فصل 11

Indiana 50 REWARD.

LEFT my house on Friday evening the 26th about 10 o’clock P.M. (without provocation whatever) my negro girl SUKEY. She is about 28 years of age, of rather a light complexion, has high cheek bones, is slender in her person, and very neat in her appearance. Had on when she went away, a striped jean frock. Sukey was lately owned by L. B. Pearce, Esq. and formerly belonged to William M. Heritage, deceased. She is at present (from appearance) a strict member of the Methodist Church in this place, and is no doubt known to a majority of the members.

JAMES AYKROYD

OCTOBER 4 THEN she became the one lagging in her lessons, surrounded by impatient children. Cora was proud of the progress she made with her reading in South Carolina and the attic. The shaky footing of every new word, an unknown territory to struggle through letter by letter. She claimed each circuit through Donald’s almanacs as a victory, then returned to the first page for another round.

Georgina’s classroom revealed the smallness of her accomplishments. She didn’t recognize the Declaration of Independence the day she joined them in the meeting house. The children’s pronunciation was crisp and mature, so distant from Michael’s stiff recitations back on Randall. Music lived in the words now, the melody asserting itself as each child took their turn, bold and confident. The boys and girls stood from the pews, turned over the paper where they’d copied the words, and sang the promises of the Founding Fathers.

With Cora, the class numbered twenty-five. The youngest—the six- and seven-year-olds—were exempt from the recital. They whispered and fussed in the pews until Georgina hushed them. Nor did Cora participate, being new to the class, the farm, their way of doing things. She felt conspicuous, older than all of them and so far behind. Cora understood why old Howard had wept, back in Miss Handler’s schoolhouse. An interloper, like a rodent that had chewed through the wall.

One of the cooks rang the bell, drawing the lesson to a close. After the meal, the younger students would return to their lessons while the older ones took to their chores. On their way out of the meeting house, Cora stopped Georgina and said, “You taught these pickaninnies how to give a proper talk, that’s for sure.”

The teacher checked to make sure her students hadn’t heard Cora. She said, “Here we call them children.”

Cora’s cheeks got hot. She’d never been able to make out what it meant, she added quickly. Did they know what was in all those big words?

Georgina hailed from Delaware and had that vexing way of Delaware ladies, delighting in puzzles. Cora had met a few of them on Valentine and didn’t care for that regional peculiarity, even if they knew how to bake a good pie. Georgina said the children make of it what they can. What they don’t understand today, they might tomorrow. “The Declaration is like a map. You trust that it’s right, but you only know by going out and testing it yourself.”

“You believe that?” Cora asked. From the teacher’s face, she didn’t know what to make of her.

Four months had passed since that first class. The harvest was done. Fresh arrivals to the Valentine farm made it so Cora was no longer the greenhorn, bumbling about. Two men Cora’s age joined the lessons in the meeting house, eager runaways more ignorant than she was. They ran their fingers over the books as if the things were goofered, hopping with magic. Cora knew her way around. When to prepare her own meal because today’s cook would muddle the soup, when to bring a shawl because Indiana nights were a shiver, colder than she’d ever known. The quiet places of shade to be alone.

Cora sat in the front of the class nowadays, and when Georgina corrected her—on her penmanship or arithmetic or speech—she no longer smarted. They were friends. Georgina was such a dedicated gossip that the lessons provided a reprieve from her constant reports on the farm’s goings-on. That strapping man from Virginia has a mischievous look, don’t you think? Patricia ate all the pig’s feet when we turned our backs. Delaware women liked to flap their gums, that was another thing.

This particular afternoon, Cora walked out with Molly once the bell sounded. She shared a cabin with the girl and her mother. Molly was ten years old, almond-eyed and reserved, careful with her affections. She had many friends but preferred to stand just outside the circle. The girl kept a green jar in her room for her treasures—marbles, arrowheads, a locket without a face—and got more pleasure from spreading them on the cabin floor, feeling the cool of blue quartz on her cheek, than playing outside.

Which was why their routine of late delighted Cora. Cora had started braiding the girl’s hair on the mornings when her mother left for work early, and the last few days Molly had reached for her hand when school ended. A new thing between them. Molly tugged her along, squeezing hard, and Cora enjoyed being led. She hadn’t been chosen by one of the little ones since Chester.

There was no noon meal on account of that night’s big Saturday supper, the smell of which impelled the students to the barbecue pits. The barbecue men had been cooking the hogs since midnight, casting a spell property-wide. More than one of the residents had dreamed of gorging on a magnificent banquet, only to wake up devastated. Hours to go. Cora and Molly joined the hungry spectators.

Over the smoky greenwood coals, long sticks splayed out the two hogs. Jimmy was the pit master. His father had grown up in Jamaica and had passed down the fire secrets of the Maroons. Jimmy poked the roasting meat with his fingers and nudged the coals, prowling around the fire as if sizing up a grappling partner. He was one of the more wizened residents on the farm, late from North Carolina and the massacres, and preferred his meat melting soft. He only had two teeth.

One of his apprentices shook a jug of vinegar and pepper. He motioned to a little girl at the edge of the fire and guided her hands to mop the insides of the hog with the mixture. The drippings popped on the coals in the trenches. White plumes of smoke sent the crowd back and the girl squealed. It would be a fine meal.

—

CORA and Molly had an appointment at home. It was a short walk. Like most of the farm’s work buildings, the older log cabins bunched on the eastern edge, put up in a hurry before they knew how big the community would become. Folks came from all over, plantations that had favored this or that arrangement of quarters, so the cabins came in various shapes. The newer ones—the latest additions the men put up now that the corn was picked—followed an identical style, with more spacious rooms, and were distributed on the property with more care.

Since Harriet had married and moved out, Cora, Molly, and Sybil were the only inhabitants of their cabin, sleeping in the two rooms off the main living area. In general, three families lived in each house. Newcomers and visitors shared Cora’s room from time to time, but for the most part the other two beds were empty.

Her own room. Another unlikely gift from the Valentine farm after all her prisons.

Sybil and her daughter were proud of their house. They’d whitewashed the exterior with quicklime, tinted it pink. Yellow paint with white trim made the front room hum in the sunlight. Decorated with wildflowers in the warm season, the room remained pleasant in the autumn with wreaths of red and gold leaves. Purple curtains bunched in the windows. Two carpenters who lived on the farm lugged in furniture now and again—they were sweet on Sybil and kept their hands busy to distract from her indifference. Sybil had dyed some burlap sacks to make a carpet, which Cora laid on when she got one of her headaches. The front room had a nice breeze that took the bite out of the attacks.

Molly called after her mother when they reached the porch. Sarsaparilla boiled for one of Sybil’s tonics, overpowering the aroma of the roasting meat. Cora headed straight to the rocking chair, which she’d claimed as hers on her first day. Molly and Sybil didn’t mind. It creaked extravagantly, the handiwork of Sybil’s less talented suitor. Sybil was of the mind that he’d made it loud on purpose, to remind her of his devotion.

Sybil emerged from the back, wringing her hands on her apron. “Jimmy working hard out there,” she said, shaking her head in hunger.

“I can’t wait,” Molly said. The girl opened the pine chest by the hearth and removed their quilting. She was steadfast on finishing her latest project by supper.

They got to it. Cora hadn’t picked up a needle apart from simple mending since Mabel left. Some of the Hob women tried to teach her to no avail. As she did in the classroom, Cora kept looking over at her companions for guidance. She cut out a bird, a cardinal; it came out looking like something dogs had fought over. Sybil and Molly encouraged her—they had badgered her into their pastime—but the quilt was botched. Fleas had found the batting, she insisted. The seams puckered, her corners unjoined. The quilt betrayed a crookedness in her thinking: run it up a pole as the flag of her wild country. She wanted to set it aside but Sybil forbid her. “You start something else when this one finished,” Sybil said. “But this ain’t finished yet.”

Cora needed no advice on the virtues of perseverance. But she picked up the creature in her lap and picked at where she’d left off.

Sybil was twelve years her senior. Her dresses made her look slightly built, but Cora knew that it was merely her time away from the plantation working on the woman in the best way: Her new life required a different sort of strength. She was meticulous in her posture, a walking spear, in the manner of those who’d been made to bend and will bend no more. Her master had been a terror, Sybil told Cora, a tobacco man who competed with the neighboring planters every year over the biggest crop. His poor showing stirred him to malice. “He work us hard,” she’d say, her thoughts lighting out to old miseries. Molly would come over from wherever she was and sit on her lap, nuzzling.

The three of them worked wordlessly for a while. A cheer went up over by the barbecue pit, as it did each time they turned the hogs. Cora was too distracted to reverse her mistakes in the quilt. The silent theater of Sybil and Molly’s love moved her always. The way the child asked for assistance without speaking and the mother pointed, nodded, and pantomimed her child out of a fix. Cora wasn’t accustomed to a quiet cabin—on Randall there was always a shriek or cry or sigh to break a moment—and certainly not accustomed to this type of maternal performance.

Sybil had absconded with Molly when her daughter was only two, toting her child all the way. Rumors from the big house held that their master meant to dispose of some property to cover debts from the disappointing crop. Sybil faced a public sale. She left that night—the full moon gave its blessing and guidance through the forest. “Molly didn’t make no sound,” Sybil said. “She knew what we were up to.” Three miles over the Pennsylvania border they risked a visit to the cottage of a colored farmer. The man fed them, whittled toys for the little girl, and, through a line of intermediaries, contacted the railroad. After a spell in Worcester working for a milliner, Sybil and Molly made their way to Indiana. Word had spread of the farm.

