فصل 05

South Carolina 30 DOLLARS REWARD

will be given to any person who will deliver to me, or confine in any gaol in the state so that I get her again, a likely yellow NEGRO GIRL 18 years of age who ran away nine months past. She is an artfully lively girl, and will, no doubt, attempt to pass as a free person, has a noticeable scar on her elbow, occasioned by a burn. I have been informed she is lurking in and about Edenton.

BENJ. P. WELLS

MURFREESBORO, JAN. 5, 1812 THE Andersons lived in a lovely clapboard house at the corner of Washington and Main, a few blocks past the hubbub of stores and businesses, where the town settled into private residences for the well-to-do. Beyond the wide front porch, where Mr. and Mrs. Anderson liked to sit in the evenings, the man scooping into his silk tobacco pouch and the woman squinting at her needlework, were the parlor, dining room, and kitchen. Bessie spent most of her time on that first floor, chasing after the children, preparing meals, and tidying up. At the top of the staircase were the bedrooms—Maisie and little Raymond shared theirs—and the second washroom. Raymond took a long nap in the afternoon and Bessie liked to sit in the window seat as he settled into his dreams. She could just make out the top two floors of the Griffin Building, with its white cornices that blazed in the sunlight.

This day she packed a lunch of bread and jam for Maisie, took the boy for a walk, and cleaned the silver and glassware. After Bessie changed the bedding, she and Raymond picked up Maisie from school and they went to the park. A fiddler played the latest melodies by the fountain as the children and their friends diverted themselves with hide-and-seek and hunt the ring. She had to steer Raymond away from a bully, careful not to upset the rascal’s mother, whom she could not pick out. It was Friday, which meant that she ended the day with the shopping. The clouds had moved in, anyway. Bessie put the salt beef and milk and the rest of the supper makings on the family’s account. She signed with an X.

Mrs. Anderson came home at six o’clock. The family doctor had advised her to spend more time out of the house. Her work raising funds for the new hospital assisted in this regard, in addition to her afternoon lunches with the other ladies of the neighborhood. She was in good spirits, rounding up her children for kisses and hugs and promising a treat after dinner. Maisie hopped and squealed. Mrs. Anderson thanked Bessie for her help and bid her good night.

The walk to the dormitories on the other side of town was not far. There were shortcuts, but Bessie liked to take in the lively activity of Main Street in the evening, mingling with the townsfolk, white and colored. She strolled down the line of establishments, never failing to linger by the big glass windows. The dressmaker with her frilly, colorful creations draped on hooped wire, the overstuffed emporiums and their wonderland of goods, the rival general stores on either side of Main Street. She made a game of picking out the latest additions to the displays. The plenty still astounded her. Most impressive of all was the Griffin Building.

At twelve stories, it was one of the tallest buildings in the nation, certainly it towered over any structure in the south. The pride of the town. The bank dominated the first floor, with its vaulted ceiling and Tennessee marble. Bessie had no business there but was not a stranger to the floors above. The previous week she took the children to see their father on his birthday and got to hear the clopping of her footsteps in the beautiful lobby. The elevator, the only one for hundreds of miles, conveyed them to the eighth floor. Maisie and Raymond were not impressed with the machine, having visited many times, but Bessie never failed to be both delighted and frightened by its magic, bracing herself with the brass rail in case of disaster.

They passed the floors of insurance agents, government offices, and export firms. Vacancies were rare; a Griffin address was a great boon to a business’s reputation. Mr. Anderson’s floor was a warren of lawyer’s offices, with rich carpets, walls of dark brown wood, and doors inlaid with frosted glass. Mr. Anderson himself worked on contracts, primarily in the cotton trade. He was quite surprised to see his family. He received the small cake from the children with good cheer, but made it clear he was anxious to get back to his papers. For a moment Bessie wondered if she was in for a scolding, but none came. Mrs. Anderson had insisted on the trip. Mr. Anderson’s secretary held open the door and Bessie hustled the children out to the confectioner.

This evening Bessie passed the shiny brass doors of the bank and continued home. Every day the remarkable edifice served as a monument to her profound change in circumstances. She walked down the sidewalk as a free woman. No one chased her or abused her. Some of Mrs. Anderson’s circle, who recognized Bessie as her girl, sometimes even smiled.

Bessie crossed the street to avoid the jumble of saloons and their disreputable clientele. She stopped herself before she searched for Sam’s face among the drunkards. Around the corner came the more modest homes of the less prosperous white residents. She picked up her pace. There was a gray house on the corner whose owners were indifferent to their dog’s feral displays, and a line of cottages where the wives stared out of the windows with flinty expressions. Many of the white men in this part of town worked as foremen or laborers in the larger factories. They tended not to employ colored help so Bessie had little information about their day to day.

Presently she arrived at the dormitories. The two-story red brick buildings had been completed only a short time before Bessie’s arrival. In time the saplings and hedges on the perimeter would provide shade and character; now they spoke of fine intentions. The brick was a pure, unsullied color, without so much as a dot of mud splashed from the rain. Not even a caterpillar crawling in a nook. Inside, the white paint still smelled fresh in the common spaces, dining rooms, and bunk rooms. Bessie wasn’t the only girl afraid to touch anything apart from the doorknobs. To even leave a speck or scratch mark.

Bessie greeted the other residents as they crossed each other on the sidewalk. Most were returning from work. Others departed to watch over children so their parents could partake of the pleasant evening. Only half of the colored residents worked on Saturdays, so Friday night was busy.

She reached number 18. She said hello to the girls braiding their hair in the common room and darted upstairs to change before dinner. When Bessie arrived in town, most of the eighty beds in the bunk room had been claimed. A day earlier and she might have been sleeping in a bed beneath one of the windows. It would be some time before someone moved away and she could switch to a better position. Bessie liked the breeze afforded by the windows. If she turned her body the other way she might see stars some nights.

Bessie opened the trunk at the foot of her bed and removed the blue dress she bought her second week in South Carolina. She smoothed it over her legs. The soft cotton on her skin still thrilled her. Bessie bunched her work clothes and put them in the sack under the bed. Lately she did her washing on Saturday afternoons following her school lessons. The chore was her way of making up for sleeping in, an indulgence she allowed herself those mornings.

Supper was roast chicken with carrots and potatoes. Margaret the cook lived over in number 8. The proctors felt it prudent that the people who cleaned and cooked in the dorms did so in buildings other than their own. It was a small but worthy idea. Margaret had a heavy hand with the salt, although her meat and poultry were always exquisitely tender. Bessie mopped up the fat with a crust of bread as she listened to the talk of evening plans. Most of the girls stayed in the night before the social, but some of the younger ones were going out to the colored saloon that had recently opened. Although it wasn’t supposed to, the saloon accepted scrip. Another reason to avoid the place, Bessie thought. She brought her dishes to the kitchen and headed back upstairs.

“Bessie?”

“Good evening, Miss Lucy,” Bessie said.

It was rare Miss Lucy stayed this late on a Friday. Most proctors disappeared at six o’clock. To hear the girls from the other dormitories tell it, Miss Lucy’s diligence put her colleagues to shame. To be sure, Bessie had benefited from her advice many times. She admired the way her clothes were always so crisp and fit just so. Miss Lucy wore her hair in a bun and the thin metal of her eyeglasses lent her a severe aspect, but her quick smile told the story of the woman beneath.

“How are things?” Miss Lucy asked.

“Think I’m gonna spend a quiet night in the quarter, Miss Lucy,” Bessie said.

“Dormitory, Bessie. Not quarter.”

“Yes, Miss Lucy.”

“Going to, not gonna.”

“I am working on it.”

“And making splendid progress!” Miss Lucy patted Bessie’s arm. “I want to talk to you Monday morning before you head out for work.”

“Anything wrong, Miss Lucy?”

“Nothing at all, Bessie. We’ll talk then.” She gave a little bow and walked to the office.

Bowing to a colored girl.

—

BESSIE Carpenter was the name on the papers Sam gave her at the station. Months later, Cora still didn’t know how she had survived the trip from Georgia. The darkness of the tunnel quickly turned the boxcar into a grave. The only light came from the engineer’s cabin, through the slats in the front of the rickety car. At one point it shook so much that Cora put her arms around Caesar and they stayed like that for a good while, squeezing each other at the more urgent tremors, pressed against the hay. It felt good to grab him, to anticipate the warm pressure of his rising and falling chest.

