“You made a promise,” I said.
“Yes, I did,” she said. “And it is my intention to keep it. But not just now. We will need time.”
I locked on to Corrine with a hard gaze. It was the first time I had looked at her without the respect that Virginia demanded. She was not being unreasonable. In fact, she was correct. But I was hot over her mocking of Sophia and there were my own feelings and shame at having delivered Sophia into outrage all those times, at having left Thena to run, and then left her again to be assaulted, at my mother who was sold, who I could not protect, who I did not avenge. All of that roiled in me and it shot out in the look I now put upon Corrine.
“You cannot do it,” Corrine said. “You will need us, and we will not consent. We will not put ourselves to the sword for your brief and small infatuations. You cannot do it.”
And then a look of recognition bloomed across her face until it covered the whole of her visage in horror, and she understood.
“Or maybe you can,” she said. “Hiram, you will bring hell upon us all. Think. Think beyond your emotions. Think beyond all your guilt. You have no right to endanger all who might be so rescued. Think, Hiram.”
But I was thinking. I was thinking of Mary Bronson and her lost boys. I was thinking of Lambert under the Alabama ox and Otha presently tracking cross the country for the freedom of his Lydia. Lydia, who endured all outrage for the chance of family.
“Think, Hiram,” she said.
“You told me freedom was a master,” I said. “You said it was a driver. You said none can fly, that we are tied to the rail. ‘I know,’ you told me. ‘And because I know, I must serve.’ ”
“You know I am not without sympathy,” she said. “I know what happened to you.”
“No, you don’t,” I said. “You can’t.”
“Hiram,” she said, “promise me you will not doom us.”
“I promise that I will not doom us,” I said. But the word-play put no folly upon her, and the less said about our remaining interview the better, for I hold her, all these years later, in the highest respect. She was speaking in full faith and honesty. And so was I.
32
I WAS OUT THERE ON my own now, and if Conduction was to be achieved, it must be done by my hand alone. And it seemed to me that there was no longer any avoiding the facts of my departure. I would have to tell them both—Sophia and Thena. I decided I would tell them each separately, for my confession to Thena involved matters far greater than the Underground. So I would start with what I thought was the simpler of confessions—Sophia.
Thena had begun to have nightmares, we thought from her attack. And so we got in the habit, on difficult nights, of leaving Caroline down below with her to sleep on her bosom and calm her. And it was such a night as this when I felt it was time.
“Sophia,” I said, “I am ready to tell you for what and I am ready to tell you how.”
She had been looking up into the gabled rafters, and now she rolled over, pulled the osnaburg blanket over herself, and turned to me.
“It’s about where I been,” I said. “About where I was and what happened when I was there.”
“Wasn’t Bryceton,” she said.
“It was,” I said. “But that was just the start of it.”
Even in that darkness, I could see her eyes, and they were too much for me to take. I rolled over so that my back was to her. I breathed in deep, and then breathed back out.
And then I told her that I had, in the time I was gone, seen another country, taken in the easy Northern air, that I had awakened when I wanted and moved as I pleased, that I had trained in to Baltimore, walked through the carnival of Philadelphia, and driven through the uplands of New York, and that I had done this all through my affiliation with that agency of freedom known only to her in whispers and tales—the Underground.
And I told her how it had happened, how Corrine Quinn had found me, how they had trained me at Bryceton, how Hawkins and Amy were in on the ruse. I told her how Georgie Parks had been destroyed, and how I had been party to that destruction. I told her about the family White, how they had loved me, how they had saved Mary Bronson, how Micajah Bland had given up his life. I told her how I had met Moses, how Kessiah had survived the racetrack, how she remembered Thena, how I had promised to conduct Thena and how I now planned to conduct her too.
“I promised to get you out,” I said. “And I mean to keep that promise.”
I turned back over, and I found those eyes waiting for me. There was a kind of deadness in them now—no shock or surprise, no emotion betrayed.
“That why you come,” she said. “To keep your promise.”
“No,” I said. “I come back because I was told to.”
“And had you not been told to?” she asked.
“Sophia, I thought of you all the time up there,” I said. I reached over and stroked her face with my hand. “I worried for you, worried for what they might have done to you…”
“But while you were worrying,” she said, “I was down here. Not knowing what was coming. Not knowing what had happened to you. Not knowing anything of that woman Corrine’s intentions.”
“She got your title from Nathaniel,” I said. “You ain’t going to Tennessee.”
She shook her head and said, “And what am I supposed to make of that? You come back with this tale, and I do believe it, I really do, but Hiram, I know you, I do not know them.”
“But you do know me,” I said. “And I am sorry for how it has come down, but I have heard you now, I have heard all of what you were saying from the start. And I understand that it is not just you, but Caroline. I am getting you out. Thena too.”
“And what about you?” she said.
“I am here until told otherwise,” I said. “I am part of this now. It is bigger than me and my desires.”
“Bigger than me too,” she said. “Bigger than this girl who you said was your blood.”
There was a long silence and then Sophia rolled over again, so that she was staring at the rafters.
“And you still ain’t said how,” she said. “I told you I needed a how.”
“How, huh?” I asked.
“Yeah, how,” she said.
“Come on,” I said.
“What?”
“You said you wanted to know how. Well, you wanna know or you don’t?”
By then I was climbing down the ladder. At the door I put on my brogans and wrapped myself in my fear-no-man coat. Looking back, I saw Sophia gazing at Caroline, still snoring lightly on Thena’s bosom.
“Come on,” I said.
We walked along that route that had now become sacred to me. I had been practicing, experimenting as I could with the powers and reach of memory, so that when we arrived, minutes later, at the banks of the river Goose, I felt myself in control.
I turned to Sophia and said, “You ready?” To this she rolled her eyes and shook her head. I took her hand, and in the other hand I clutched the wooden horse.
And then I guided her down toward the banks, and as we walked I spoke of that night, that last Holiday when we were all there together, and more than spoke it, I felt it, made it real to me—Conway and Kat, Philipa and Brick, Thena all wrathy in front of the fire—“Land, niggers,” she said. “Land.” And I remembered, then, Georgie Parks, Amber, and their little boy. And I remembered the free ones—Edgar and Patience, Pap and Grease. And no sooner did I think of them than I felt Sophia jump with a start, and squeeze my hand, and I knew then that it had begun.