So many fugitives had passed through Valentine—there was no telling who might have spent time there. Did Sybil happen to make the acquaintance of a woman from Georgia? Cora asked her one evening. Cora had been with them for a few weeks. Slept the night through once or twice, put back some of the weight she’d lost in the attic. The dry flies cut out their noise, leaving an opening in the night for a question. A woman from Georgia, maybe went by the name of Mabel, maybe not?

Sybil shook her head.

Of course she hadn’t. A woman who leaves her daughter behind becomes someone else to hide the shame of it. But Cora asked everyone on the farm sooner or later, the farm being its own kind of depot, attracting people who were between places. She asked those who’d been on Valentine for years, she asked all the new people, pestered the visitors who came to the farm to see if what they’d heard was true. The free men and women of color, the fugitives who stayed and the ones who moved on. She asked them in the cornfield between a work song, rumbling in the back of a buggy on the way to town: gray eyes, scar across the back of her right hand from a burn, maybe went by the name of Mabel, maybe not?

“Maybe she in Canada,” Lindsey answered when Cora decided it was her turn. Lindsey being a slim, hummingbird woman fresh out of Tennessee, who maintained a demented cheer that Cora couldn’t understand. From what she saw, Tennessee was fire, disease, and violence. Even if it was there that Royal and them had rescued her. “Lot of folks, they fond of Canada now,” Megan said. “Though it’s awful cold.”

Cold nights for the coldhearted.

Cora folded her quilt and retired to her room. She curled up, too distracted thinking on mothers and daughters. Fretting over Royal, three days overdue. Her headache approached like a thunderhead. She turned her face to the wall and did not move.

—

SUPPER was held outside the meeting house, the biggest building on the property. Legend had it that they put it up in a single day, before one of the first big gatherings, when they realized the assembled no longer fit inside Valentine’s farmhouse. Most days it served as a schoolhouse. Sundays, a church. On Saturday evenings the farm got together for a common meal and diversions. Masons who worked on the courthouse downstate came back hungry, seamstresses returned from daywork for local white ladies and put on their nice dresses. Temperance was the rule except for Saturday night, when those with a taste for spirits partook and had something to think about at the next morning’s sermon.

The hogs were the first order of business, chopped on the long pine table and covered in dipney sauce. Smoky collards, turnips, sweet potato pie, and the rest of the kitchen’s concoctions sat in the Valentines’ nice dishes. The residents were a reserved bunch, save for when Jimmy’s barbecue came out—prim ladies used their elbows. The pit master lowered his head at every compliment, already thinking of improvements for the next roast. In a deft maneuver Cora tugged off a crispy ear, Molly’s favorite, and presented it to the girl.

Valentine no longer kept count of how many families lived on his land. One hundred souls was a sturdy number to stop at—a fantastic figure by any measure—and that didn’t account for the colored farmers who’d purchased adjacent land and got their own operations going. Of the fifty or so children, most were under the age of five. “Liberty make a body fertile,” Georgina said. That, and the knowledge they will not be sold, Cora added. The women in the colored dormitories of South Carolina believed they knew liberty, but the surgeons’ knives cut them to prove otherwise.

Once the hogs disappeared, Georgina and some of the younger women took the children to the barn for games and sing-alongs. The children didn’t sit still for all the talk at the meetings. Their absence placed the stakes of the discussions into relief; ultimately, it was for the young ones that they schemed. Even if the adults were free of the shackles that had held them fast, bondage had stolen too much time. Only the children could take full advantage of their dreaming. If white men let them.

The meeting house filled. Cora joined Sybil in a pew. Tonight was to be a subdued affair. Next month after the shucking bee, the farm would host the most important gathering yet, to address the recent debates about picking up stakes. In advance, the Valentines had reduced the Saturday-night entertainments. The pleasant weather—and the warnings of the coming Indiana winter, which scared those who’d never seen snow—kept them occupied. Trips to town turned into dallying expeditions. Social calls stretched into the evening now that so many colored settlers had put down roots, the advance guard of a great migration.

Many of the farm’s leaders were out of town. Valentine himself was in Chicago meeting with the banks, his two sons in tow now that they were old enough to help with the farm’s accounts. Lander traveled with one of the new abolitionist societies in New York, on a speaking tour of New England; they kept him busy. What he learned during this latest excursion into the country would doubtless shape his contribution to the big meeting.

Cora studied her neighbors. She’d held out hope that Jimmy’s hogs would lure Royal back in time, but he and his partners were still engaged in their mission for the underground railroad. There was no word from their party. Gruesome reports reached the farm concerning a posse that had strung up some colored troublemakers the previous night. It had happened thirty miles downstate, and the victims supposedly worked for the railroad, but nothing specific on top of that. A freckled woman unfamiliar to Cora—so many strangers these days—carried on about the lynchings in a loud voice. Sybil turned and shushed her, then gave Cora a quick hug as Gloria Valentine stepped to the lectern.

Gloria had been working in the laundry of an indigo plantation when John Valentine met her. “The most delicious vision these eyes ever beheld,” Valentine liked to tell the new arrivals, drawing out delicious as if ladling hot caramel. Valentine didn’t make a habit of visiting slavers in those days, but he’d gone in on a shipment of feed with Gloria’s owner. By the end of the week he had purchased her freedom. A week after that they wed.

She was still delicious, and as graceful and composed as if she’d gone to a finishing school for white ladies. She protested that she didn’t enjoy filling in for her husband, but her ease in front of a crowd argued otherwise. Gloria worked hard on eliminating her plantation inflections—Cora heard her slip when conversation took a folksy turn—but she was naturally impressive, whether she spoke colored or white. When Valentine’s addresses took a stern tone, his practical disposition overcoming his generosity, Gloria stepped in to smooth matters.

“Did you all have a pleasant day?” Gloria said when the room quieted. “I was down in the root cellar all day and then I come up to see what a gift God gave us today. That sky. And them hogs…”

She apologized for her husband’s absence. John Valentine wanted to take advantage of the big harvest to renegotiate their loan. “Lord knows, there’s so much in the offing, it’s nice to have a little peace of mind.” She bowed at Mingo, who sat in front, next to the empty space usually reserved for Valentine. Mingo was a stoutly made man of middle stature, with a West Indian complexion that was livened by his red checkered suit tonight. He gave an amen and turned to nod at his allies in the meeting house.

Sybil nudged Cora at this acknowledgment of the farm’s political arguments, an acknowledgment that legitimized Mingo’s position. There was frequent talk now of lighting out west, where colored towns sprouted up on the other side of the Arkansas River. To places that didn’t share a border with slave states, had never countenanced the abomination of slavery. Mingo advocated staying in Indiana, but with a severe reduction in those they sheltered: the runaways, the lost. People like Cora. The parade of famous visitors spreading the farm’s renown made the place into a symbol of colored uplift—and a target. After all, the specter of colored rebellion, all those angry dark faces surrounding them, had stirred white settlers to leave the south. They come to Indiana, and right next door is a black nation rising. It always ended in violence.

Sybil scorned Mingo, his greasy personality and constant jockeying; an imperious nature lurked beneath his gregariousness. Yes, the man wore an honorable legend: After he hired himself out from his master for weekend labor, he had purchased the freedom of his wife, then his children, and finally himself. Sybil dismissed this prodigious feat—the man got lucky with regards to his master is all. Mingo would never be more than an opportunist, harassing the farm with his own notions about colored advancement. With Lander, he would take the lectern at next month’s gathering to decide their future.

Cora declined to join her friend in her derision. Mingo had been distant to her on account of the attention that runaways brought to the farm, and when he heard she was wanted for murder, shunned Cora altogether. Still, the man had saved his family and could’ve died before completing his task—it was a mighty thing. Her first day in the schoolhouse his two girls, Amanda and Marie, had delivered the Declaration with poise. They were admirable girls. But no, Cora didn’t like his smart talk. Something in his smile reminded her of Blake, that preening buck from the old days. Mingo didn’t need a place to put his doghouse, but surely he was on the lookout to expand his domain.

They’d get to the music in short order, Gloria reassured them. There weren’t what Valentine called “dignitaries” among them tonight—in fancy clothes, with Yankee accents—although some guests from the county had come down the road. Gloria asked them to stand up and identify themselves for a welcome. Then it was time for the diversions. “While you digest that fine meal, we have a sweet treat,” she said. “You may recognize his face from his earlier visit to Valentine, a most distinguished young man of the arts.”

The previous Saturday, it had been a pregnant opera singer from Montreal. The Saturday before that, a violinist from Connecticut who made half the women weep, so overcome were they with feeling. Tonight belonged to the poet. Rumsey Brooks was solemn and slim, dressed in a black suit with a black bow tie. He looked like a traveling preacher.

—

HE’D been there three months prior with a delegation out of Ohio. Did the Valentine farm deserve its reputation? An old white lady devoted to the cause of negro uplift had organized the expedition. The widow of a big Boston lawyer, she collected funds for various ventures, the publication and dissemination of colored literature a particular concern. After hearing one of Lander’s orations, she arranged for the distribution of his autobiography; the printer had previously put out a line of Shakespeare’s tragedies. The volume’s first run sold out in days, a handsome edition with Elijah Lander’s name in gold leaf. Rumsey’s own manuscript was forthcoming next month, Gloria said.

