“Jasper wasn’t killed by no mob,” Cora said.
“There are always unexpected expenses,” Ridgeway said. “I’m not going to get reimbursed for all the food I fed it.”
“You go on about reasons,” Cora said. “Call things by other names as if it changes what they are. But that don’t make them true. You killed Jasper in cold blood.”
“That was more of a personal matter,” Ridgeway conceded, “and not what I’m talking about here. You and your friend killed a boy. You have your justifications.”
“I was going to escape.”
“That’s all I’m talking about, survival. Do you feel awful about it?”
The boy’s death was a complication of her escape, like the absence of a full moon or losing the head start because Lovey had been discovered out of her cabin. But shutters swung out inside her and she saw the boy trembling on his sickbed, his mother weeping over his grave. Cora had been grieving for him, too, without knowing it. Another person caught in this enterprise that bound slave and master alike. She moved the boy from the lonely list in her head and logged him below Martin and Ethel, even though she did not know his name. X, as she signed herself before she learned her letters.
Nonetheless. She told Ridgeway, “No.”
“Of course not — it’s nothing. Better weep for one of those burned cornfields, or this steer swimming in our soup. You do what’s required to survive.” He wiped his lips. “It’s true, though, your complaint. We come up with all sorts of fancy talk to hide things. Like in the newspapers nowadays, all the smart men talking about Manifest Destiny. Like it’s a new idea. You don’t know what I’m talking about, do you?” Ridgeway asked.
Cora sat back. “More words to pretty things up.”
“It means taking what is yours, your property, whatever you deem it to be. And everyone else taking their assigned places to allow you to take it. Whether it’s red men or Africans, giving up themselves, giving of themselves, so that we can have what’s rightfully ours. The French setting aside their territorial claims. The British and the Spanish slinking away.
“My father liked his Indian talk about the Great Spirit,” Ridgeway said. “All these years later, I prefer the American spirit, the one that called us from the Old World to the New, to conquer and build and civilize. And destroy that what needs to be destroyed. To lift up the lesser races. If not lift up, subjugate. And if not subjugate, exterminate. Our destiny by divine prescription — the American imperative.”
“I need to visit the outhouse,” Cora said.
The corners of his mouth sank. He gestured for her to walk in front. The steps to the back alley were slippery with vomit and he grabbed her elbow to steady her. Closing the outhouse door, shutting him out, was the purest pleasure she’d had in a long while.
Ridgeway continued his address undeterred. “Take your mother,” the slave catcher said. “Mabel. Stolen from her master by misguided whites and colored individuals in a criminal conspiracy. I kept an eye out all this time, turned Boston and New York upside down, all the colored settlements. Syracuse. Northampton. She’s up in Canada, laughing at the Randalls and me. I take it as a personal injury. That’s why I bought you that dress. To help me picture her wrapped like a present for her master.”
He hated her mother as much as she did. That, and the fact they both had eyes in their head, meant they had two things in common.
Ridgeway paused — a drunk wanted to use the privy. He shooed him away. “You absconded for ten months,” he said. “Insult enough. You and your mother are a line that needs to be extinguished. A week together, chained up, and you sass me without end, on your way to a bloody homecoming. The abolitionist lobby loves to trot out your kind, to give speeches to white people who have no idea how the world works.”
The slave catcher was wrong. If she’d made it north she would have disappeared into a life outside their terms. Like her mother. One thing the woman had passed on to her.
“We do our part,” Ridgeway said, “slave and slave catcher. Master and colored boss. The new arrivals streaming into the harbors and the politicians and sheriffs and newspapermen and the mothers raising strong sons. People like you and your mother are the best of your race. The weak of your tribe have been weeded out, they die in the slave ships, die of our European pox, in the fields working our cotton and indigo. You need to be strong to survive the labor and to make us greater. We fatten hogs, not because it pleases us but because we need hogs to survive. But we can’t have you too clever. We can’t have you so fit you outrun us.”
She finished her business and picked out a fugitive bulletin from the stack of paper to wipe herself. Then she waited. A pitiful respite, but it was hers.
“You heard my name when you were a pickaninny,” he said. “The name of punishment, dogging every fugitive step and every thought of running away. For every slave I bring home, twenty others abandon their full-moon schemes. I’m a notion of order. The slave that disappears — it’s a notion, too. Of hope. Undoing what I do so that a slave the next plantation over gets an idea that it can run, too. If we allow that, we accept the flaw in the imperative. And I refuse.”
The music from next door was slow now. Couples coming together to hold each other, to sway and twist. That was real conversation, dancing slow with another person, not all these words. She knew that, even though she had never danced like that with another person and had refused Caesar when he asked. The only person to ever extend a hand to her and say, Come closer. Maybe everything the slave catcher said was true, Cora thought, every justification, and the sons of Ham were cursed and the slave master performed the Lord’s will. And maybe he was just a man talking to an outhouse door, waiting for someone to wipe her ass.
—
CORA and Ridgeway returned to the wagon to find Homer rubbing his small thumbs on the reins and Boseman sipping whiskey from a bottle. “This town is sick with it,” Boseman said, slurring. “I can smell it.” The younger man led the way out of town. He shared his disappointments. The shave and bath had gone well; with a fresh face the man looked almost innocent. But he had not been able to perform like a man at the brothel. “The madam was sweating like a pig and I knew they had the fever, her and her whores.” Ridgeway let him decide how far was far enough to camp.
She had been asleep for a short time when Boseman crept in and put his hand over her mouth. She was ready.
Boseman put his fingers to his lips. Cora nodded as much as his grip permitted: She would not cry out. She could make a fuss now and wake Ridgeway; Boseman would give him some excuse and that would be the end of it. But she had thought about this moment for days, of when Boseman let his carnal desires get the best of him. It was the most drunk he’d been since North Carolina. He complimented her dress when they stopped for the night. She steeled herself. If she could persuade him to unshackle her, a dark night like this was made for running.
Homer snored loudly. Boseman slipped her chains from the wagon ring, careful not to let the links sound against each other. He undid her ankles and cinched her wrist chains to silence them. He descended first and helped Cora out. She could just make out the road a few yards away. Dark enough.
Ridgeway knocked him to the ground with a growl and started kicking him. Boseman started his defense and Ridgeway kicked him in the mouth. She almost ran. She almost did. But the quickness of the violence, the blade of it, arrested her. Ridgeway scared her. When Homer came to the back of the wagon with a lantern and revealed Ridgeway’s face, the slave catcher was staring at her with untempered fury. She’d had her chance and missed it and at the look on his face was relieved.