The Underground Railroad

by Colson Whitehead

THE first time Caesar approached Cora about running north, she said no.

she was part of a bulk purchase, eighty-eight human souls for sixty crates of rum and gunpowder, the price arrived upon after the standard haggling

screams of those shackled to her contrived to drive Ajarry to madness. Because of her tender age, her captors did not immediately force their urges upon her, but eventually some of the more seasoned mates dragged her from the hold six weeks into the

passage.

at the auction in Ouidah,

the rest of her family was purchased by Portuguese traders from the frigate Vivilia, next seen four months later drifting ten miles off Bermuda. Plague had claimed all on board.

The next time Cora’s grandmother was sold was after a month in the pest house on Sullivan’s Island, once the physicians certified her and the rest of the Nanny’s cargo clear of illness.

Traders and procurers from up and down the coast converged on Charleston, checking the merchandise’s eyes and joints and spines, wary of venereal distemper and other afflictions.

The slaves stood naked on the platform. There was a bidding war over a group of Ashanti studs, those Africans of renowned industry and musculature, and the foreman of a limestone quarry boug...

Just before sunset an agent bought her for two hundred and twenty-six dollars. She would have fetched more but for that season’s glut of young girls.

She was branded, not for the first or last time, and fettered to the rest of the day’s acquisitions.

Ajarry spent three months as the property of a Welshman who eventually lost her, three other slaves, and two hogs in a game of whist.

Her price fluctuated.

She learned to quickly adjust to the new plantations, sorting the nigger breakers from the merely cruel, the layabouts from the hardworking, the informers from the secret-keepers. Masters and mistresses in degrees of wickedness, estates of disparate means and ambition.

Wherever she went it was sugar and indigo, except for a stint folding tobacco leaves for one week before she was sold again. The trader called upon the tobacco plantation looking for slaves of breeding age, preferably with all their teeth and of pliable disposition. She was a woman now.

In America the quirk was that people were things. Best to cut your losses on an old man who

won’t survive a trip across the ocean. A young buck from strong tribal stock got customers into a froth. A slave girl squeezing out pups was like a mint, money that bred money. If you were a thing—a cart or a horse or a slave—your value determined your possibilities.

Finally, Georgia.

Randall plantation bought her for two hundred and ninety-two dollars,

She never drew a breath off Randall land ...

her ...

Cora’s grandmother took a husband...

The two plantations were well-stocked, ninety head of nigger on the northern half and eighty-five head on the southern half. Ajarry generally had her pick.

Ajarry bore five children by those men, each delivered in the same spot on the planks of the cabin,

That’s where you came from and where I’ll put you back if you don’t listen.

Two died miserably of fever. One boy cut his foot while playing on a rusted plow, which poisoned his blood. Her yo...

hit him in the head with a wooden block. One after another. At least the...

The child that lived past the age of ten was Cora’s mother, Mabel.

Ajarry died in the cotton, the bolls bobbing around her like whitecaps on the brute ocean. The last of her village, keeled over in the rows from a knot in her brain, blood pouring from her nose and white froth covering her lips.

Know your value and you know your place in the order. To escape the boundary of the plantation was to escape the fundamental principles of your existence: impossible.

It was her grandmother talking that Sunday evening when Caesar

approached Cora about the underground railroad, and she said no. Three weeks later she said yes. This t...

THIRTY DOLLAR REWARD Ran away from the subscriber, living in Salisbury, on the 5th instant, a negro girl by the name of LIZZIE.

I will give the above reward on the delivery of the girl, or for information on her being lodged in any Gaol in this state. All persons are forewarned of harboring said girl, under penalty of law prescribed.

W. M. DIXON JULY ...

WHEN Mabel vanished Cora became a stray. Eleven years old, ten years, thereabouts—there was no one now to tell for sure. In Cora’s shock, the world drained to gray impressions. The first color to return was the simmering brown-red of the soil in her family’s plot. It reawakened her to people and things, and she decided to hold on to her stake, even though she was young and small and had nobody to look after her anymore.

She fought for the dirt. There were the small pests, the ones too young for real work. Cora shooed off those children trampling her sprouts and yelled at them for digging up her yam slips,

And there was Old Abraham to contend with.

Cora overheard him lobby for the redistribution of her parcel. “All that for her.” All three square yards of it.

Sixteen or seventeen. That’s where Cora put her age. One year since Connelly ordered her to take a husband. Two years since Pot and his friends had seasoned her. They had not repeated their violation, and no worthy man paid her notice after that day, given the cabin she called home and the stories of her lunacy.

James Randall had bought

Caesar and Prince to join the field gangs. She had seen him whittling, worrying blocks of pine with his curved carving knives. He didn’t mix with the more bothersome element on the plantation,

“What can I do for you, Caesar?” He didn’t bother to see if anyone was in earshot. He knew there was no one because he had planned. “I’m going back north,” he said. “Soon. Running away. I want you to come.”

“I don’t want you to tell on me,” he said. “Have to trust you on that. But I’m going soon, and I want you. For good luck.”

To ease her restlessness she crept out to her plot and sat on her maple and smelled the air and listened. Things in the swamp whistled and splashed, hunting in the living darkness. To walk in there at night, heading north to the Free States.

Have to take leave of your senses to do that. But her mother had.

Of Mabel there was no sign. No one had escaped the Randall plantation before. The fugitives were always clawed back, betrayed by friends, they misinterpreted the stars and ran deeper into the labyrinth of bondage.

The infamous slave catcher Ridgeway paid a call on the plantation one week later.

Ridgeway’s audience lasted half an hour. He took notes in a small diary and to hear the house speak of it was a man of intense concentration and flowery manner of speech. He did not return for two years, not long before Old Randall’s death, to apologize in person for his failure.

The slave catcher shared rumors of a new branch of the underground railroad said to be operating in the southern part of the state, as impossible as it sounded.