The poet kissed his host’s hand and asked permission to share some of his poetry. He was not without charisma, Cora had to admit. According to Georgina, Rumsey courted one of the milk-house girls, but was so liberal with flattery that he was obviously a young man open to the sweet mysteries of fate. “Who knows what destiny has in store for us,” he asked Cora on his first visit, “and what kind of people we will have the pleasure to know?” Royal suddenly appeared at her side and pulled her away from the poet’s honey words.

She should have recognized Royal’s intentions. If she’d known how out of sorts his disappearances made her, she would have rebuffed him.

With Gloria’s blessing, the poet cleared his throat. “?’Ere I saw a dappled wonder,” he recited, his voice rising and dipping as if battling a headwind. “Settling ’cross the fields, hovering on angel wings and brandishing a blazing shield…”

The meeting house amened and sighed. Rumsey tried not to smile at their reaction, the effect of his performance. Cora couldn’t make much out of his poems: a visitation of a magnificent presence, a seeker awaiting a message. A conversation between an acorn, a sapling, and a powerful oak. Also a tribute to Benjamin Franklin and his ingenuity. Versifying left her cold. Poems were too close to prayer, rousing regrettable passions. Waiting for God to rescue you when it was up to you. Poetry and prayer put ideas in people’s heads that got them killed, distracting them from the ruthless mechanism of the world.

After the poetry the musicians were set to perform, some players who had just joined the farm. The poet prepared the dancing circles well, intoxicating them with visions of flight and release. If it made them happy, who was Cora to belittle them? They put bits of themselves into his characters, grafting their faces onto the figures in his rhymes. Did they see themselves in Benjamin Franklin or his inventions? Slaves were tools, so maybe the latter, but no one here was a slave. Counted as property by someone far away, perhaps, but not here.

The entire farm was something beyond her imagination. The Valentines had performed a miracle. She sat among the proof of it; more than that, she was part of that miracle. She had given herself too easily to the false promises of South Carolina. Now a bitter part of her refused the treasures of the Valentine farm, even as every day some blessing part came into bloom. In a young girl taking her hand. In her fears for a man she’d come to feel for.

Rumsey closed with an appeal for nurturing the artistic temperament in young and old alike, “to stoke that Apollonian ember in all mortal beings.” One of the newcomers shoved the lectern across the stage. A cue for the musicians, and a cue for Cora. Sybil knew her friend’s ways by now and kissed her farewell. The hall stifled; outside it was cold and dark. Cora left to the sound of the large pews scraping to make room to dance. She passed someone on the path who declared, “You going the wrong way, girl!”

When she got home, Royal was leaning against a post of her porch. His silhouette, even in the dark. “I thought you’d be along once that banjo got on,” he said.

Cora lit the lamp and saw his black eye, the yellow-purple lump. “Oh,” she said, hugging him, putting her face into his neck.

“A scuffle is all,” he said. “We got away.” Cora shuddered and he whispered, “I know you were worried. I didn’t feel like mixing with folks tonight, reckoned I’d wait here.”

On the porch, they sat on the lovelorn carpenters’ chairs and took in the night. He moved over so their shoulders touched.

She told him what he’d missed, the poet and the meal.

“There’ll be more,” he said. “I got you something.” He rummaged in his leather satchel. “It’s this year’s edition, but I thought you’d appreciate it even though it’s October. When I get to a place where they got next year’s, I’ll pick it up.”

She grabbed his hand. The almanac had a strange, soapy smell and made a cracking noise like fire as she turned the pages. She’d never been the first person to open a book. Royal took her to the ghost tunnel after a month on the farm.

Cora started working her second day, thoughts in a knot over Valentine’s motto: “Stay, and contribute.” A request, and a cure. She contributed first in the washhouse. The head of the laundry was a woman named Amelia who’d known the Valentines in Virginia and followed two years later. Gently she warned Cora against “abusing the garments.” Cora was quick with her labor on Randall. Working with her hands stirred her old, fearful industry. She and Amelia decided that she might prefer another chore. She helped in the milk house for a week and did a stint with Aunty, watching the babies while their parents worked. After that, she spread manure in the fields when the leaves of the Indian corn turned yellow. As Cora bent in the rows she looked out for an overseer, haunted.

“You look weary,” Royal told her one August evening after Lander delivered one of his speeches. Lander’s talk verged on a sermon, concerning the dilemma of finding your purpose once you’ve slipped the yoke of slavery. The manifold frustrations of liberty. Like the rest of the farm, Cora regarded the man with awe. He was an exotic prince, traveling from a far land to teach them how people conducted themselves in decent places. Places so far away they eluded all maps.

Elijah Lander’s father was a rich white lawyer in Boston who lived openly with his colored wife. They suffered the rebukes of their circle and in midnight whispers characterized their offspring as the union of an African goddess and a pale mortal. A demigod. To hear the white dignitaries tell it in their long-winded introductions to his speeches, Lander demonstrated his brilliance from an early age. A sickly child, he made the family library his playground, poring over volumes he struggled to lift from the shelves. At the age of six, he played the piano like a European master. He performed concerts to the empty parlor, bowing to silent applause.

Family friends interceded to make him the first colored student at one of the prestigious white colleges. “They gave me a slave pass,” as he described it, “and I used it for mischief.” Lander lived in a broom closet; no one would room with him. After four years his fellows elected him valedictorian. He skittered between obstacles like a primeval creature who had outwitted the modern world. Lander could have been anything he wanted. A surgeon, a judge. Brahmins urged him to go to the nation’s capital to make his mark in politics. He’d broken through into a small corner of American success where his race did not curse him. Some might have lived in that space happily, rising alone. Lander wanted to make room for others. People were wonderful company sometimes.

In the end, he chose to give speeches. In his parents’ parlor to an audience of distinguished Bostonians, then in the homes of those distinguished Bostonians, in colored meeting houses and Methodist churches and lecture halls throughout New England. Sometimes he was the first colored person to set foot in the buildings apart from the men who built them, the women who cleaned them.

Red-faced sheriffs arrested him for sedition. He was jailed for inciting riots that weren’t riots but peaceful gatherings. The Honorable Judge Edmund Harrison of Maryland issued a warrant for his arrest, accusing him of “promulgating an infernal orthodoxy that imperils the fabric of good society.” A white mob beat him before he was rescued by those who had come to hear him read from his “Declarations of the Rights of the American Negro.” From Florida to Maine his pamphlets, and later his autobiography, were burned in bonfires along with his effigy. “Better in effigy than in person,” he said.

What private aches nagged him beneath that placid demeanor, none could say. He remained imperturbable and strange. “I’m what the botanists call a hybrid,” he said the first time Cora heard him speak. “A mixture of two different families. In flowers, such a concoction pleases the eye. When that amalgamation takes its shape in flesh and blood, some take great offense. In this room we recognize it for what it is—a new beauty come into the world, and it is in bloom all around us.”

—

WHEN Lander finished his address that August night, Cora and Royal sat on the meeting-house steps. The other residents streamed past them. Lander’s words had set Cora in a melancholy place. “I don’t want them to put me out,” she said.

Royal turned over her palm and slid a thumb across her fresh calluses. No need to fret about that, he said. He proposed a trip to see more of Indiana, as a break from her labors.

The next day they set out in a buggy pulled by two piebald horses. With her wages she had bought a new dress and bonnet. The bonnet covered the scar on her temple, for the most part. The scar made her nervous lately. She’d never thought overlong about brands before, the Xs and Ts and clovers slave masters burned into their chattel. A horseshoe puckered on Sybil’s neck, ugly and purple—her first owner had raised draft horses. Cora thanked the Lord that her skin had never been burned in such a way. But we have all been branded even if you can’t see it, inside if not without—and the wound from Randall’s cane was the very same thing, marking her as his.

Cora had been to town plenty, even climbed the steps of the white bakery to buy a cake. Royal took them in the opposite direction. The sky was a sheet of slate but it was still warm, an August afternoon that let you know its kind was running out. They stopped for a picnic at the side of a meadow, under a crab apple tree. He’d packed some bread, jam, and sausage. She let him put his head in her lap. She considered running her hands through the soft black curls by his ears but refrained when a memory of old violence reared up.

On the way back Royal turned the buggy down an overgrown path. Cora wouldn’t have seen it otherwise. Cottonwood swallowed the entrance. He said he wanted to show her something. She thought it might be a pond or a quiet place no one knew about. Instead they rounded a turn and stopped at a forlorn, ramshackle cottage, gray like chewed-up meat. Shutters slanted off, wild grasses bowing from the roof. Weather-beaten was the word—the house was a whipped mutt. She hesitated at the threshold. The grime and moss gave her a lonesome feeling, even with Royal there.

Weeds pushed out of the floor of the main room as well. She covered her nose from the stench. “It makes that manure smell sweet,” she said. Royal laughed and said he’d always thought manure smelled sweet. He uncovered the trapdoor to the cellar and lit a candle. The stairs creaked. Animals scurried in the cellar, outraged over the intrusion. Royal counted off six paces and started digging. He stopped when he had exposed the second trapdoor, and they descended to the station. He warned her about the steps, which were slick with a gray slime.