Then the locomotive decelerated. Caesar jumped up. They could scarcely believe it, although the runaways’ excitement was tempered. Each time they completed one leg of their journey, the next unexpected segment commenced. The barn of shackles, the hole in the earth, this broken-down boxcar—the heading of the underground railroad was laid in the direction of the bizarre. Cora told Caesar that on seeing the chains, she feared Fletcher had conspired with Terrance from the very beginning and that they had been conveyed to a chamber of horrors. Their plot, escape, and arrival were the elements of an elaborate living play.

The station was similar to their point of departure. Instead of a bench, there was a table and chairs. Two lanterns hung on the wall, and a small basket sat next to the stairs.

The engineer set them loose from the boxcar. He was a tall man with a horseshoe of white hair around his pate and the stoop that came from years of field work. He mopped sweat and soot from his face and was about to speak when a ferocious coughing wracked his person. After a few pulls from his flask the engineer regained his composure.

He cut off their thanks. “This is my job,” he said. “Feed the boiler, make sure she keeps running. Get the passengers where they got to be.” He made for his cabin. “You wait here until they come and fetch you.” In moments the train had disappeared, leaving a swirling wake of steam and noise.

The basket contained victuals: bread, half a chicken, water, and a bottle of beer. They were so hungry they shook out the crumbs from the basket to divvy. Cora even took a sip of the beer. At the footsteps on the stairs, they steeled themselves for the latest representative of the underground railroad.

Sam was a white man of twenty-five years and exhibited none of the eccentric mannerisms of his co-workers. Sturdy in frame and jolly, he wore tan trousers with braces and a thick red shirt that had suffered roughly at the washboard. His mustache curled at the ends, bobbing with his enthusiasm. The station agent shook their hands and appraised them, unbelieving. “You made it,” Sam said. “You’re really here.”

He had brought more food. They sat at the wobbly table and Sam described the world above. “You’re a long way from Georgia,” Sam said. “South Carolina has a much more enlightened attitude toward colored advancement than the rest of the south. You’ll be safe here until we can arrange the next leg of your trip. It might take time.”

“How long?” Caesar asked.

“No telling. There are so many people being moved around, one station at a time. It’s hard to get messages through. The railroad is God’s work, but maddening to manage.” He watched them devour the food with evident pleasure. “Who knows?” he said. “Perhaps you’ll decide to stay. As I said, South Carolina is like nothing you’ve ever seen.”

Sam went upstairs and returned with clothes and a small barrel of water. “You need to wash up,” he said. “I intend that in the kindest way.” He sat on the stairs to give them privacy. Caesar bid Cora to wash up first, and joined Sam. Her nakedness was no novelty, but she appreciated the gesture. Cora started with her face. She was dirty, she smelled, and when she wrung the cloth, dark water spilled out. The new clothes were not stiff negro cloth but a cotton so supple it made her body feel clean, as if she had actually scrubbed with soap. The dress was simple, light blue with plain lines, like nothing she had worn before. Cotton went in one way, came out another.

When Caesar finished washing up, Sam gave them their papers.

“The names are wrong,” Caesar said.

“You’re runaways,” Sam said. “This is who you are now. You need to commit the names and the story to memory.”

More than runaways—murderers, maybe. Cora hadn’t thought of the boy since they stepped underground. Caesar’s eyes narrowed as he made the same calculation. She decided to tell Sam about the fight in the woods.

The station agent made no judgments and looked genuinely aggrieved by Lovey’s fate. He told them he was sorry about their friend. “Hadn’t heard about that. News like that doesn’t travel here like it does some places. The boy may have recovered for all we know, but that does not change your position. All the better that you have new names.”

“It says here we’re the property of the United States Government,” Caesar pointed out.

“That’s a technicality,” Sam said. White families packed up and flocked to South Carolina for opportunities, from as far as New York according to the gazettes. So did free men and women, in a migration the country had never witnessed before. A portion of the colored were runaways, although there was no telling how many, for obvious reasons. Most of the colored folk in the state had been bought up by the government. Saved from the block in some cases or purchased at estate sales. Agents scouted the big auctions. The majority were acquired from whites who had turned their back on farming. Country life was not for them, even if planting was how they had been raised and their family heritage. This was a new era. The government offered very generous terms and incentives to relocate to the big towns, mortgages and tax relief.

“And the slaves?” Cora asked. She did not understand the money talk, but she knew people being sold as property when she heard it.

“They get food, jobs, and housing. Come and go as they please, marry who they wish, raise children who will never be taken away. Good jobs, too, not slave work. But you’ll see soon enough.” There was a bill of sale in a file in a box somewhere, from what he understood, but that was it. Nothing that would be held over them. A confidante in the Griffin Building had forged these papers for them.

“Are you ready?” Sam asked.

Caesar and Cora looked at each other. Then he extended his hand like a gentleman. “My lady?”

She could not prevent herself from smiling, and they stepped into the daylight together.

The government had purchased Bessie Carpenter and Christian Markson from a bankruptcy hearing in North Carolina. Sam helped them rehearse as they walked to town. He lived two miles outside, in a cottage his grandfather had built. His parents had operated the copper shop on Main Street, but Sam chose a different path after they died. He sold the business to one of the many transplants who’d come to South Carolina for a fresh start and Sam now worked at one of the saloons, the Drift. His friend owned the place, and the atmosphere suited his personality. Sam liked the spectacle of the human animal up close, as well as his access to the workings of the town, once the drink loosened tongues. He made his own hours, which was an asset in his other enterprise. The station was buried beneath his barn, as with Lumbly.

At the outskirts Sam gave them detailed directions to the Placement Office. “And if you get lost, just head for that”—he pointed at the skyscraping wonder—“and make a right when you hit Main Street.” He would contact them when he had more information.

Caesar and Cora made their way up the dusty road into town, unbelieving. A buggy rounded the turn and the pair nearly dove into the woods. The driver was a colored boy who tipped his cap in a jaunty fashion. Nonchalant, as if it were nothing. To have such bearing at his young age! When he was out of sight they laughed at their ridiculous behavior. Cora straightened her back and held her head level. They would have to learn how to walk like freemen.

In the following months, Cora mastered posture. Her letters and speech required more attention. After her talk with Miss Lucy, she removed her primer from her trunk. While the other girls gossiped and said good night one by one, Cora practiced her letters. The next time she signed for the Andersons’ groceries, she would write Bessie in careful print. She blew out the candle when her hand cramped.

It was the softest bed she had ever lain in. But then, it was the only bed she had ever lain in. Miss Handler must have been raised in the bosom of saints. Even though the old man was utterly incompetent with regards to the rudiments of writing and speaking, the teacher was never less than polite and indulgent. The entire class—the schoolhouse was full on Saturday mornings—shifted at their desks while the old man sputtered and choked on the day’s lessons. The two girls in front of Cora made cross-eyes at each other and giggled at his botched sounds.

Cora joined the class in exasperation. It was nigh impossible to understand Howard’s speech under normal circumstances. He favored a pidgin of his lost African tongue and slave talk. In the old days, her mother had told her, that half language was the voice of the plantation. They had been stolen from villages all over Africa and spoke a multitude of tongues. The words from across the ocean were beaten out of them over time. For simplicity, to erase their identities, to smother uprisings. All the words except for the ones locked away by those who still remembered who they had been before. “They keep ’em hid like precious gold,” Mabel said.

These were not her mother’s and grandmother’s times. Howard’s attempts at “I am” consumed precious lesson time, already too short after the work week. She had come here to learn.

A gust sent the shutters wheezing on their hinges. Miss Handler put down her chalk. “In North Carolina,” she said, “what we are doing is a crime. I would be fined a hundred dollars and you would receive thirty-nine lashes. That’s from the law. Your master would likely have a more severe punishment.” The woman met Cora’s eyes. The teacher was only a few years older than her but she made Cora feel like an ignorant pickaninny. “It’s hard to start from nothing. A few weeks ago, some of you were where Howard is now. It takes time. And patience.”

She dismissed them. Chastened, Cora snatched up her things, wishing to be the first one out the door. Howard wiped his tears with his sleeve.

The schoolhouse lay south of the rows of girls’ dormitories. The building was also used for meetings in need of a more serious atmosphere than that of the common rooms, Cora noticed, such as the assemblies on hygiene and feminine matters. It looked out on the green, the colored population’s park. Tonight one of the bands from the men’s dormitory was playing in the gazebo for the social.

