The Underground Railroad

by Colson Whitehead

It was his mission to upset, mash, and draw out the metal into the useful things that made society operate: nails, horseshoes, plows, knives, guns. Chains. Working the spirit, he called it.

“You got to

work that spirit, boy.” One day he would find his spirit, his father told him.

Ridgeway was fourteen when he took up with the patrollers.

A boy might find a place.

In another country they would have been criminals, but this was America.

Let his father keep his disdain and his spirit, too. The two men were parts of the same

system, serving a nation rising to its destiny.

Freemen informed on their African brothers and sisters, comparing the descriptions of runaways in the gazettes with the furtive creatures slinking around the colored churches, saloons, and meeting houses.

New York City was a factory of antislavery sentiment. The courts had to sign off before Ridgeway was

permitted to take his charges south.

unstoppable racial logic. If niggers

were supposed to have their freedom, they wouldn’t be in chains. If the red man was supposed to keep hold of his land, it’d still be his. If the white man wasn’t destined to take this new world, he wouldn’t own it now.

the true Great Spirit, the divine thread connecting all human endeavor—if you can keep it, it is yours. Your property, slave or continent. The American imperative.

finally left his father behind, and the burden of that man’s philosophy. Ridgeway was not working the spirit. He was not the smith, rendering order. Not the hammer. Not the anvil. He was the heat.

The slave mothers said, Mind yourself or Mister Ridgeway will come for you.

The slave masters said, Send for Ridgeway.

Mabel’s disappearance nagged at him longer than it should have,

On returning, now charged to find that woman’s daughter, he knew why

Impossible as it seemed, the underground railroad had a spur in

Georgia. He would find it. He woul...

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.

BENJ. P. WELLS MURFREESBORO, JAN. 5, 1812

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.

A delicate matter ... for colored help.

Most impressive of all was the Griffin Building. At twelve stories, it was one of the tallest buildings in the nation,

The pride of the town.

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.

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.

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.

Sam was a white man of twenty-five years and exhibited none of the eccentric mannerisms of his co-workers.

The station agent shook their hands and appraised them, unbelieving. “You made it,” Sam said. “You’re really here.”

“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.”

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.”

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.

Cora straightened her back and held her head level. They would have to learn how to walk like freemen.

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.

She had come here to learn.

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.”

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.

In return he gained the eternal fear of any slave with a notion to learn his letters.

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

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.”

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

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.

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.

It was unexpectedly fulfilling, Caesar said, to witness the complete product, in contrast to the disembodied toil on Randall.

This week the