It was the sorriest, saddest station yet. There was no drop to the tracks—the rails started at the end of the steps and jetted into the dark tunnel. A small handcar rested on the tracks, its iron pump waiting for a human touch to animate it. As in the mica mine in North Carolina, long wooden planks and struts buttressed the walls and ceiling.

“It’s not made for a locomotive,” Royal said. “The tunnel is too small, see. It doesn’t connect to the rest of the line.”

No one had been there in a long time. Cora asked where it went.

Royal grinned. “It’s from before my time. The conductor I replaced showed me when I took over this section. I took that handcar a few miles in, but it was too unsettling. The walls hugging and coming close.” Cora knew better than to ask who built it. All the railroad men, from Lumbly to Royal, countered with a variation of “Who do you think made it? Who makes everything?” She’d get him to tell her one day, she decided.

The ghost tunnel had never been used, Royal said, as far as anyone knew. No one knew when it was dug, or who had lived above. Some engineers told him the house had been built by one of the old surveyors, like Lewis and Clark, who had explored and mapped the American wilderness. “If you saw the entire country,” Royal said, “from the Atlantic to the Pacific, the great Niagara Falls and the Rio Grande, would you make a home here, in the woods of Indiana?” An old station master offered that it had been the home of a major general in the Revolutionary War, a man who had witnessed much bloodshed and had withdrawn from the young nation after helping to bring it into existence.

A recluse story contained more sense, but Royal thought the army part was claptrap. Did Cora notice that there was no sign that someone had lived there, not even an old toothpick or a nail in the wall?

A notion crept over her like a shadow: that this station was not the start of the line but its terminus. Construction hadn’t started beneath the house but at the other end of the black hole. As if in the world there were no places to escape to, only places to flee.

In the cellar above, the scavengers roused to activity, scraping.

Such a dank little hole. Any trip with this point of origin could only be ill-fated. The last time she’d been in one of the railroad’s departure stations it had been brightly lit, generous in its comforts, and had delivered her to the bounty of Valentine. That was in Tennessee, when they waited to be carried away from the dangerous escapade with Ridgeway. The events of that night still made her heart quicken.

—

ONCE they left the slave catcher and his wagon, her rescuers gave their names. Royal was the man who’d spied her in town; his partner was Red, owing to the rusty color of his curly hair. The timid one was Justin, a fugitive like her and unaccustomed to waving bowie knives at white men.

After Cora agreed to go with them—never had an inevitability been so politely proposed—the three men made haste to hide the signs of the altercation. Homer’s looming presence, somewhere in the dark, magnified the urgency. Red kept watch with his rifle as Royal and Justin chained first Boseman and then Ridgeway to the wagon. The slave catcher did not speak, sneering at Cora with his bloody mouth the while.

“That one,” she said, pointing, and Red chained him to the ring her captors had used for Jasper.

They drove the slave catcher’s wagon to the far edge of the pasture, hiding it from the road. Red shackled Ridgeway five times over, using every chain in the wagon’s boot. He tossed the keys into the grass. They chased away the horses. Of Homer, there was no sound; perhaps the boy skulked just outside the lantern light. Whatever head start these measures gave would have to suffice. Boseman let out a mortifying gasp as they departed, which Cora took as his death rattle.

Her rescuers’ cart was a short walk down the road from Ridgeway’s camp. She and Justin hid under a thick blanket in the back and they charged off, at dangerous velocity given the darkness and the uniformly poor quality of Tennessee roads. So agitated by the fight were Royal and Red that they forgot to blindfold their cargo for several miles. Royal was bashful about it. “It’s for the safety of the depot, miss.”

That third trip on the underground railroad began beneath a stable. By now a station meant a descent down impossibly deep steps and the revelation of the next station’s character. The owner of the premises was away on business, Royal told them as he untied the rags from their eyes, a ruse to hide his part in their enterprise. Cora never got his name, nor that of the town of departure. Just that he was another person of subterranean inclinations—and a taste for imported white tile. The walls of the station were covered with it.

“Every time we come down here, there’s something new,” Royal said. The four of them waited for the train at a table covered with a white tablecloth, sitting in heavy chairs upholstered in crimson. Fresh flowers jutted from a vase and paintings of farmland hung on the walls. There was a cut-crystal pitcher full of water, a basket of fruit, and a big loaf of pumpernickel for them to eat.

“This is a rich folk’s house,” Justin said.

“He likes to maintain a mood,” Royal answered.

Red said he liked the white tiles, which were an improvement over the pine boards that had been there formerly. “I don’t know how he put them up himself,” he added.

Royal said he hoped the help had a still tongue.

“You killed that man,” Justin said. He was numb. They had discovered a jug of wine inside a cupboard and the fugitive drank with abandon.

“Ask the girl if he had it coming,” Red said.

Royal grabbed Red’s forearm to stop the man’s trembling. His friend had never taken a man’s life before. The premise of their misadventure was enough to get them hanged, but the murder ensured grim abuse before they swung. Royal was taken aback when Cora told him later that she was wanted for murder in Georgia. He recovered and said, “Then our course was already set from the moment I laid eyes on you, on that dirty street.”

Royal was the first freeborn man Cora had ever met. There were many freemen in South Carolina who’d relocated for the so-called opportunities, but they’d served their time as chattel. Royal took in liberty with his first breath.

He was raised in Connecticut; his father was a barber and his mother a midwife. They were freeborn as well, hailing from New York City. On their orders, Royal apprenticed with a printer as soon as he was old enough to labor. His parents believed in the dignity of the honest trades, envisioning the generations of their family branching into the future, each more accomplished than the last. If the north had eliminated slavery, one day the abominable institution would fall everywhere. The negro’s story may have started in this country with degradation, but triumph and prosperity would be his one day.

Had his parents realized the power of their reminiscences on the boy, they might have been more reserved in their stories of their native city. Royal lit out for Manhattan at eighteen, and his first sight of the majestic city from the rail of the ferry confirmed his fate. He took a room with three other men in a colored boardinghouse in Five Points and hung a shingle as a barber until he met the famous Eugene Wheeler. The white man started a conversation with Royal at an antislavery meeting; impressed, Wheeler told him to come to his office the next day. Royal had read of the man’s exploits in the newspaper—lawyer, abolitionist crusader, bane of slavers and those who did their dirty work. Royal scouted the city jail for runaways the lawyer might defend, ran messages between enigmatic persons, and distributed funds from antislavery societies to relocated fugitives. By his official induction into the underground railroad, he had been its instrument for some time.

“I oil the pistons,” he liked to say. Royal placed the coded messages in the classifieds that informed runaways and conductors of departures. He bribed ship captains and constables, rowed shivering pregnant women across rivers in leaky skiffs, and delivered judges’ release orders to frowning deputies. In general he was paired with a white ally, but Royal’s quick wits and proud bearing made it clear the color of his skin was no impediment. “A free black walks different than a slave,” he said. “White people recognize it immediately, even if they don’t know it. Walks different, talks different, carries himself different. It’s in the bones.” Constables never detained him and kidnappers kept their distance.

His association with Red began with the Indiana posting. Red was from North Carolina, absconding after the regulators strung up his wife and child. He walked the Freedom Trail for miles, searching for their bodies to say goodbye. He failed—the trail of corpses went on forever it seemed, in every direction. When Red made it north, he took up with the railroad and dedicated himself to the cause with a sinister resourcefulness. On hearing of Cora’s accidental killing of the boy in Georgia, he smiled and said, “Good.”

The Justin mission was unusual from the start. Tennessee lay outside Royal’s posting, but the railroad’s local representative had been out of contact since the wildfire. To cancel the train would be disastrous. With no one else available, Royal’s superiors reluctantly sent the two colored agents deep into the Tennessee badlands.

The guns were Red’s idea. Royal had never held one before.

“It fits in your hand,” Royal said, “but it’s as heavy as a cannon.”

“You looked fearsome,” Cora said.

“I was shaking, but inside,” he told her.

Justin’s master often hired him out for masonry work and a sympathetic employer made arrangements with the railroad on his behalf. There was one condition—that Justin hold off on making tracks until he finished the stone wall around the man’s property. They agreed that a gap of three stones was acceptable, if Justin left thorough instructions for completion.

On the appointed day, Justin set off for work one last time. His absence wouldn’t be noticed until nightfall; his employer insisted that Justin never showed up that morning. He was in the back of Royal and Red’s cart by ten o’clock. The plan changed when they came upon Cora in town.

The train pulled into the Tennessee station. It was the most splendid locomotive yet, its shiny red paint returning the light even through the shroud of soot. The engineer was a jolly character with a booming voice, opening the door to the passenger car with no little ceremony. Cora suspected a kind of tunnel madness afflicted railroad engineers, to a man.

After the rickety boxcar and then the cargo platform that had conveyed her to North Carolina, to step into a proper passenger car—well-appointed and comfortable like the ones she’d read about in her almanacs—was a spectacular pleasure. There were seats enough for thirty, lavish and soft, and brass fixtures gleamed where the candlelight fell. The smell of fresh varnish made her feel like the inaugural passenger of a magical, maiden voyage. Cora slept across three seats, free from chains and attic gloom for the first time in months.

