Fiona was off the premises — beyond infrequent mentions of that creature. The slam of the bedroom door often preceded Martin’s upstairs visit. The only thing that kept Ethel from turning her in, Cora decided, was complicity.
“Ethel is a simple woman,” Martin said, sinking in the chair. “She couldn’t foresee these troubles when I asked for her hand.”
Cora knew that Martin was about to recount his accidental recruitment, which meant extra time outside the nook. She stretched her arms and encouraged him. “How could you, Martin.”
“Lord, how could I,” Martin said.
He was a most unlikely instrument of abolition. In Martin’s recollection, his father, Donald, had never expressed an opinion about the peculiar institution, although their family was rare in their circle in not owning slaves. When Martin was little, the stock boy at the feed store was a wizened, stooped man named Jericho, freed many years previously. To his mother’s dismay, Jericho came over every Thanksgiving bearing a tin of turnip mash. Donald grunted in disapproval or shook his head at newspaper items about the latest slave incident, but it wasn’t clear if he judged the brutality of the master or the intransigence of the slave.
At eighteen, Martin left North Carolina and after a period of lonesome meandering took a position as a clerk in a Norfolk shipping office. The quiet work and sea air suited him. He developed a fondness for oysters and his constitution improved generally. Ethel’s face appeared one day in a crowd, luminous. The Delanys had old ties to the region, pruning the family tree into a lopsided sight: abundant and many-cousined in the north, sparse and faceless in the south. Martin rarely visited his father. When Donald fell while fixing the roof, Martin hadn’t been home in five years.
The men had never communicated easily. Before Martin’s mother passed, it was her lot to translate the ellipses and muttered asides that constituted conversation between father and son. At Donald’s deathbed, there was no interpreter. He made Martin promise to finish his work, and the son assumed the old man meant him to take over the feed store. That was the first misunderstanding. The second was taking the map he discovered in his father’s papers for directions to a cache of gold. In his life, Donald wrapped himself in a kind of quiet that, depending on the observer, signaled imbecility or a reservoir of mystery. It would be just like his father, Martin thought, to comport himself like a pauper while hiding a fortune.
The treasure, of course, was the underground railroad. Some might call freedom the dearest currency of all, but it was not what Martin expected. Donald’s diary — set on a barrel on the station platform and surrounded by colored stones in a kind of shrine — described how his father had always been disgusted by his country’s treatment of the Ethiopian tribe. Chattel slavery was an affront to God, and slavers an aspect of Satan. Donald had provided aid to slaves his whole life, whenever possible and with whatever means at hand, ever since he was a small boy and misdirected some bounty men who badgered him over a runaway.