They deserved Miss Handler’s scolding. South Carolina maintained a different attitude toward colored progress, as Sam had told Cora on the platform. Cora had savored this fact in a multitude of ways over the months, but the provision for colored education was among the most nourishing. Connelly once put out a slave’s eyes for looking at words. He lost Jacob’s labor, though if the man had been talented the overseer would have subjected him to a less drastic punishment. In return he gained the eternal fear of any slave with a notion to learn his letters.

Don’t need eyes to shuck corn, Connelly told them. Or to starve yourself to death, as Jacob did presently.

She put the plantation behind her. She did not live there anymore.

A page slipped out of her primer and she chased it onto the grass. The book was falling apart, from her use and that of the previous owners. Cora had seen little children, ones younger than Maisie, use the same primer for their lessons. New copies with fresh spines. The ones from the colored schoolhouse were well-thumbed and she had to squeeze her letters above and in between other people’s scribblings, but there was no whipping attached just for looking at it.

Her mother would be proud of her. As Lovey’s mother was likely proud of her daughter for running away, for a day and a half. Cora replaced the page in her book. She pushed the plantation from her again. She was getting better at it. Her mind was wily though, twisty. Thoughts she did not like wormed in from the sides, from beneath, through the cracks, from places she had battened down.

Of her mother, for example. Her third week in the dormitory, she knocked on the door of Miss Lucy’s office. If the government kept records of all the colored arrivals, perhaps among the many names was that of her mother. Mabel’s life after her escape was an enigma. It was possible she was one of the freemen who came to South Carolina for the opportunities.

Miss Lucy worked in a room down the hallway from number 18’s common room. Cora did not trust her, yet there she stood. Miss Lucy admitted her. The office was cramped, with filing cabinets the proctor had to squeeze through to get to her desk, but she kept it pleasant with samplers on the walls detailing farming scenes. There was no room for a second chair. Visitors stood for their audience, which kept the visits short.

Miss Lucy regarded Cora over her glasses. “What’s her name?”

“Mabel Randall.”

“Your name is Carpenter,” Miss Lucy said.

“That my daddy’s name. My mother, she a Randall.”

“That is,” Miss Lucy said. “She is.”

She stooped before one of the cabinets and ran her fingers over the blue-tinted papers, glancing in Cora’s direction every so often. Miss Lucy had mentioned that she lived with a group of proctors in a boardinghouse near the square. Cora tried to picture what the woman did when she was not managing the dormitory, how she spent her Sundays. Did she have a young gentleman who took her places? How did an unattached white woman occupy herself in South Carolina? Cora was getting braver but still stuck close to the dormitories when not attending to the Andersons. It seemed prudent, those early days out of the tunnel.

Miss Lucy moved to another cabinet, tugging open a series of drawers, but came up empty. “These records are only of who’s here at our dormitories,” she said. “But we have locations all over the state.” The proctor wrote down her mother’s name and promised to check the master records in the Griffin Building. For the second time she reminded Cora of the lessons in reading and writing, which were optional but recommended, in keeping with their mission of colored uplift, especially for those with aptitude. Then Miss Lucy returned to her work.

It had been a whim. Once Mabel ran, Cora thought of her as little as possible. After landing in South Carolina, she realized that she had banished her mother not from sadness but from rage. She hated her. Having tasted freedom’s bounty, it was incomprehensible to Cora that Mabel had abandoned her to that hell. A child. Her company would have made the escape more difficult, but Cora hadn’t been a baby. If she could pick cotton, she could run. She would have died in that place, after untold brutalities, if Caesar had not come along. In the train, in the deathless tunnel, she had finally asked him why he brought her with him. Caesar said, “Because I knew you could do it.”

How she hated her. The nights without number she spent up in the miserable loft, tossing about, kicking the woman next to her, devising ways off the plantation. Sneaking into a cartload of cotton and leaping to the road outside New Orleans. Bribing an overseer with her favors. Taking her hatchet and running through the swamp as her wretched mother had done. All the sleepless nights. In the light of morning she convinced herself that her scheming had been a dream. Those were not her thoughts, not at all. Because to walk around with that in your mind and do nothing was to die.

She didn’t know where her mother had fled. Mabel hadn’t spent her freedom saving money to buy her daughter out of bondage, that was certain. Randall would not have allowed it, but nonetheless. Miss Lucy never did find her mother’s name in her files. If she had, Cora would have walked up to Mabel and knocked her flat.

“Bessie—you all right with yourself?”

It was Abigail from number 6, who came by for supper occasionally. She was friendly with the girls who worked on Montgomery Street. Cora had been standing in the middle of the grass, staring. She told Abigail everything was fine and returned to the dormitory to do her chores. Yes, Cora needed to keep better guard over her thoughts.

If Cora’s own mask was occasionally askew, she proved adept at maintaining the disguise of Bessie Carpenter, late of North Carolina. She had prepared herself for Miss Lucy’s question about her mother’s surname and for other tracks the conversation might have taken. The interview at the Placement Office that first day had concluded after a few brief questions. The newcomers had toiled either in the house or in the field. In either case, the majority of the openings were domestic work. The families were told to exercise forbearance with inexperienced help.

The doctor’s examination gave her a scare, but not on account of the questions. The gleaming steel instruments in the examination room looked like tools Terrance Randall might have ordered from the blacksmith for sinister purposes.

The doctor’s offices were on the tenth floor of the Griffin. She survived the shock of her first elevator ride and stepped into a long corridor lined with chairs, all of which were full of colored men and women awaiting examinations. After a nurse in a stark white uniform checked her name off a list, Cora joined the group of women. The nervous talk was understandable; for most, this was their first visit with a doctor. On the Randall plantation, the doctor was only called when the slave remedies, the roots and salves, had failed and a valued hand was near death. In most cases there was nothing for the doctor to do at that point but complain about the muddy roads and receive his payment.

They called her name. The window in the examination room granted her a view of the configuration of the town and the verdant countryside for miles and miles. That men had built such a thing as this, a stepping-stone to heaven. She might have stayed there all day, gazing at the landscape, but the examination cut short her reverie. Dr. Campbell was an efficient sort, a portly gentleman who buzzed around the room with his white coat flapping behind him like a cape. He probed about her general health as his young nurse recorded it all on blue paper. From which tribe did her ancestors originate and what did she know of their constitutions? Had she ever been sick? How was the condition of her heart, her lungs? She realized the headaches she had suffered since Terrance’s blows had disappeared since she came to South Carolina.

The intelligence test was brief, consisting of playing with wooden shapes and a series of illustrated quizzes. She undressed for the physical examination. Dr. Campbell looked at her hands. They had softened but were still those of one who had worked the fields. His fingers traced the scars from her whippings. Hazarding a guess as to the number of lashes, he was off by two. He examined her privates with his tools. The exam was painful and made her ashamed, the doctor’s cold attitude doing nothing to ease her discomfort. Cora answered his questions about the assault. Dr. Campbell turned to the nurse and she wrote down his speculations over her ability to mother a child.

A collection of imposing metal instruments lay on a nearby tray. He picked up one of the most terrifying, a thin spike attached to a glass cylinder. “We’re going to take some blood,” he said.

“What for?”

“Blood tells us a lot,” the doctor said. “About diseases. How they spread. Blood research is the frontier.” The nurse grabbed Cora’s arm and Dr. Campbell stabbed the needle in. This explained the howls she had heard in the hall outside. She made her own contribution. Then she was done. In the hall, only the men remained. The chairs were full.

That was her last visit to the tenth floor of the building. Once the new hospital opened, Mrs. Anderson told her one day, the offices of the government doctors were relocating. The floor was already fully leased, Mr. Anderson added. Mrs. Anderson’s own doctor ran his practice on Main Street, above the optician. He sounded like a capable man. In the months that Cora had worked for the family, the mother’s bad days had markedly reduced in number. The tantrums, the afternoons she spent locked in her room with the drapes shut, her severe manner with the children occurred less frequently. Spending more time outside the house, and the pills, had worked wonders.

When Cora finished her Saturday washing and had supper, it was almost time for the social. She put on her new blue dress. It was the prettiest one at the colored emporium. She shopped there as little as possible on account of the markup. From shopping for Mrs. Anderson, she was horrified that things in their local establishment cost two or three times as much as those in the white stores. As for the dress, it had cost a week’s wages and she was forced to use scrip. She had been careful about her spending for the most part. Money was new and unpredictable and liked to go where it pleased. Some of the girls owed months of wages and resorted to scrip for everything now. Cora understood why—after the town deducted for food, housing, and miscellany like upkeep on the dormitories and schoolbooks, there was little left. Best to rely on scrip’s credit sparingly. The dress was a one-time affair, Cora assured herself.