The iron horse still rumbled through the tunnel when she woke. Lumbly’s words returned to her: If you want to see what this nation is all about, you have to ride the rails. Look outside as you speed through, and you’ll find the true face of America. It was a joke, then, from the start. There was only darkness outside the windows on her journeys, and only ever would be darkness.

Justin talked in the seat in front of her. He said that his brother and three nieces he’d never met lived up in Canada. He’d spend a few days at the farm and then head north.

Royal assured the fugitive that the railroad was at his disposal. Cora sat up and he repeated what he’d just told her fellow fugitive. She could continue on to a connection in Indiana, or stay on the Valentine farm.

White people took John Valentine as one of theirs, Royal said. His skin was very light. Any person of color recognized his Ethiopian heritage immediately. That nose, those lips, good hair or no. His mother was a seamstress, his father a white peddler who passed through every few months. When the man died, he left his estate to his son, the first time he acknowledged the boy outside of the walls of their house.

Valentine tried his hand at potato farming. He employed six freemen to work his land. He never claimed to be that which he was not, but did not disabuse people of their assumptions. When Valentine purchased Gloria, no one thought twice. One way of keeping a woman was to keep her in bondage, especially if, like John Valentine, you were new to romantic liaisons. Only John, Gloria, and a judge on the other side of the state knew she was free. He was fond of books and taught his wife her letters. They raised two sons. The neighbors thought it broad-minded, if wasteful, that he set them free.

When his eldest boy was five, one of Valentine’s teamsters was strung up and burned for reckless eyeballing. Joe’s friends maintained that he hadn’t been to town that day; a bank clerk friendly with Valentine shared the rumor that the woman was trying to make a paramour jealous. As the years pass, Valentine observed, racial violence only becomes more vicious in its expression. It will not abate or disappear, not anytime soon, and not in the south. He and his wife decided that Virginia was an unfit place to raise a family. They sold the farm and picked up stakes. Land was cheap in Indiana. There were white people there, too, but not so close.

Valentine learned the temperament of Indian corn. Three lucky seasons in a row. When he visited relations back in Virginia, he promoted the advantages of his new home. He hired old cronies. They could even live on his property until they found their footing; he’d expanded his acreage.

Those were the guests he invited. The farm as Cora discovered it originated one winter night after a blur of slow, heavy snow. The woman at the door was an awful sight, frozen half to death. Margaret was a runaway from Delaware. Her journey to the Valentine farm had been fraught—a troupe of hard characters took her on a zigzag route away from her master. A trapper, the pitchman of a medicine show. She roamed from town to town with a traveling dentist until he turned violent. The storm caught her between places. Margaret prayed to God for deliverance, promised an end to the wickedness and moral shortcomings she had expressed in her flight. The lights of Valentine emerged in the gloom.

Gloria tended to her visitor the best she could; the doctor came around on his pony. Margaret’s chills never subsided. She expired a few days later.

The next time Valentine went east on business, a broadsheet promoting an antislavery meeting stopped him in his tracks. The woman in the snow was the emissary of a dispossessed tribe. He bent himself to their service.

By that autumn, his farm was the latest office of the underground railroad, busy with fugitives and conductors. Some runaways lingered; if they contributed, they could stay as long as they liked. They planted the corn. In an overgrown patch, a former plantation bricklayer built a forge for a former plantation blacksmith. The forge spat out nails at a remarkable rate. The men crosscut trees and erected cabins. A prominent abolitionist stopped for a day en route to Chicago and stayed for a week. Luminaries, orators, and artists started attending the Saturday-night discussions on the negro question. One freewoman had a sister in Delaware who’d gotten into difficulties; the sister came out west for a new start. Valentine and the farm’s parents paid her to teach their children, and there were always more children.

With his white face, Royal said, Valentine went down to the county seat and bought parcels for his friends with black faces, the former field hands who had come west, the fugitives who had found a haven on his farm. Found a purpose. When the Valentines arrived, that neck of Indiana was unpopulated. As the towns erupted into being, quickened by the relentless American thirst, the black farm was there as a natural feature of the landscape, a mountain or a creek. Half the white stores depended on its patronage; Valentine residents filled the squares and Sunday markets to sell their crafts. “It’s a place of healing,” Royal told Cora on the train north. “Where you can take stock and make preparations for the next leg of the journey.”

The previous night in Tennessee, Ridgeway had called Cora and her mother a flaw in the American scheme. If two women were a flaw, what was a community?

—

ROYAL didn’t mention the philosophical disputes that dominated the weekly meetings. Mingo, with his schemes for the next stage in the progress of the colored tribe, and Lander, whose elegant but opaque appeals offered no easy remedy. The conductor also avoided the very real matter of the white settlers’ mounting resentment of the negro outpost. The divisions would make themselves known by and by.

As they hurtled through the underground passage, a tiny ship on this impossible sea, Royal’s endorsement achieved its purpose. Cora slapped her hands on the cushions of the parlor car and said the farm suited her just fine.

Justin stayed two days, filled his belly, and joined his relations in the north. He later sent a letter describing his welcome, his new position at a building company. His nieces had signed their names in different-colored ink, frisky and naïve. Once Valentine lay before her in its seductive plenty, there was no question of Cora leaving. She contributed to the life of the farm. This was labor she recognized, she understood the elemental rhythms of planting and harvest, the lessons and imperatives of the shifting seasons. Her visions of city life clouded—what did she know about places like New York City and Boston? She’d grown up with her hands in the dirt.

One month after her arrival, at the mouth of the ghost tunnel, Cora remained certain of her decision. She and Royal were about to return to the farm when a gust swept out of the tunnel’s murky depths. As if something moved toward them, old and dark. She reached for Royal’s arm.

“Why did you bring me here?” Cora said.

“We’re not supposed to talk about what we do down here,” Royal said. “And our passengers aren’t supposed to talk about how the railroad operates—it’d put a lot of good people in danger. They could talk if they wanted to, but they don’t.”

It was true. When she told of her escape, she omitted the tunnels and kept to the main contours. It was private, a secret about yourself it never occurred to you to share. Not a bad secret, but an intimacy so much a part of who you were that it could not be made separate. It would die in the sharing.

“I showed you because you’ve seen more of the railroad than most,” Royal continued. “I wanted you to see this—how it fits together. Or doesn’t.”

“I’m just a passenger.”

“That’s why,” he said. He rubbed his spectacles with his shirttail. “The underground railroad is bigger than its operators—it’s all of you, too. The small spurs, the big trunk lines. We have the newest locomotives and the obsolete engines, and we have handcars like that one. It goes everywhere, to places we know and those we don’t. We got this tunnel right here, running beneath us, and no one knows where it leads. If we keep the railroad running, and none of us can figure it out, maybe you can.”

She told him she didn’t know why it was there, or what it meant. All she knew is that she didn’t want to run anymore. November sapped them with Indiana cold, but two events made Cora forget about the weather. The first was Sam’s appearance on the farm. When he knocked on her cabin, she hugged him tight until he pleaded for her to stop. They wept. Sybil brewed cups of root tea while they composed themselves.

His coarse beard was entwined with gray and his belly had grown large, but he was the same garrulous fellow who’d taken in her and Caesar those long months past. The night the slave catcher came to town had cleaved him from his old life. Ridgeway snatched Caesar at the factory before Sam could warn him. Sam’s voice faltered as he told her how their friend was beaten in the jail. He kept mum about his comrades, but one man said he’d seen the nigger talking to Sam on more than one occasion. That Sam abandoned the saloon in the middle of his shift—and the fact some in town had known Sam since they were children and disliked his self-satisfied nature—sufficed to get his house burned to the ground.

“My grandfather’s house. My house. Everything that was mine.” By the time the mob tore Caesar from the jail and mortally assaulted him, Sam was well on his way north. He paid a peddler for a ride and was on a ship bound for Delaware the next day.

A month later under cover of night, operatives filled in the entrance to the tunnel beneath his house, per railroad policy. Lumbly’s station had been dealt with in similar fashion. “They don’t like to take chances,” he said. The men brought him back a souvenir, a copper mug warped from the fire. He didn’t recognize it but kept it anyway.

“I was a station agent. They found me different things to do.” Sam drove runaways to Boston and New York, hunkered over the latest surveys to devise escape routes, and took care of the final arrangements that would save a fugitive’s life. He even posed as a slave catcher named “James Olney,” prying slaves from jail on the pretext of delivering them to their masters. The stupid constables and deputies. Racial prejudice rotted one’s faculties, he said. He demonstrated his slave-catcher voice and swagger, to Cora’s and Sybil’s amusement.

He had just brought his latest cargo to the Valentine farm, a family of three who’d been hiding out in New Jersey. They had insinuated themselves into the colored community there, Sam said, but a slave catcher nosed around and it was time to flee. It was his final mission for the underground railroad. He was western bound. “Every pioneer I meet, they like their whiskey. They’ll be needing barkeeps in California.”

It heartened her to see her friend happy and fat. So many of those who had helped Cora had come to awful fates. She had not got him killed.

Then he gave her the news from her plantation, the second item that took the sting out of the Indiana cold.

Terrance Randall was dead.

