The Underground Railroad

by Colson Whitehead

One month after her arrival, at the mouth of the ghost tunnel, Cora remained certain of her decision.

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

“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.

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.

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.

They were in the time of short days and long nights. Cora visited the library frequently as the weather turned.

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.

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.”

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

“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.”

Last week a feed store hung a shingle saying WHITES ONLY—a nightmare reaching up from the south to claim them.

“Indiana was a slave state,” Valentine continued. “That evil soaks into the soil. Some say it steeps and gets stronger.

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.”

Sybil insisted Mingo was the informer.

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.

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.

“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?

good full moon to sanctuary. “Valentine farm is a delusion. Who told you the negro deserved a place of refuge?

“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.

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.

The white men outside whooped and howled over the carnage. Pell-mell the residents hastened to the exits,

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.”

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.

Valentine’s house was ablaze.

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.

Homer was at his side—he was the boy she’d seen in the pews, winking at her.

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.”

RAN AWAY from her legal but not rightful master fifteen months past, a slave girl called CORA; of ordinary height and dark brown complexion; has a star-shape mark on her temple from an injury; possessed of a spirited nature and devious method. Possibly answering to the name BESSIE. Last seen in Indiana among the outlaws of John Valentine Farm.

She has stopped running. Reward remains unclaimed. SHE WAS NEVER PROPERTY. DECEMBER 23

Cora leaned into the pump of the handcar.

She tried the lever again and the handcar crawled forward.

She pumped and pumped and rolled out of the

light. Into the tunnel that no one had made, that led nowhere.

Into northness. Was she traveling through the tunnel or digging it? Each time she brought her arms down on the lever, she drove a pickax into the rock, swung a sledge onto a railroad spike.

the men and women who made the underground railroad. The ones who excavated a million tons of rock and dirt, toiled in the belly of the earth for

deliverance of slaves...

There was only the darkness of the tunnel, and somewhere ahead, an exit. Or a dead end, if that’s what fate decreed—nothing but a blank, pitiless wall.

The mouth of the tunnel started as a tiny hole in the dark. Her strides made it a circle, and then the mouth of a cave, hidden by brush and vines. She pushed aside the brambles and entered the air. It was warm. Still that stingy winter light but warmer than Indiana, the sun almost overhead.

She kneeled to drink from the creek when she stumbled on it. Cool clear water. She washed the soot and grime from her arms and face. “From the mountains,” she said, after an article in one of the dusty almanacs. “Snowmelt.” Hunger made her head light. The sun told her which way was north.

“I go by Ollie,” he said. The other two wagons came into view around the bend. The blanket was stiff and raspy under her chin but she didn’t mind. She wondered where he escaped from, how bad it was, and how far he traveled before he put it behind him.

Runaway slave advertisements come from the digital collections of the University of North Carolina at Greensboro.