The girls in the bunk room were in a state of great excitement over the evening’s gathering. Cora was no exception. She finished primping. Perhaps Caesar was already on the green.

He waited on one of the benches affording a view of the gazebo and the musicians. He knew she was not going to dance. From across the green, Caesar seemed older than he had in his Georgia days. She recognized his evening clothes from the stacks in the colored emporium, but he wore them with more confidence than other men his age who hailed from plantations. The factory work agreed with him. As well as the other elements of their improved circumstances, of course. In the week since they last saw each other, he had cultivated a mustache.

Then she saw the flowers. She complimented him on the bouquet and thanked him. He complimented her on her dress. He had tried to kiss her a month after they emerged from the tunnel. She pretended it didn’t happen and since then he had joined this performance. One day they would address it. Maybe at that time she would kiss him, she didn’t know.

“I know them,” Caesar said. He pointed at the band as they took their places. “I think they might even be better than George and Wesley.”

Cora and Caesar grew more casual about referring to Randall in public as the months passed. Much of what they said could apply to any former slave who overheard them. A plantation was a plantation; one might think one’s misfortunes distinct, but the true horror lay in their universality. In any event, the music would soon cover their talk of the underground railroad. Cora hoped the musicians wouldn’t think them rude for their inattention. It was unlikely. Playing their music as freemen and not chattel was probably still a cherished novelty. To attack the melody without the burden of providing one of the sole comforts of their slave village. To practice their art with liberty and joy.

The proctors arranged the socials to foster healthy relations between colored men and women, and to undo some of the damage to their personalities wrought by slavery. By their reckoning, the music and dancing, the food and punch, all unfolding on the green in the flickering lantern light, were a tonic for the battered soul. For Caesar and Cora it was one of their few opportunities to catch each other up.

Caesar worked in the machine factory outside town and his changing schedule rarely overlapped with hers. He liked the work. Every week the factory assembled a different machine, determined by the volume of orders. The men arranged themselves before the conveyor belt and each was responsible for attaching his assigned component to the shape moving down the line. At the start of the belt there was nothing, a pile of waiting parts, and when the last man was finished, the result lay before them, whole. It was unexpectedly fulfilling, Caesar said, to witness the complete product, in contrast to the disembodied toil on Randall.

The work was monotonous but not taxing; the changing products helped with the tedium. The lengthy rest breaks were well distributed throughout the shift, arranged according to a labor theorist often quoted by the foremen and managers. The other men were fine fellows. Some still bore the marks of plantation behavior, eager to redress perceived slights and acting as if they still lived under the yoke of reduced resources, but these men improved every week, fortified by the possibilities of their new lives.

The former fugitives traded news. Maisie lost a tooth. This week the factory manufactured locomotive engines—Caesar wondered whether they would one day be used by the underground railroad. The prices at the emporium had gone up again, he observed. This was not news to Cora.

“How is Sam?” Cora asked. It was easier for Caesar to meet with the station agent.

“In his usual temper—cheerful for no reason you can tell. One of the louts at the tavern gave him a black eye. He’s proud of it. Says he’d always wanted one.”

“And the other?”

He crossed his hands on his thighs. “There’s a train in a few days. If we want to take it.” He said that last part as if he knew her attitude.

“Perhaps the next one.”

“Yes, maybe the next one.”

Three trains had passed through since the pair arrived. The first time they talked for hours over whether it was wiser to depart the dark south immediately or see what else South Carolina had to offer. By then they had gained a few pounds, earned wages, and begun to forget the daily sting of the plantation. But there had been real debate, with Cora agitating for the train and Caesar arguing for the local potential. Sam was no help—he was fond of his birthplace and an advocate of South Carolina’s evolution on matters of race. He didn’t know how the experiment would turn out, and he came from a long line of rabble-rousers distrustful of the government, but Sam was hopeful. They stayed. Maybe the next one.

The next one came and went with a shorter discussion. Cora had just finished a splendid meal in her dormitory. Caesar had bought a new shirt. The thought of starving again on the run was not attractive, nor was the prospect of leaving behind the things they had purchased with their toil. The third train came and went, and now this fourth one would, too.

“Maybe we should stay for good,” Cora said.

Caesar was silent. It was a beautiful night. As he promised, the musicians were very talented and played the rags that had made everyone happy at previous socials. The fiddler came from this or that plantation, the banjo man from another state: Every day the musicians in the dormitories shared the melodies from their regions and the body of music grew. The audience contributed dances from their own plantations and copied each other in the circles. The breeze cooled them when they broke away to rest and flirt. Then they started in again, laughing and clapping hands.

“Maybe we should stay,” Caesar repeated. It was decided.

The social ended at midnight. The musicians put out a hat for donations, but most people were deep in scrip by Saturday night so it remained empty. Cora said good night to Caesar and was on her way home when she witnessed an incident.

The woman ran through the green near the schoolhouse. She was in her twenties, of slender build, and her hair stuck up wildly. Her blouse was open to her navel, revealing her breasts. For an instant, Cora was back on Randall and about to be educated in another atrocity.

Two men grabbed the woman and, as gently as they could, stopped her flailing. A crowd gathered. One girl went to fetch the proctors from over by the schoolhouse. Cora shouldered her way in. The woman blubbered incoherently and then said suddenly, “My babies, they’re taking away my babies!”

The onlookers sighed at the familiar refrain. They had heard it so many times in plantation life, the lament of the mother over her tormented offspring. Cora remembered Caesar’s words about the men at the factory who were haunted by the plantation, carrying it here despite the miles. It lived in them. It still lived in all of them, waiting to abuse and taunt when chance presented itself.

The woman calmed down somewhat and was led back to the dormitory at the very rear of the line. Despite the comfort brought by their decision to stay, it was a long night for Cora as her thoughts returned to the woman’s screams, and the ghosts she called her own. “Will I be able to say goodbye? To the Andersons and the children?” Cora asked.

Miss Lucy was sure that could be arranged. The family was fond of her, she said.

“Did I do a bad job?” Cora thought she had made a fine adjustment to the more delicate rhythms of domestic work. She ran her thumb across the pads of her fingers. They were so soft now.

“You did a splendid job, Bessie,” Miss Lucy said. “That’s why when this new placement came up, we thought of you. It was my idea and Miss Handler seconded it. The museum needs a special kind of girl,” she said, “and not many of the residents have adapted as well as you have. You should take it as a compliment.”

Cora was reassured but lingered in the doorway.

“Anything else, Bessie?” Miss Lucy asked, squaring her papers.

Two days after the incident at the social, Cora was still troubled. She asked after the screaming woman.

Miss Lucy nodded in sympathy. “You’re referring to Gertrude,” she said. “I know it was upsetting. She’s fine. They’re keeping her in bed for a few days until she’s herself again.” Miss Lucy explained that there was a nurse on hand checking on her. “That’s why we reserved that dormitory for residents with nervous disorders. It doesn’t make sense for them to mix with the larger population. In number 40, they can get the care they require.”

“I didn’t know 40 was special,” Cora said. “It’s your Hob.”

“I’m sorry?” Miss Lucy asked, but Cora didn’t elaborate. “They’re only there for a short time,” the white woman added. “We’re optimistic.”

Cora didn’t know what optimistic meant. She asked the other girls that night if they were familiar with the word. None of them had heard it before. She decided that it meant trying.

The walk to the museum was the same route she took to the Andersons’, until she turned right at the courthouse. The prospect of leaving the family made her sorrowful. She had little contact with the father, as he left the house early and his office window was one of those in the Griffin that stayed lit the latest. Cotton had made him a slave, too. But Mrs. Anderson had been a patient employer, especially after her doctor’s prescriptions, and the children were pleasant. Maisie was ten. By that age on the Randall plantation all the joy was ground out. One day a pickaninny was happy and the next the light was gone from them; in between they had been introduced to a new reality of bondage. Maisie was spoiled, doubtless, but there were worse things than being spoiled if you were colored. The little girl made Cora wonder what her own children might be like one day.

She’d seen the Museum of Natural Wonders many times on her strolls but never knew what the squat limestone building was for. It occupied an entire block. Statues of lions guarded the long flat steps, seeming to gaze thirstily at the large fountain. Once Cora walked into its influence, the sound of the splashing water dampened the street noise, lifting her into the auspices of the museum.