From all accounts, the slave master’s preoccupation with Cora and her escape only deepened over time. He neglected the plantation’s affairs. His day to day on the estate consisted of conducting sordid parties in the big house and putting his slaves to bleak amusements, forcing them to serve as his victims in Cora’s stead. Terrance continued to advertise for her capture, filling the classifieds in far-off states with her description and details of her crime. He upped the considerable reward more than once—Sam had seen the bulletins himself, astounded—and hosted any slave catcher who passed through, to provide a fuller portrait of Cora’s villainy and also to shame the incompetent Ridgeway, who had failed first his father and then him.

Terrance died in New Orleans, in a chamber of a Creole brothel. His heart relented, weakened by months of dissipation.

“Or even his heart was tired of his wickedness,” Cora said. As Sam’s information settled, she asked about Ridgeway.

Sam waved his hand dismissively. “He’s the butt of humor now. He’d been at the end of his career even before”—here he paused—“the incident in Tennessee.”

Cora nodded. Red’s act of murder was not spoken of. The railroad discharged him once they got the full story. Red wasn’t bothered. He had new ideas about how to break the stranglehold of slavery and refused to give up his guns. “Once he lays his hand to the plow,” Royal said, “he is not one to turn back.” Royal was sad to see his friend ride off, but there was no bringing their methods into convergence, not after Tennessee. Cora’s own act of murder he excused as a matter of self-protection, but Red’s naked bloodthirstiness was another matter.

Ridgeway’s penchant for violence and odd fixations had made it hard to find men willing to ride with him. His soiled reputation, coupled with Boseman’s death and the humiliation of being bested by nigger outlaws, turned him into a pariah among his cohort. The Tennessee sheriffs still searched for the murderers, of course, but Ridgeway was out of the hunt. He had not been heard of since the summer.

“What about the boy, Homer?”

Sam had heard about the strange little creature. It was he who eventually brought help to the slave catcher, out in the forest. Homer’s bizarre manner did nothing for Ridgeway’s standing—their arrangement fed unseemly speculations. At any rate, the two disappeared together, their bond unbroken by the assault. “To a dank cave,” Sam said, “as befits those worthless shits.”

Sam stayed on the farm for three days, pursuing the affections of Georgina to no avail. Long enough to mix it up with the shucking bee.

—

THE competition unfolded on the first night of the full moon. The children spent all day arranging the corn into two mammoth piles, inside a border of red leaves. Mingo captained one team—the second year in a row, Sybil observed with distaste. He picked a team full of allies, heedless of representing the breadth of farm society. Valentine’s eldest son, Oliver, gathered a diverse group of newcomers and old hands. “And our distinguished guest, of course,” Oliver said finally, beckoning Sam.

A little boy blew the whistle and the shucking began in a frenzy. This year’s prize was a large silver mirror Valentine had picked up in Chicago. The mirror stood between the piles, tied with a blue ribbon, reflecting the orange flicker of the jack-o’-lanterns. The captains shouted orders to their men while the audience hooted and clapped. The fiddler played a fast and comical accompaniment. The smaller children raced around the piles, snatching the husks, sometimes before they even touched the ground.

“Get that corn!”

“You best hurry up over there!”

Cora watched from the side, Royal’s hand resting on her hip. She had permitted him to kiss her the night before, which he took, not without reason, as an indication Cora was finally allowing him to step up his pursuit. She’d made him wait. He’d wait more. But Sam’s report on Terrance’s demise had softened her, even as it bred spiteful visions. She envisioned her former master tangled in linens, purple tongue poking from his lips. Calling for help that never arrived. Melting to a gory pulp in his casket, and then torments in a hell out of Revelation. Cora believed in that part of the holy book, at least. It described the slave plantation in code.

“This wasn’t harvest on Randall,” Cora said. “It was full moon when we picked, but there was always blood.”

“You’re not on Randall anymore,” Royal said. “You’re free.”

She kept ahold of her temper and whispered, “How so? Land is property. Tools is property. Somebody’s going to auction the Randall plantation, the slaves, too. Relations always coming out when someone dies. I’m still property, even in Indiana.”

“He’s dead. No cousin is going to bother over getting you back, not like he did.” He said, “You’re free.”

Royal joined the singing to change the subject and to remind her that there were things a body could feel good about. A community that had come together, from seeding to harvest to the bee. But the song was a work song Cora knew from the cotton rows, drawing her back to the Randall cruelties and making her heart thud. Connelly used to start the song as a signal to go back to picking after a whipping.

How could such a bitter thing become a means of pleasure? Everything on Valentine was the opposite. Work needn’t be suffering, it could unite folks. A bright child like Chester might thrive and prosper, as Molly and her friends did. A mother raise her daughter with love and kindness. A beautiful soul like Caesar could be anything he wanted here, all of them could be: own a spread, be a schoolteacher, fight for colored rights. Even be a poet. In her Georgia misery she had pictured freedom, and it had not looked like this. Freedom was a community laboring for something lovely and rare.

Mingo won. His men chaired him around the piles of naked cobs, hoarse with cheers. Jimmy said he’d never seen a white man work so hard and Sam beamed with pleasure. Georgina remained unswayed, however.

On the day of Sam’s departure, Cora embraced him and kissed his whiskered cheek. He said he’d send a note when he settled, wherever that was.

They were in the time of short days and long nights. Cora visited the library frequently as the weather turned. She brought Molly when she could coax the girl. They sat next to each other, Cora with a history or a romance, and Molly turning the pages of a fairy tale. A teamster stopped them one day as they were about to enter. “Master said the only thing more dangerous than a nigger with a gun,” he told them, “was a nigger with a book. That must be a big pile of black powder, then!”

When some of the grateful residents proposed building an addition to Valentine’s house for his books, Gloria suggested a separate structure. “That way, anyone with a mind to pick up a book can do so at their leisure.” It also gave the family more privacy. They were generous, but there was a limit.

They put up the library next to the smokehouse. The room smelled pleasantly of smoke when Cora sat down in one of the big chairs with Valentine’s books. Royal said it was the biggest collection of negro literature this side of Chicago. Cora didn’t know if that was true, but she certainly didn’t lack for reading material. Apart from the treatises on farming and the cultivation of various crops, there were rows and rows of histories. The ambitions of the Romans and the victories of the Moors, the royal feuds of Europe. Oversize volumes contained maps of lands Cora had never heard of, the outlines of the unconquered world.

And the disparate literature of the colored tribes. Accounts of African empires and the miracles of the Egyptian slaves who had erected pyramids. The farm’s carpenters were true artisans—they had to be to keep all those books from jumping off the shelves, so many wonders did they contain. Pamphlets of verse by negro poets, autobiographies of colored orators. Phillis Wheatley and Jupiter Hammon. There was a man named Benjamin Banneker who composed almanacs—almanacs! she devoured them all—and served as a confidant to Thomas Jefferson, who composed the Declaration. Cora read the accounts of slaves who had been born in chains and learned their letters. Of Africans who had been stolen, torn from their homes and families, and described the miseries of their bondage and then their hair-raising escapes. She recognized their stories as her own. They were the stories of all the colored people she had ever known, the stories of black people yet to be born, the foundations of their triumphs.

People had put all that down on paper in tiny rooms. Some of them even had dark skin like her. It put her head in a fog each time she opened the door. She’d have to get started if she was going to read them all.

Valentine joined her one afternoon. Cora was friendly with Gloria, who called Cora “the Adventuress,” owing to the many complications of her journey, but she hadn’t spoken to Gloria’s husband beyond greetings. The enormity of her debt was inexpressible, so she avoided him altogether.

He regarded the cover of her book, a romance about a Moorish boy who becomes the scourge of the Seven Seas. The language was simple and she was making quick work of it. “I never did read that,” Valentine said. “I heard you like to spend time here. You’re the one from Georgia?”

She nodded.

“Never been there—the stories are so dismal, I’m liable to lose my temper and make my wife a widow.”

Cora returned his smile. He’d been a presence in the summer months, looking after the Indian corn. The field hands knew indigo, tobacco—cotton, of course—but corn was its own beast. He was pleasant and patient in his instructions. With the changing of the season he was scarce. Feeling poorly, people said. He spent most of his time in the farmhouse, squaring the farm’s accounts.

He wandered to the shelves of maps. Now that they were in the same room, Cora was compelled to rectify her months of silence. She asked after the preparations for the gathering.

“Yes, that,” Valentine said. “Do you think it will happen?”

“It has to,” Cora said.

The meeting had been postponed twice on account of Lander’s speaking engagements. Valentine’s kitchen table started the culture of debate on the farm, when Valentine and his friends—and later, visiting scholars and noted abolitionists—stayed up past midnight arguing over the colored question. The need for trade schools, colored medical schools. For a voice in Congress, if not a representative then a strong alliance with liberal-minded whites. How to undo slavery’s injury to the mental faculties—so many freed men continued to be enslaved by the horrors they’d endured.

The supper conversations became ritual, outgrowing the house and migrating to the meeting house, whereupon Gloria stopped serving food and drink and let them fend for themselves. Those favoring a more gradual view of colored progress traded barbs with those on a more pressing schedule. When Lander arrived—the most dignified and eloquent colored man any of them had seen—the discussions adopted a more local character. The direction of the nation was one matter; the future of the farm, another.

“Mingo promises it will be a memorable occasion,” Valentine said. “A spectacle of rhetoric. These days, I hope they get the spectacle done early so I can retire at a decent hour.” Worn down by Mingo’s lobbying, Valentine had ceded organization of the debate.

