The Underground Railroad

by Colson Whitehead

the distance she had traveled from the slave catchers. North Carolina was an improvement, beneath the surface.

Opposite the cave-in, the tunnel terminated after a hundred feet, confirming her fear. She was trapped once more. Cora collapsed on the rocks and wept until sleep overtook her. The station agent woke her. “Oh!”

“What are you doing here?” “I’m a passenger, sir.” “Don’t you know this station is closed?”

His name was Martin Wells. Together they widened the hole in the wall of stone and she squeezed through to the other side.

She gulped the air like water, the night sky the best meal she had ever had, the stars made succulent and ripe after her time below.

The cave-in that had so distressed Cora was a ruse to camouflage the operation below. Despite its success, the new laws in North Carolina had rendered the station inoperable—he was visiting the mine merely to leave a message for the underground railroad that he could accept no more passengers.

Martin stopped the horses. He removed the tarpaulin. “It will be sunrise soon, but I wanted you to see this,” the station agent said.

The corpses hung from trees as rotting ornaments. Some of them were naked, others partially clothed, the trousers black where their bowels emptied when their necks snapped.

One had been castrated, an ugly mouth gaping where his manhood had been. The other was a woman. Her belly curved. Cora had never been good at knowing if a body was with

a child. Their bulging eyes seemed to rebuke her stares,

“They call this road the Freedom Trail now,” Martin said as he covered the wagon again. “The bodies go all the way to town.”

A tall white woman in her nightclothes leaned against

did not look at Cora as she said, “You’re going to get us murdered.”

At the top of the stairs, Ethel stopped and pointed to the washroom. “You smell,” she said. “Be quick about it.”

“Come, come,” she said. Her face set in a grimace. She still had not looked at the fugitive. Cora pulled herself up above the false ceiling, into the cramped nook.

“The girl is coming by and by,” she said. “If she hears you, she’ll turn us in and they will kill us all. Our daughter and her family arrive this afternoon. They cannot know you are here.

The jagged hole had been carved from the inside, the work of a previous occupant who’d taken issue with the state of the lodgings. She wondered where the person was now.

She learned that her hosts would not visit her during the day,

their girl Fiona was working.

On her arrival day there were additional visitors—Martin and Ethel’s daughter, Jane, and her family. From the daughter’s bright and pleasant manner, Cora decided she took after her father,

At one point the girls started for the attic but reconsidered after a discussion about the habits and customs of ghosts. There was indeed a ghost

in the house, but she was done with chains, rattling or no.

Cora did not immediately notice an important feature of the park: Everyone was white.

In North Carolina the negro race did not exist except at the ends of ropes.

A man in a rumpled linen suit took the stage to deliver a brief welcome. Martin told Cora later that this was Judge Tennyson, a respected figure in town when abstemious.

the next act, a coon show. She’d heard of them but had never witnessed their travesties;

Two white men, their faces blackened by burned cork, capered through a series of skits that brought t...

the skinnier performer took off his dilapidated boot and counted his toes over and over again, constantly losing his place, generated the loudest reaction.

The final performance,

was a shor...

the play concerned a slave—again, a white man in burned cork, pink showing on his neck and wrists—who ran north

In the north, a saloon keeper took him on.

ruthless boss, beating and insulting the wayward slave at every turn, stealing wages and dignity, the hard image of northern white attitudes.

The last scene depicted the slave on his master’s doorstep, having once again run away, this time from the false promises of the Free State...

The true purpose of the evening revealed itself.

His voice was firm and clear and for the first time that evening Cora did not miss a single word.

Jamison, though every soul in the park was aware of his identity.

Sleep used to come so hard to me, in the days before our regulators secured the darkness.” He gestured to the formidable band, fifty-strong, who had assembled at the side of the bandstand.

“It’s not every rider who makes a catch his first week out,” Jamison said. “Let’s see what young Richard has for us.” Two night riders dragged a colored girl onstage.

Her gray tunic was torn and smeared with blood and filth, and her head had been crudely shaved.

She absconded from her plantation in the confusion of the reorganization and hid in the woods these many months. Believing she had escaped the logic of our system.”

In the dark, he said, colored miscreants lurked to violate the citizens’ wives and daughters. In the deathless dark, their southern heritage lay defenseless and imperiled. The riders kept them safe.

this new North Carolina and its rights,” Jamison said. “For this separate nation we have forged, free from northern interference and the contamination of a lesser race.

The noose lowered around Louisa’s neck and she was led up the stairs. With the precision born of practice, a night rider threw the rope over the thick, sturdy branch with a single toss.

Cora turned away before the girl swung. She crawled to the opposite side of the nook, in the corner of her latest cage.

The town hushed. Jamison gave the word.

Despite the hour, Martin spoke in a whisper. His next-door neighbor’s son was a night rider. As the slave owners’ enforcers, the patrollers were the law: white, crooked, and merciless.

The revolts were quashed, but the immensity of the colored population remained.

“We know it, but don’t say it,” Cora told Martin.

“And if we say, we don’t say it for anyone to hear,” Cora said. “How big we are.”