Inside, she was taken through a door that was off-limits to the public and led into a maze of hallways. Through half-opened doors, Cora glimpsed curious activities. A man put a needle and thread to a dead badger. Another held up yellow stones to a bright light. In a room full of long wooden tables and apparatus she saw her first microscopes. They squatted on the tables like black frogs. Then she was introduced to Mr. Field, the curator of Living History.

“You’ll do perfectly,” he said, scrutinizing her as the men in the rooms had scrutinized the projects on their worktables. His speech at all times was quick and energetic, without a trace of the south. She later discovered that Mr. Fields had been hired from a museum in Boston to update the local practices. “Been eating better since you came, I see,” he said. “To be expected, but you’ll do fine.”

“I start cleaning in here first, Mr. Fields?” Cora had decided on the way over that in her new position she would avoid the cadences of plantation speech the best she could.

“Cleaning? Oh, no. You know what we do here—” He stopped. “Have you been here before?” He explained the business of museums. In this one, the focus was on American history—for a young nation, there was so much to educate the public about. The untamed flora and fauna of the North American continent, the minerals and other splendors of the world beneath their feet. Some people never left the counties where they were born, he said. Like a railroad, the museum permitted them to see the rest of the country beyond their small experience, from Florida to Maine to the western frontier. And to see its people. “People like you,” Mr. Fields said.

Cora worked in three rooms. That first day, gray drapes covered the large glass windows that separated them from the public. The next morning the drapes were gone and the crowds arrived.

The first room was Scenes from Darkest Africa. A hut dominated the exhibit, its walls wooden poles lashed together under a peaked thatch roof. Cora retreated into its shadows when she needed a break from the faces. There was a cooking fire, the flames represented by shards of red glass; a small, roughly made bench; and assorted tools, gourds, and shells. Three large black birds hung from the ceiling on a wire. The intended effect was that of a flock circling over the activity of the natives. They reminded Cora of the buzzards that chewed the flesh of the plantation dead when they were put on display.

The soothing blue walls of Life on the Slave Ship evoked the Atlantic sky. Here Cora stalked a section of a frigate’s deck, around the mast, various small barrels, and coils of rope. Her African costume was a colorful wrap; her sailor outfit made her look like a street rascal, with a tunic, trousers, and leather boots. The story of the African boy went that after he came aboard, he helped out on deck with various small tasks, a kind of apprentice. Cora tucked her hair under the red cap. A statue of a sailor leaned against the gunwale, spyglass pointed. The eyes, mouth, and skin color were painted on its wax head in disturbing hues.

Typical Day on the Plantation allowed her to sit at a spinning wheel and rest her feet, the seat as sure as her old block of sugar maple. Chickens stuffed with sawdust pecked at the ground; from time to time Cora tossed imaginary seed at them. She had numerous suspicions about the accuracy of the African and ship scenes but was an authority in this room. She shared her critique. Mr. Fields did concede that spinning wheels were not often used outdoors, at the foot of a slave’s cabin, but countered that while authenticity was their watchword, the dimensions of the room forced certain concessions. Would that he could fit an entire field of cotton in the display and had the budget for a dozen actors to work it. One day perhaps.

Cora’s criticism did not extend to Typical Day’s wardrobe, which was made of coarse, authentic negro cloth. She burned with shame twice a day when she stripped and got into her costume.

Mr. Fields had the budget for three actors, or types as he referred to them. Also recruited from Miss Handler’s schoolhouse, Isis and Betty were similar in age and build to Cora. They shared costumes. On their breaks, the three discussed the merits and disadvantages of their new positions. Mr. Fields let them be, after a day or two of adjustments. Betty liked that he never showed his temper, as opposed to the family she had just worked for, who were generally nice but there was always the possibility of a misunderstanding or a bad mood that was none of her doing. Isis enjoyed not having to speak. She hailed from a small farm where she was often left to her own devices, save on those nights when the master needed company and she was forced to drink the cup of vice. Cora missed the white stores and their abundant shelves, but she still had her evening walks home, and her game with the changing window displays.

On the other hand, ignoring the museum visitors was a prodigious undertaking. The children banged on the glass and pointed at the types in a disrespectful fashion, startling them as they pretended to fuss with sailor’s knots. The patrons sometimes yelled things at their pantomimes, comments that the girls couldn’t make out but that gave every indication of rude suggestions. The types rotated through the exhibits every hour to ease the monotony of pretending to swab the deck, carve hunting tools, and fondle the wooden yams. If Mr. Fields had one constant instruction, it was that they not sit so much, but he didn’t press it. They teased Skipper John, as they nicknamed the dummy sailor, from their stools as they fiddled with the hemp rope.

—

THE exhibits opened the same day as the hospital, part of a celebration trumpeting the town’s recent accomplishments. The new mayor had been elected on the progress ticket and wanted to ensure that the residents associated him with his predecessor’s forward-looking initiatives, which had been implemented while he was still a property lawyer in the Griffin Building. Cora did not attend the festivities, although she saw the glorious fireworks that night from the dormitory window and got to see the hospital up close when her checkup came around. As the colored residents settled into South Carolina life, the doctors monitored their physical well-being with as much dedication as the proctors who took measure of their emotional adjustments. Some day, Miss Lucy told Cora one afternoon while they walked the green, all the numbers and figures and notes would make a great contribution to their understanding of colored life.

From the front, the hospital was a smart, sprawling single-floor complex that seemed as long as the Griffin Building was tall. It was stark and unadorned in its construction in a way Cora had never seen before, as if to announce its efficiency in its very walls. The colored entrance was around the side but apart from that was identical to the white entrance, in the original design and not an afterthought, as was so often the case.

The colored wing was having a busy morning when Cora gave her name to the receptionist. A group of men, some of whom she recognized from socials and afternoons on the green, filled the adjacent room while they waited for their blood treatments. She hadn’t heard of blood trouble before arriving in South Carolina, but it afflicted a great number of the men in the dormitories and was the source of tremendous effort on the part of the town doctors. The specialists had their own section it seemed, the patients disappearing down a long hall when their name was called.

She saw a different physician this time, one more pleasant than Dr. Campbell. His name was Stevens. He was a northerner, with black curls that verged on womanish, an effect he tempered with his carefully tended beard. Dr. Stevens seemed young for a doctor. Cora took his precociousness as a tribute to his talents. As she moved through the examination, Cora got the impression she was being conveyed on a belt, like one of Caesar’s products, tended down the line with care and diligence.

The physical examination was not as extensive as the first. He consulted the records from her previous visit and added his own notes on blue paper. In between he asked her about dormitory life. “Sounds efficient,” Dr. Stevens said. He declared the museum work “an intriguing public service.”

After she dressed, Dr. Stevens pulled over a wooden stool. His manner remained light as he said, “You’ve had intimate relations. Have you considered birth control?”

He smiled. South Carolina was in the midst of a large public health program, Dr. Stevens explained, to educate folks about a new surgical technique wherein the tubes inside a woman were severed to prevent the growth of a baby. The procedure was simple, permanent, and without risk. The new hospital was specially equipped, and Dr. Stevens himself had studied under the man who pioneered the technique, which had been perfected on the colored inmates of a Boston asylum. Teaching the surgery to local doctors and offering its gift to the colored population was part of the reason he was hired.

“What if I don’t want to?”

“The choice is yours, of course,” the doctor said. “As of this week, it is mandatory for some in the state. Colored women who have already birthed more than two children, in the name of population control. Imbeciles and the otherwise mentally unfit, for obvious reasons. Habitual criminals. But that doesn’t apply to you, Bessie. Those are women who already have enough burdens. This is just a chance for you to take control over your own destiny.”

She wasn’t his first recalcitrant patient. Dr. Stevens put the matter aside without losing his warm demeanor. Her proctor had more information about the program, he told Cora, and was available to talk about any concern.

She walked down the hospital corridor briskly, hungry for air. Cora had become too accustomed to escaping unscathed from encounters with white authority. The directness of his questions and his subsequent elaborations threw her. To compare what had happened the night of the smokehouse with what passed between a man and his wife who were in love. Dr. Stevens’s speech made them the same. Her stomach twisted at the idea. Then there was the matter of mandatory, which sounded as if the women, these Hob women with different faces, had no say. Like they were property that the doctors could do with as they pleased. Mrs. Anderson suffered black moods. Did that make her unfit? Was her doctor offering her the same proposal? No.