Mingo had lived on the farm for a long time, and when it came to addressing Lander’s appeals, it was good to have a native voice. He was not as accomplished a speaker, but as a former slave spoke for a large segment of the farm.

Mingo had taken advantage of the delay to press for improved relations with the white towns. He swayed a few from Lander’s camp—not that it was clear exactly what Lander had in mind. Lander was plainspoken but opaque.

“What if they decide that we should leave?” Cora was surprised at her difficulty in mustering the words.

“They? You’re one of us.” Valentine took the chair that Molly favored on her visits. Up close, it was plain the burden of so many souls had exacted its toll. The man was weariness itself. “It may be out of our hands,” he said. “What we built here…there are too many white people who don’t want us to have it. Even if they didn’t suspect our alliance with the railroad. Look around. If they kill a slave for learning his letters, how do you think they feel about a library? We’re in a room brimming with ideas. Too many ideas for a colored man. Or woman.”

Cora had come to cherish the impossible treasures of the Valentine farm so completely that she’d forgotten how impossible they were. The farm and the adjacent ones operated by colored interests were too big, too prosperous. A pocket of blackness in the young state. Valentine’s negro heritage became known years before. Some felt tricked that they’d treated a nigger as an equal—and then to have that uppity nigger shame them with his success.

She told Valentine of an incident the previous week, when she’d been walking up the road and was almost trampled by a wagon. The driver yelled disgusting epithets as he passed. Cora was not the only victim of abuse. The new arrivals to the nearby towns, the rowdies and low whites, started fights when residents came for supplies. Harassed the young women. Last week a feed store hung a shingle saying WHITES ONLY—a nightmare reaching up from the south to claim them.

Valentine said, “We have a legal right as American citizens to be here.” But the Fugitive Slave Law was a legal fact as well. Their collaborations with the underground railroad complicated things. Slave catchers didn’t show their faces often, but it wasn’t unheard of. Last spring, two catchers appeared with a warrant to search every house on the farm. Their quarry was long gone, but the reminder of the slave patrols exposed the precarious nature of the residents’ lives. One of the cooks urinated in their canteens as they ransacked the cabins.

“Indiana was a slave state,” Valentine continued. “That evil soaks into the soil. Some say it steeps and gets stronger. Maybe this isn’t the place. Maybe Gloria and I should have kept going after Virginia.”

“I feel it when I go to town now,” Cora said. “See that look in their eyes I know.” It wasn’t just Terrance and Connelly and Ridgeway she recognized, the savage ones. She’d watched the faces in the park in North Carolina during the daytime, and at night when they gathered for atrocities. Round white faces like an endless field of cotton bolls, all the same material.

Taking in Cora’s downcast expression, Valentine told her, “I’m proud of what we’ve built here, but we started over once. We can do it again. I have two strong sons to help now, and we’ll get a nice sum for the land. Gloria has always wanted to see Oklahoma, although for the life of me I don’t know why. I try to make her happy.”

“If we stay,” Cora said, “Mingo wouldn’t allow people like me. The runaways. Those with nowhere to go.”

“Talk is good,” Valentine said. “Talk clears the air and makes it so you can see what’s what. We’ll see what the mood of the farm is. It’s mine, but it’s everybody’s, too. Yours. I’ll abide by the decision of the people.”

Cora saw the discussion had depleted him. “Why do all this,” she asked. “For all of us?”

“I thought you were one of the smart ones,” Valentine said. “Don’t you know? White man ain’t going to do it. We have to do it ourselves.”

If the farmer had come in for a specific book, he left empty-handed. The wind whistled through the open door and Cora pulled her shawl tight. If she kept reading, she might start another book by suppertime. The final gathering on Valentine farm took place on a brisk December night. In the years to come, the survivors shared their versions of what happened that evening, and why. Until the day she died, Sybil insisted Mingo was the informer. She was an old lady then, living on a Michigan lake with a gang of grandchildren who had to listen to her familiar stories. According to Sybil, Mingo told the constables that the farm harbored fugitives and provided the particulars for a successful ambush. A dramatic raid would put an end to relations with the railroad, the endless stream of needy negroes, and ensure the longevity of the farm. When asked if he anticipated the violence, she pressed her lips into a line and said no more.

Another survivor—Tom the blacksmith—observed that the law had hunted Lander for months. He was the intended target. Lander’s rhetoric inflamed passions; he fomented rebellion; he was too uppity to allow to run free. Tom never learned to read but liked to show off his volume of Lander’s Appeal, which the great orator had signed to him.

Joan Watson was born on the farm. She was six years old that night. In the aftermath of the attack she wandered the forest for three days, chewing acorns, until a wagon train discovered her. When she got older, she described herself as a student of American history, attuned to the inevitable. She said that white towns had simply banded together to rid themselves of the black stronghold in their midst. That is how the European tribes operate, she said. If they can’t control it, they destroy it.

If anyone on the farm knew what was to come, they gave no sign. Saturday proceeded in lazy calm. Cora spent most of the day in her bedroom with the latest almanac Royal had given her. He’d picked it up in Chicago. He knocked on her door ’round midnight to give it to her; he knew she was awake. It was late and she didn’t want to disturb Sybil and Molly. Cora took him into her room for the first time.

She broke down at the sight of next year’s almanac. Thick as a book of prayer. Cora had told Royal about the attic days in North Carolina, but seeing the year on the cover—an object conjured from the future—spurred Cora to her own magic. She told him about her childhood on Randall where she had picked cotton, tugging a sack. About her grandmother Ajarry who’d been kidnapped from her family in Africa and tilled a small corner of land, the only thing to call her own. Cora spoke of her mother, Mabel, who absconded one day and left her to the inconstant mercy of the world. About Blake and the doghouse and how she had faced him down with a hatchet. When she told Royal about the night they took her behind the smokehouse and she apologized to him for letting it happen, he told her to hush. She was the one due an apology for all her hurts, he said. He told her that every one of her enemies, all the masters and overseers of her suffering, would be punished, if not in this world then the next, for justice may be slow and invisible, but it always renders its true verdict in the end. He folded his body into hers to quiet her shaking and sobs and they fell asleep like that, in the back room of a cabin on the Valentine farm.

She didn’t believe what he said about justice, but it was nice to hear him say it.

Then she woke up the next morning and felt better, and had to admit that she did believe it, maybe just a little.

Thinking Cora was laid up with one of her headaches, Sybil brought her some food around noon. She teased Cora about Royal staying the night. She was mending the dress she’d wear to the gathering when he “come sneaking out of here holding his boots in his hand and looking like a dog that’d stolen some scraps.” Cora just smiled.

“Your man ain’t the only one come around last night,” Sybil said. Lander had returned.

That accounted for Sybil’s playfulness. Lander impressed her mightily, every one of his visits fortifying her for days after. Those honeyed words of his. Now he had finally come back to Valentine. The gathering would happen, to an unknowable outcome. Sybil didn’t want to move west and leave her home, which everyone assumed to be Lander’s solution. She’d been adamant about staying ever since the talk of resettling started. But she wouldn’t abide Mingo’s conditions, that they stop providing shelter to those in need. “There ain’t no place like here, not anywhere. He wants to kill it.”

“Valentine won’t let him spoil it,” Cora said, though after talking with the man in the library it seemed he’d already packed up in his mind.

“We’ll see,” Sybil said. “I may have to give a speech my own self, and tell these people what they need to hear.”

That night Royal and Cora sat in the front row next to Mingo and his family, the wife and children he had rescued from slavery. His wife, Angela, was silent, as always; to hear her speak, you had to hide under the window of their cabin as she counseled her man in private. Mingo’s daughters wore bright blue dresses, their long pigtails entwined with white ribbons. Lander played guessing games with the youngest one as the residents filled the meeting hall. Her name was Amanda. She held a bouquet of cloth flowers; he made a joke about them and they laughed. When Cora caught Lander at a moment such as this, in a brief lapse between performances, he reminded her of Molly. For all his friendly talk, she thought he’d prefer to be home by himself, playing concerts in empty rooms.

He had long, dainty fingers. How curious that one who’d never picked a boll or dug a trench or experienced the cat-o’-nine-tails had come to speak for those who had been defined by those things. He was lean in build, with glowing skin that announced his mixed parentage. She had never seen him rush or hurry. The man moved with exquisite calm, like a leaf drifting on the surface of a pond, making its own way on gentle currents. Then he opened his mouth, and you saw that the forces steering him to your presence were not gentle at all.

There were no white visitors this night. Everyone who lived and worked on the farm was in attendance, as well as the families from the neighboring colored farms. Seeing them all in one room, Cora got an idea of how large they were for the first time. There were people she’d never seen before, like the mischievous little boy who winked at her when their eyes met. Strangers but family, cousins but never introduced. She was surrounded by men and women who’d been born in Africa, or born in chains, who had freed themselves or escaped. Branded, beaten, raped. Now they were here. They were free and black and stewards of their own fates. It made her shiver.

Valentine gripped the lectern for support. “I didn’t grow up the way you did,” he said. “My mother never feared for my safety. No trader was going to snatch me in the night and sell me south. The whites saw the color of my skin, and that sufficed to let me be. I told myself I was doing nothing wrong, but I conducted myself in ignorance all my days. Until you came here and made a life with us.”

