The Underground Railroad

by Colson Whitehead

Mabel had packed for her adventure. A machete. Flint and tinder. She stole a cabin mate’s shoes, which were in better shape. For weeks, her empty garden testified to her miracle. Before she lit out she dug up every turnip and yam from their plot,

cumbersome load and ill-advised for a journey that required a fleet foot.

Randall’s visitors sipped spiced rum as Big Anthony was doused with oil and roasted. The witnesses were spared his screams, as his manhood had been cut off on the first day, stuffed in his mouth, and sewn in. The stocks smoked, charred, and burned, the figures

the wood twisting in the flames as if alive.

She approached him the night of Terrance’s address and he acted as if she had agreed long before. Caesar was like no colored man she had ever met.

“You can read?” Cora asked. “Yes.” A demonstration was impossible of course, but if they made it off the plantation they would depend on this rare gift.

He wanted to go as soon as possible. The following night. The waxing moon would have to suffice. Agents of the underground railroad would be waiting. The underground railroad—Caesar had been very busy.

their escape would cause such a ruckus that there would be no need to alert his man.

Antislavery literature was illegal in this part of the nation. Abolitionists and sympathizers who came down

to Georgia and Florida were run off, flogged and abused by mobs, tarred and feathered. Methodists and their inanities had no place in the bosom of King Cotton. The planters did not abide contagion.

Their speed made them giddy. The impossibility of it. Their fear called after them even if no one else did. They had six hours until their disappearance was discovered and another one or two before the posses reached

where they were now. But fear was already in pursuit, as it had been every day on the plantation, and it matched their pace.

The plan was to shoot west until they hit a string of islands a trapper had shown him, and then bow northeast until the swamp dried up.

“You get on back before you ruin us,” Caesar said. “I’m going where you going,” Lovey said.

“He’s not going to take three of us,” Caesar said. “He know I’m coming?” Cora asked. He shook his head. “Then two surprises as good as one,”

The opportunity stepped up and Lovey availed herself, heedless of the whip.

by the time it got light they were out of the swamp. “They know,” Lovey said when the orange sun broke in the west.

“He thinks I’m good luck, because my mother was the only one.” “You want luck, cut off a rabbit foot,” Lovey said.

Ultimately the pigs did them in. They were following the rut of a hog trail when the white men rushed from the trees. There were four of them. Bait laid on the trail, the hog hunters waited for their quarry, which turned nocturnal in the hot weather. The runaways were a different sort of beast but more remunerative.

Cora hesitated and he tugged her roughly

forward. She followed his instructions. They stopped running when they realized they had no inkling of where they were headed.

Caesar scouted a promising spot and they climbed trees, sleeping like raccoons.

By now the word had spread about last night’s altercation. The patrollers knew the direction they traveled.

The red weathervane was Caesar’s sign that this was the house, the yellow curtains pulled shut in the back window the signal that Fletcher was home but his wife was not.

The host was unhappy to see the extra passenger,

Terrance’s reward was unprecedented. Advertisements were posted at every public place. The worst sort of scoundrels took up the chase. Drunkards, incorrigibles, poor whites who didn’t even own shoes delighted in this opportunity to scourge the colored population.

Until the hog hunters came upon them. Lovey was back on Randall. Posses had called on Fletcher’s house twice already

The story of the escape and their own account of the fight in the woods did much to alleviate Fletcher’s dismay.

The men decided that traveling right under their noses, with the slaves hidden beneath a Hessian blanket in the back of Fletcher’s cart, was the most prudent.

Fletcher introduced him as Lumbly. He shook their hands weakly. “You the conductor?” Caesar asked.

“More of a station agent.”

Fletcher informed them it was time for him to return to his wife: “My part is finished, my friends.”

The only currency to satisfy the debt was their survival and to help others when circumstances permitted. By her accounting, at least.

The stairs led onto a small platform. The black mouths of the gigantic tunnel opened at either end. It must have been twenty feet tall, walls lined with dark and light colored stones in an alternating pattern. The sheer industry that had made such a project possible.

Two steel rails ran the visible length of the tunnel, pinned into the dirt by wooden crossties. The steel ran south and north presumably, springing from some inconceivable source and shooting toward a miraculous terminus.

“Who built it?”

“Who builds anything in this country?”

“You have two choices. We have a train leaving in one hour and another in six hours.

“The next one,” Cora said, standing. There was no question. “The trick of it is, they’re not going to the same place,” Lumbly said. “One’s going one way and the other…”

The runaways didn’t understand. From the station agent’s words, one route might be more direct but more dangerous. Was he saying one route was longer?

How many hands had it required to make this place? And the tunnels beyond, wherever and how far they led? She thought of the picking, how it raced down the furrows at harvest, the African bodies working as one, as fast

as their strength permitted.

The tunnel, the tracks, the desperate souls who found salvation in the coordination of its stations and timetables—this was a marvel to be proud of.

It wasn’t what she envisioned. The locomotive was black, an ungainly contraption led by the triangular snout of the cowcatcher, though there would be few animals where this engine was headed.

small ones in front and three behind. The locomotive pulled one single car, a dilapidated boxcar

Cora and Caesar climbed into the car and Lumbly abruptly shut them in. He peered between the gaps in the wood. “If you want to see what this nation is all about, I always say, you have to ride the rails.

Following Lumbly’s final instructions, Cora looked through the slats. There was only darkness, mile after mile. When they next stepped into the sunlight, they were in South Carolina.

ARNOLD Ridgeway’s father was a blacksmith. The sunset glow of molten iron bewitched him, the way the color emerged in the stock slow and then fast, overtaking it like an emotion, the sudden pliability and restless writhing of the thing as it waited for purpose.

He had a saloon partner named Tom Bird, a half-breed

shared stories of the Great Spirit. The Great Spirit lived in all things—the earth, the sky, the animals and forests—flowing through and connecting them in a divine thread. Although Ridgeway’s father scorned religious talk, Tom Bird’s testimony on the Great Spirit reminded him of how he felt about iron. He bent to no god save the glowing iron he tended in his forge.