As she turned these thoughts over, she found herself in front of the Andersons’ house. Her feet took over when her mind was elsewhere. Perhaps underneath, Cora was thinking about children. Maisie would be at school, but Raymond might be home. She had been too busy the last two weeks to make a proper goodbye.

The girl who opened the door looked at Cora with suspicion, even after she explained who she was.

“I thought her name was Bessie,” the girl said. She was skinny and small, but she held on to the door as if more than happy to throw her weight against it to keep out intruders. “You said you was Cora.”

Cora cursed the doctor’s distraction. She explained that her master named her Bessie, but in the quarter everyone called her Cora because she looked so much like her mother.

“Mrs. Anderson is not at home,” the girl said. “And the children are playing with they friends. You best come back when she’s home.” She shut the door.

For once, Cora took the shortcut home. Talking to Caesar would have helped, but he was at the factory. She lay in her bed until supper. From that day on, she took a route to the museum that avoided the Anderson home.

Two weeks later Mr. Fields decided to give his types a proper tour of the museum. Isis and Betty’s time behind the glass had improved their acting skills. The duo affected a plausible interest as Mr. Fields held forth on the cross-sections of pumpkins and the life rings of venerable white oaks, the cracked-open geodes with their purple crystals like glass teeth, the tiny beetles and ants the scientists had preserved with a special compound. The girls chuckled at the stuffed wolverine’s frozen smile, the red-tailed hawk caught mid-dive, and the lumbering black bear that charged the window. Predators captured in the moment they went in for the kill.

Cora stared at the wax faces of the white people. Mr. Fields’s types were the only living exhibits. The whites were made of plaster, wire, and paint. In one window, two pilgrims in thick wool breeches and doublets pointed at Plymouth rock while their fellow voyagers looked on from ships in the mural. Delivered to safety after the hazardous passage to a new beginning. In another window, the museum arranged a harbor scene, where white colonists dressed like Mohawk Indians hurled crates of tea over the side of the ship with exaggerated glee. People wore different kinds of chains across their lifetimes, but it wasn’t hard to interpret rebellion, even when the rebels wore costumes to deny blame.

The types walked before the displays like paying customers. Two determined explorers posed on a ridge and gazed at the mountains of the west, the mysterious country with its perils and discoveries before them. Who knew what lay out there? They were masters of their lives, lighting out fearlessly into their futures.

In the final window, a red Indian received a piece of parchment from three white men who stood in noble postures, their hands open in gestures of negotiation.

“What’s that?” Isis asked.

“That’s a real tepee,” Mr. Fields said. “We like to tell a story in each one, to illuminate the American experience. Everyone knows the truth of the historic encounter, but to see it before you—”

“They sleep in there?” Isis said.

He explained. And with that, the girls returned to their own windows.

“What do you say, Skipper John,” Cora asked her fellow sailor. “Is this the truth of our historic encounter?” She had lately taken to making conversation with the dummy to add some theater for the audience. Paint had flaked from his cheek, exposing the gray wax beneath.

The stuffed coyotes on their stands did not lie, Cora supposed. And the anthills and the rocks told the truth of themselves. But the white exhibits contained as many inaccuracies and contradictions as Cora’s three habitats. There had been no kidnapped boys swabbing the decks and earning pats on the head from white kidnappers. The enterprising African boy whose fine leather boots she wore would have been chained belowdecks, swabbing his body in his own filth. Slave work was sometimes spinning thread, yes; most times it was not. No slave had ever keeled over dead at a spinning wheel or been butchered for a tangle. But nobody wanted to speak on the true disposition of the world. And no one wanted to hear it. Certainly not the white monsters on the other side of the exhibit at that very moment, pushing their greasy snouts against the window, sneering and hooting. Truth was a changing display in a shop window, manipulated by hands when you weren’t looking, alluring and ever out of reach.

The whites came to this land for a fresh start and to escape the tyranny of their masters, just as the freemen had fled theirs. But the ideals they held up for themselves, they denied others. Cora had heard Michael recite the Declaration of Independence back on the Randall plantation many times, his voice drifting through the village like an angry phantom. She didn’t understand the words, most of them at any rate, but created equal was not lost on her. The white men who wrote it didn’t understand it either, if all men did not truly mean all men. Not if they snatched away what belonged to other people, whether it was something you could hold in your hand, like dirt, or something you could not, like freedom. The land she tilled and worked had been Indian land. She knew the white men bragged about the efficiency of the massacres, where they killed women and babies, and strangled their futures in the crib.

Stolen bodies working stolen land. It was an engine that did not stop, its hungry boiler fed with blood. With the surgeries that Dr. Stevens described, Cora thought, the whites had begun stealing futures in earnest. Cut you open and rip them out, dripping. Because that’s what you do when you take away someone’s babies—steal their future. Torture them as much as you can when they are on this earth, then take away the hope that one day their people will have it better.

“Ain’t that right, Skipper John?” Cora asked. Sometimes, if Cora turned her head fast, it looked as if the thing were winking at her.

A few nights later, she noticed the lights in number 40 were out, even though it was early in the evening. She asked the other girls. “They were moved to the hospital,” one said. “So they can get better.” The night before Ridgeway put an end to South Carolina, Cora lingered on the roof of the Griffin Building, trying to see where she had come from. There was an hour until her meeting with Caesar and Sam and she didn’t relish the idea of fretting on her bed, listening to the chirping of the other girls. Last Saturday after school, one of the men who worked in the Griffin, a former tobacco hand named Martin, told her that the door to the roof was unlocked. Access was easy. If Cora worried about one of the white people who worked on the twelfth floor questioning her when she got off the elevator, Martin told her, she could take the stairs for the final flights.

This was her second twilight visit. The height made her giddy. She wanted to jump up and snatch the gray clouds roiling overhead. Miss Handler had taught the class about the Great Pyramids in Egypt and the marvels the slaves made with their hands and sweat. Were the pyramids as tall as this building, did the pharaohs sit on top and take the measure of their kingdoms, to see how diminished the world became when you gained the proper distance? On Main Street below workmen erected three- and four-story buildings, taller than the old line of two-floor establishments. Cora walked by the construction every day. Nothing as big as the Griffin yet, but one day the building would have brothers and sisters, striding over the land. Whenever she let her dreams take her down hopeful avenues, this notion stirred her, that of the town coming into its own.

To the east side of the Griffin were the white people’s houses and their new projects—the expanded town square, the hospital, and the museum. Cora crossed to the west, where the colored dormitories lay. From this height, the red boxes crept up on the uncleared woods in impressive rows. Is that where she would live one day? A small cottage on a street they hadn’t laid yet? Putting the boy and the girl to sleep upstairs. Cora tried to see the face of the man, conjure the names of the children. Her imagination failed her. She squinted south toward Randall. What did she expect to see? The night took the south into darkness.

And north? Perhaps she would visit one day.

The breeze made her shiver and she headed for the street. It was safe to go to Sam’s now.

Caesar didn’t know why the station agent wanted to see them. Sam had signaled as he passed the saloon and told him, “Tonight.” Cora had not returned to the railroad station since her arrival, but the day of her deliverance was so vivid she had no trouble finding the road. The animal noises in the dark forest, the branches snapping and singing, reminded her of their flight, and then of Lovey disappearing into the night.

She walked faster when the light from Sam’s windows fluttered through the branches. Sam embraced her with his usual enthusiasm, his shirt damp and reeking with spirits. She had been too distracted to notice the house’s disarray on her previous visit, the grimed plates, sawdust, and piles of clothes. To get to the kitchen she had to step over an upturned toolbox, its contents jumbled on the floor, nails fanned like pick-up-sticks. Before she left, she would recommend he contact the Placement Office for a girl.

Caesar had already arrived and sipped a bottle of ale at the kitchen table. He’d brought one of his bowls for Sam and ran his fingers over its bottom as if testing an imperceptible fissure. Cora had almost forgotten he liked to work with wood. She had not seen much of him lately. He had bought more fancy clothes from the colored emporium, she noted with pleasure, a dark suit that fit him well. Someone had taught him how to tie a tie, or perhaps that was a token of his time in Virginia, when he had believed the old white woman would free him and he had worked on his appearance.

“Is there a train coming in?” Cora asked.

“In a few days,” Sam said.

Caesar and Cora shifted in their seats.

“I know you don’t want to take it,” Sam said. “It’s no matter.”