He left Virginia, he said, to spare his children the ravages of prejudice and its bully partner, violence. But saving two children is not enough when God has gifted you with so much. “A woman came to us out of the bitter winter—sick and desperate. We could not save her.” Valentine’s voice rasped. “I neglected my duty. As long as one of our family endured the torments of bondage, I was a freeman in name only. I want to express my gratitude to everyone here for helping me to put things right. Whether you have been among us for years or just a few hours, you have saved my life.”

He faltered. Gloria joined him and gathered his body in hers. “Now some of our family have things they want to share with you,” Valentine said, clearing his throat. “I hope you’ll listen to them like you listen to me. There’s room enough for different notions when it comes to charting our path through the wilderness. When the night is dark and full of treacherous footing.”

The farm’s patriarch withdrew from the lectern and Mingo replaced him. Mingo’s children trailed him, kissing his hands for good luck before returning to the pews.

Mingo opened with the story of his journey, the nights he spent begging the Lord for guidance, the long years it took to purchase his family’s freedom. “With my honest labor, one by one, just as you saved yourselves.” He rubbed a knuckle in his eye.

Then he changed course. “We accomplished the impossible,” Mingo said, “but not everyone has the character we do. We’re not all going to make it. Some of us are too far gone. Slavery has twisted their minds, an imp filling their minds with foul ideas. They have given themselves over to whiskey and its false comforts. To hopelessness and its constant devils. You’ve seen these lost ones on the plantations, on the streets of the towns and cities—those who will not, cannot respect themselves. You’ve seen them here, receiving the gift of this place but unable to fit in. They always disappear in the night because deep in their hearts they know they are unworthy. It is too late for them.”

Some of his cronies in the back of the room amened. There are realities we have to face, Mingo explained. White people aren’t going to change overnight. The farm’s dreams are worthy and true, but require a gradual approach. “We can’t save everyone, and acting as if we can will doom us all. You think the white folks—just a few miles from here—are going to endure our impudence forever? We flaunt their weakness. Harboring runaways. Underground railroad agents with guns coming and going. People who are wanted for murder. Criminals.” Cora made fists as Mingo’s gaze fell on her.

The Valentine farm had taken glorious steps into the future, he said. White benefactors supplied schoolbooks for their children—why not ask them to pass the hat for entire schools? And not just one or two, but dozens more? By proving the negro’s thrift and intelligence, Mingo argued, he will enter into American society as a productive member with full rights. Why jeopardize that? We need to slow things down. Reach an accommodation with our neighbors and, most of all, stop activities that will force their wrath upon us. “We’ve built something astounding here,” he concluded. “But it is a precious thing, and it needs to be protected, nourished, or else it will wither, like a rose in a sudden frost.”

During the applause, Lander whispered to Mingo’s daughter and they giggled again. She removed one of the cloth flowers from her bouquet and twisted it into the top buttonhole of his green suit. Lander pretended to sniff its fragrance and mock-swooned.

“It’s time,” Royal said as Lander shook Mingo’s hand and assumed his place at the lectern. Royal had spent the day with him, walking the grounds and talking. Royal didn’t share what Lander would speak on that night, but he had an optimistic air. Formerly, when the subject of relocating came up, Royal told Cora he favored Canada over the west. “They know how to treat free negroes there,” he said. And his work with the railroad? Have to settle down sometime, Royal said. Can’t raise a family while running around on railroad errands. Cora changed the subject when he engaged in such talk.

Now she’d see for herself—they’d all see—what the man from Boston had in mind.

“Brother Mingo made some good points,” Lander said. “We can’t save everyone. But that doesn’t mean we can’t try. Sometimes a useful delusion is better than a useless truth. Nothing’s going to grow in this mean cold, but we can still have flowers.

“Here’s one delusion: that we can escape slavery. We can’t. Its scars will never fade. When you saw your mother sold off, your father beaten, your sister abused by some boss or master, did you ever think you would sit here today, without chains, without the yoke, among a new family? Everything you ever knew told you that freedom was a trick—yet here you are. Still we run, tracking by the good full moon to sanctuary.

“Valentine farm is a delusion. Who told you the negro deserved a place of refuge? Who told you that you had that right? Every minute of your life’s suffering has argued otherwise. By every fact of history, it can’t exist. This place must be a delusion, too. Yet here we are.

“And America, too, is a delusion, the grandest one of all. The white race believes—believes with all its heart—that it is their right to take the land. To kill Indians. Make war. Enslave their brothers. This nation shouldn’t exist, if there is any justice in the world, for its foundations are murder, theft, and cruelty. Yet here we are.

“I’m supposed to answer Mingo’s call for gradual progress, for closing our doors to those in need. I’m supposed to answer those who think this place is too close to the grievous influence of slavery, and that we should move west. I don’t have an answer for you. I don’t know what we should do. The word we. In some ways, the only thing we have in common is the color of our skin. Our ancestors came from all over the African continent. It’s quite large. Brother Valentine has the maps of the world in his splendid library, you can look for yourself. They had different ways of subsistence, different customs, spoke a hundred different languages. And that great mixture was brought to America in the holds of slave ships. To the north, the south. Their sons and daughters picked tobacco, cultivated cotton, worked on the largest estates and smallest farms. We are craftsmen and midwives and preachers and peddlers. Black hands built the White House, the seat of our nation’s government. The word we. We are not one people but many different people. How can one person speak for this great, beautiful race—which is not one race but many, with a million desires and hopes and wishes for ourselves and our children?

“For we are Africans in America. Something new in the history of the world, without models for what we will become.

“Color must suffice. It has brought us to this night, this discussion, and it will take us into the future. All I truly know is that we rise and fall as one, one colored family living next door to one white family. We may not know the way through the forest, but we can pick each other up when we fall, and we will arrive together.”

—

WHEN the former residents of the Valentine farm recalled that moment, when they told strangers and grandchildren of how they used to live and how it came to an end, their voices still trembled years later. In Philadelphia, in San Francisco, in the cow towns and ranches where they eventually made a home, they mourned those who died that day. The air in the room turned prickly, they told their families, quickened by an unseen power. Whether they had been born free or in chains, they inhabited that moment as one: the moment when you aim yourself at the north star and decide to run. Perhaps they were on the verge of some new order, on the verge of clasping reason to disorder, of putting all the lessons of their history to bear on the future. Or perhaps time, as it will, lent the occasion a gravity that it did not possess, and everything was as Lander insisted: They were deluded.

But that didn’t mean it wasn’t true.

The shot hit Lander in the chest. He fell back, dragging down the lectern. Royal was the first one to his feet. As he ran to the fallen man, three bullets bit into his back. He jerked like one of Saint Vitus’s dancers and dropped. Then came a chorus of rifle fire, screams, and broken glass, and a mad scramble overtook the meeting hall.

The white men outside whooped and howled over the carnage. Pell-mell the residents hastened to the exits, squeezing between pews, climbing over them, climbing over one another. Once the main entrance bottlenecked, people crawled over the windowsills. More rifles crackled. Valentine’s sons helped their father to the door. To the left of the stage, Gloria crouched over Lander. She saw there was nothing to be done and followed her family out.

Cora held Royal’s head in her lap, just as she had the afternoon of the picnic. She ran her fingers through his curls and rocked him and wept. Royal smiled through the blood that bubbled on his lips. He told her not to be afraid, the tunnel would save her again. “Go to the house in the woods. You can tell me where it goes.” His body went slack.

Two men grabbed her and removed her from Royal’s body. It’s not safe here, they said. One of them was Oliver Valentine, come back to help others escape the meeting house. He cried and shouted. Cora broke from her rescuers once they got her outside and down the steps. The farm was a commotion. The white posse dragged men and women into the dark, their hideous faces awash with delight. A musket cut down one of Sybil’s carpenters—he held a baby in his arms and they both crashed to the ground. No one knew where best to run, and no reasonable voice could be heard above the clamor. Each person on their own, as they ever had been.

Mingo’s daughter Amanda shook on her knees, her family absent. Desolate in the dirt. Her bouquet had shed its petals. She gripped the naked stems, the iron wires the blacksmith had drawn out on the anvil last week, just for her. The wires cut her palms, she gripped them so tight. More blood in the dirt. As an old woman she would read about the Great War in Europe and recall this night. She lived on Long Island then, after roaming all over the country, in a small house with a Shinnecock sailor who doted on her to excess. She’d spent time in Louisiana and Virginia, where her father opened colored institutions of learning, and California. A spell in Oklahoma, where the Valentines resettled. The conflict in Europe was terrible and violent, she told her sailor, but she took exception to the name. The Great War had always been between the white and the black. It always would be.

Cora called for Molly. She didn’t see anyone she recognized; their faces had been transformed by fear. The heat from the fires washed over her. Valentine’s house was ablaze. A jar of oil exploded against the second floor and John and Gloria’s bedroom caught. The windows of the library shattered and Cora saw the books burning on the shelves inside. She made two steps toward it before Ridgeway grabbed her. They struggled and his big arms encircled her, her feet kicking against the air like those of one hanging from a tree.

Homer was at his side—he was the boy she’d seen in the pews, winking at her. He wore suspenders and a white blouse, looking like the innocent child he would have been in a different world. At the sight of him, Cora added her voice to the chorus of lamentation that echoed across the farm.

“There’s a tunnel, sir,” Homer said. “I heard him say it.”