“We decided to stay,” Caesar said.

“We wanted to make sure before we told you,” Cora added.

Sam huffed and leaned back in the creaky chair. “It made me happy to see you skipping the trains and making a go of things here,” the station agent said. “But you may reconsider after my story.”

Sam offered them some sweetmeats—he was a faithful customer of Ideal Bakery off Main Street—and revealed his purpose. “I want to warn you away from Red’s,” Sam said.

“You scared of the competition?” Caesar joked. There was no question on that front. Sam’s saloon did not serve colored patrons. No, Red’s had exclusive claim to the residents of the dormitories with a hankering for drink and dance. It didn’t hurt that they took scrip.

“More sinister,” Sam said. “I’m not sure what to make of it, to be honest.” It was a strange story. Caleb, the owner of the Drift, possessed a notoriously sour disposition; Sam had a reputation as the barkeep who enjoyed conversation. “You get to know the real life of a place, working there,” Sam liked to say. One of Sam’s regulars was a doctor by the name of Bertram, a recent hospital hire. He didn’t mix socially with the other northerners, preferring the atmosphere and salty company at the Drift. He had a thirst for whiskey. “To drown out his sins,” Sam said.

On a typical night, Bertram kept his thoughts close until his third drink, when the whiskey unstoppered him and he rambled animatedly about Massachusetts blizzards, medical-school hazing rituals, or the relative intelligence of Virginia opossum. His discourse the previous evening had turned to female companionship, Sam said. The doctor was a frequent visitor at Miss Trumball’s establishment, preferring it to the Lanchester House, whose girls had a saturnine disposition in his opinion, as if imported from Maine or other gloom-loving provinces.

“Sam?” Cora said.

“I’m sorry, Cora.” He abridged. Dr. Bertram enumerated some of the virtues of Miss Trumball’s, and then added, “Whatever you do, man, keep out of Red’s Café, if you have a taste for nigger gals.” Several of his male patients frequented the saloon, carrying on with the female patrons. His patients believed they were being treated for blood ailments. The tonics the hospital administered, however, were merely sugar water. In fact, the niggers were participants in a study of the latent and tertiary stages of syphilis.

“They think you’re helping them?” Sam asked the doctor. He kept his voice neutral, even as his face got hot.

“It’s important research,” Bertram informed him. “Discover how a disease spreads, the trajectory of infection, and we approach a cure.” Red’s was the only colored saloon in the town proper; the proprietor got a break on the rent for a watchful eye. The syphilis program was one of many studies and experiments under way at the colored wing of the hospital. Did Sam know that the Igbo tribe of the African continent is predisposed to nervous disorders? Suicide and black moods? The doctor recounted the story of forty slaves, shackled together on a ship, who jumped overboard en masse rather than live in bondage. The kind of mind that could conceive of and execute such a fantastic course! What if we performed adjustments to the niggers’ breeding patterns and removed those of melancholic tendency? Managed other attitudes, such as sexual aggression and violent natures? We could protect our women and daughters from their jungle urges, which Dr. Bertram understood to be a particular fear of southern white men.

The doctor leaned in. Had Sam read the newspaper today?

Sam shook his head and topped off the man’s drink.

Still, the barkeep must have seen the editorials over the years, the doctor insisted, expressing anxiety over this very topic. America has imported and bred so many Africans that in many states the whites are outnumbered. For that reason alone, emancipation is impossible. With strategic sterilization—first the women but both sexes in time—we could free them from bondage without fear that they’d butcher us in our sleep. The architects of the Jamaica uprisings had been of Beninese and Congolese extraction, willful and cunning. What if we tempered those bloodlines carefully over time? The data collected on the colored pilgrims and their descendants over years and decades, the doctor said, will prove one of the boldest scientific enterprises in history. Controlled sterilization, research into communicable diseases, the perfection of new surgical techniques on the socially unfit—was it any wonder the best medical talents in the country were flocking to South Carolina?

A group of rowdies stumbled in and crowded Bertram to the end of the bar. Sam was occupied. The doctor drank quietly for a time and then slipped out. “You two are not the sort that goes to Red’s,” Sam said, “but I wanted you to know.”

“Red’s,” Cora said. “This is more than the saloon, Sam. We have to tell them they’re being lied to. They’re sick.”

Caesar was in agreement.

“Will they believe you over their white doctors?” Sam asked. “With what proof? There is no authority to turn to for redress—the town is paying for it all. And then there are all the other towns where colored pilgrims have been installed in the same system. This is not the only place with a new hospital.”

They worked it out over the kitchen table. Was it possible that not only the doctors but everyone who ministered to the colored population was involved in this incredible scheme? Steering the colored pilgrims down this or that path, buying them from estates and the block in order to conduct this experiment? All those white hands working in concert, committing their facts and figures down on blue paper. After Cora’s discussion with Dr. Stevens, Miss Lucy had stopped her one morning on her way to the museum. Had Cora given any thought to the hospital’s birth control program? Perhaps Cora could talk to some of the other girls about it, in words they could understand. It would be very appreciated, the white woman said. There were all sorts of new positions opening up in town, opportunities for people who had proven their worth.

Cora thought back to the night she and Caesar decided to stay, the screaming woman who wandered into the green when the social came to an end. “They’re taking away my babies.” The woman wasn’t lamenting an old plantation injustice but a crime perpetrated here in South Carolina. The doctors were stealing her babies from her, not her former masters.

“They wanted to know what part of Africa my parents hailed from,” Caesar said. “How was I to know? He said I had the nose of a Beninese.”

“Nothing like flattery before they geld a fellow,” Sam said.

“I have to tell Meg,” Caesar said. “Some of her friends spend evenings at Red’s. I know they have a few men they see there.”

“Who’s Meg?” Cora said.

“She’s a friend I’ve been spending time with.”

“I saw you walk down Main Street the other day,” Sam said. “She’s very striking.”

“It was a nice afternoon,” Caesar said. He took a sip of his beer, focusing on the black bottle and avoiding Cora’s eyes.

They made little progress on a course of action, struggling with the problem of whom to turn to and the possible reaction from the other colored residents. Perhaps they would prefer not to know, Caesar said. What were these rumors compared to what they had been freed from? What sort of calculation would their neighbors make, weighing all the promises of their new circumstances against the allegations and the truth of their own pasts? According to the law, most of them were still property, their names on pieces of paper in cabinets kept by the United States Government. For the moment, warning people was all they could do.

Cora and Caesar were almost to town when he said, “Meg works for one of those Washington Street families. One of those big houses you see?”

Cora said, “I’m glad you have friends.”

“You sure?”

“Were we wrong to stay?” Cora asked.

“Maybe this is where we were supposed to get off,” Caesar said. “Maybe not. What would Lovey say?”

Cora had no answer. They didn’t speak again.

—

SHE slept poorly. In the eighty bunks the women snored and shifted under their sheets. They had gone to bed believing themselves free from white people’s control and commands about what they should do and be. That they managed their own affairs. But the women were still being herded and domesticated. Not pure merchandise as formerly but livestock: bred, neutered. Penned in dormitories that were like coops or hutches.

In the morning, Cora went to her assigned work with the rest of the girls. As she and the other types were about to get dressed, Isis asked if she could switch rooms with Cora. She was feeling poorly and wanted to rest at the spinning wheel. “If I could just get off my feet for a bit.”

After six weeks at the museum, Cora hit upon a rotation that suited her personality. If she started in Typical Day on the Plantation, she could get her two plantation shifts finished just after the midday meal. Cora hated the ludicrous slave display and preferred to get it over as soon as possible. The progression from Plantation to Slave Ship to Darkest Africa generated a soothing logic. It was like going back in time, an unwinding of America. Ending her day in Scenes from Darkest Africa never failed to cast her into a river of calm, the simple theater becoming more than theater, a genuine refuge. But Cora agreed to Isis’s request. She would end the day a slave.

In the fields, she was ever under the merciless eye of the overseer or boss. “Bend your backs!” “Work that row!” At the Andersons’, when Maisie was at school or with her playmates and little Raymond was asleep, Cora worked unmolested and unwatched. It was a small treasure in the middle of the day. Her recent installation in the exhibition returned her to the furrows of Georgia, the dumb, open-jawed stares of the patrons stealing her back to a state of display.

One day she decided to retaliate against a red-haired white woman who scowled at the sight of Cora’s duties “at sea.” Perhaps the woman had wed a seaman of incorrigible appetites and hated the reminder—Cora didn’t know the source of her animus, or care. The woman irked her. Cora stared into her eyes, unwavering and fierce, until the woman broke, fairly running from the glass toward the agricultural section.

From then on Cora selected one patron per hour to evil-eye. A young clerk ducking out from his desk in the Griffin, a man of enterprise; a harried matron corralling an unruly clutch of children; one of the sour youths who liked to batter the glass and startle the types. Sometimes this one, sometimes that one. She picked the weak links out from the crowd, the ones who broke under her gaze. The weak link—she liked the ring of it. To seek the imperfection in the chain that keeps you in bondage. Taken individually, the link was not much. But in concert with its fellows, a mighty iron that subjugated millions despite its weakness. The people she chose, young and old, from the rich part of town or the more modest streets, did not individually persecute Cora. As a community, they were shackles. If she kept at it, chipping away at weak links wherever she found them, it might add up to something.

She got good at her evil eye. Looking up from the slave wheel or the hut’s glass fire to pin a person in place like one of the beetles or mites in the insect exhibits. They always broke, the people, not expecting this weird attack, staggering back or looking at the floor or forcing their companions to pull them away. It was a fine lesson, Cora thought, to learn that the slave, the African in your midst, is looking at you, too.

The day Isis felt under the weather, during Cora’s second rotation on the ship, she looked past the glass and saw pigtailed Maisie, wearing one of the dresses Cora used to wash and hang on the line. It was a school trip. Cora recognized the boys and girls who accompanied her, even if the children did not remember her as the Andersons’ old girl. Maisie didn’t place her at first. Then Cora fixed her with the evil eye and the girl knew. The teacher elaborated on the meaning of the display, the other children pointed and jeered at Skipper John’s garish smile—and Maisie’s face twitched in fear. From the outside, no one could tell what passed between them, just like when she and Blake faced each other the day of the doghouse. Cora thought, I’ll break you, too, Maisie, and she did, the little girl scampering out of the frame. She didn’t know why she did it, and was abashed until she took off her costume and returned to the dormitory.

—

SHE called upon Miss Lucy that evening. Cora had been figuring on Sam’s news all day, holding it up to the light like a hideous bauble, tilting it so. The proctor had aided Cora many times. Now her suggestions and advice resembled maneuvers, the way a farmer tricks a donkey into moving in line with his intentions.

The white woman was gathering a stack of her blue papers when Cora poked her head into the office. Was her name written down there, and what were the notes beside it? No, she corrected: Bessie’s name, not hers.

“I only have a moment,” the proctor said.

“I saw people moving back into number 40,” Cora said. “But no one who used to live there. Are they still in the hospital for their treatment?”

Miss Lucy looked at her papers and stiffened. “They were moved to another town,” she said. “We need room for all the new arrivals, so women like Gertrude, the ones who need help, are being sent to where they can get more suitable attention.”

“They’re not coming back?”

“They are not.” Miss Lucy appraised her visitor. “It troubles you, I know. You’re a smart girl, Bessie. I still hope you’ll take on the mantle of leadership with the other girls, even if you don’t think the operation is what you need right now. You could be a true credit to your race if you put your mind to it.”

“I can decide for myself,” Cora said. “Why can’t they? On the plantation, master decided everything for us. I thought we were done with that here.”

Miss Lucy recoiled from the comparison. “If you can’t see the difference between good, upstanding people and the mentally disturbed, with criminals and imbeciles, you’re not the person I thought you were.”

I’m not the person you thought I was.

One of the proctors interrupted them, an older woman named Roberta who often coordinated with the Placement Office. She had placed Cora with the Andersons, those months ago. “Lucy? They’re waiting on you.”

Miss Lucy grumbled. “I have them all right here,” Miss Lucy told her colleague. “But the records in the Griffin are the same. The Fugitive Slave Law says we have to hand over runaways and not impede their capture—not drop everything we’re doing just because some slave catcher thinks he’s onto his bounty. We don’t harbor murderers.” She rose, holding the stack of papers to her chest. “Bessie, we’ll take this up tomorrow. Please think about our discussion.”

Cora retreated to the bunkhouse stairs. She sat on the third step. They could be looking for anyone. The dormitories were full of runaways who’d taken refuge here, in the wake of a recent escape from their chains or after years of making a life for themselves elsewhere. They could be looking for anyone.

They hunted murderers.

Cora went to Caesar’s dormitory first. She knew his schedule but in her fright could not remember his shifts. Outside, she didn’t see any white men, the rough sort she imagined slave catchers to look like. She sprinted across the green. The older man at the dormitory leered at her—there was always a licentious implication when a girl visited the men’s housing—and informed her that Caesar was still at the factory. “You want to wait with me?” he asked.

It was getting dark. She debated whether or not to risk Main Street. The town records had her name as Bessie. The sketches on the fliers Terrance had printed after their escape were crudely drawn but resembled them enough that any savvy hunter would look at her twice. There was no way she would rest until she conferred with Caesar and Sam. She took Elm Street, parallel to Main, until she reached the Drift’s block. Each time she turned a corner, she expected a posse on horses, with torches and muskets and mean smiles. The Drift was full with early-evening carousers, men she recognized and those she did not. She had to pass by the saloon’s window twice before the station agent saw her and motioned for her to come around back.

The men in the saloon laughed. She slipped through the light cast in the alley from inside. The outhouse door was ajar: empty. Sam stood in the shadows, his foot on a crate as he laced his boots. “I was trying to figure out how to get word,” he said. “The slave catcher’s name is Ridgeway. He’s talking to the constable now, about you and Caesar. I’ve been serving two of his men whiskey.”

He handed her a flier. It was one of the bulletins Fletcher had described in his cottage, with one change. Now that she knew her letters, the word murder hooked her heart.

There was a ruckus from inside the bar and Cora stepped farther into the shadows. Sam couldn’t leave for another hour, he said. He’d gather as much information as he could and try to intercept Caesar at the factory. It was best if Cora went ahead to his house and waited.

She ran as she had not in a long time, sticking to the side of the road and darting into the woods at the sound of a traveler. She entered Sam’s cottage through the back door and lit a candle in the kitchen. After pacing, unable to sit, Cora did the only thing that calmed her. She had cleaned all the dishware when Sam returned home.

“It’s bad,” the station agent said. “One of the bounty hunters came in right after we spoke. Had a ring of ears around his neck like a red Indian, a real tough character. He told the others that they knew where you were. They left to meet their man in front, Ridgeway.” He panted from the run over. “I don’t know how, but they know who you are.”

Cora had grabbed Caesar’s bowl. She turned it over in her hands.

“They got a posse together,” Sam said. “I couldn’t get to Caesar. He knows to come here or the saloon—we had a plan. He may already be on his way.” Sam intended to return to the Drift to wait for him.

“Do you think anyone saw us talking?”

“Maybe you should go down to the platform.”

They dragged the kitchen table and the thick gray rug. Together they lifted the door in the floor—it was a tight fit—and the musty air flickered the candles. She took some food and a lantern and descended into the darkness. The door closed above her and the table rumbled back into place.

She had avoided the services at the colored churches in town. Randall forbade religion on his plantation to eliminate the distraction of deliverance, and churching never interested her once she came to South Carolina. It made her seem strange to the other colored residents, she knew, but seeming strange had not bothered her for a long time. Was she supposed to pray now? She sat at the table in the thin lamplight. It was too dark on the platform to make out where the tunnel began. How long would it take them to root out Caesar? How fast could he run? She was aware of the bargains people made in desperate situations. To reduce the fever in a sick baby, to halt the brutalities of an overseer, to deliver one from a host of slave hells. From what she saw, the bargains never bore fruit. Sometimes the fever subsided, but the plantation was always still there. Cora did not pray.

She fell asleep waiting. Later, Cora crawled back up the steps, perching just beneath the door, and listened. It might be day or night in the world. She was hungry and thirsty. She ate some of the bread and sausage. Moving up and down the steps, putting her ear to the door and then retreating after a time, she passed the hours. When she finished the food, her despair was complete. She listened by the door. There was not a sound.

The thundering above woke her, terminating the void. It was not one person, or two, but many men. They ransacked the house and shouted, knocking over cabinets and upending furniture. The noise was loud and violent and so near, she shrank down the steps. She could not make out their words. Then they were done.

The seams in the door permitted no light and no draft. She could not smell the smoke, but she heard the glass shatter and the pop and crackle of the wood.

The house was on fire.