By then she had run a few times. When they stopped for supplies, Boseman was distracted by a funeral procession rounding the corner and she made it a couple of yards before a boy tripped her. They added a neck collar, iron links dropping to her wrists like moss. It gave her the posture of a beggar or praying mantis. She ran when the men stopped to relieve themselves at the side of the trail and made it a little farther that time. She ran once at dusk, by a stream, the water making a promise of movement. The slick stones sent her tumbling into the water, and Ridgeway thrashed her. She stopped running.
—
THEY seldom spoke the first days after leaving North Carolina. She thought the confrontation with the mob had exhausted them as much as it had exhausted her, but silence was their policy in general — until Jasper came into their midst. Boseman whispered his rude suggestions and Homer turned back from the driver’s seat to give her an unsettling grin on his inscrutable schedule, but the slave catcher kept his distance at the head of the line. Occasionally he whistled.
Cora caught on that they were heading west instead of south. She’d never paid attention to the sun’s habits before Caesar. He told her it might aid their escape. They stopped in a town one morning, outside a bakery. Cora steeled herself and asked Ridgeway about his plans.
His eyes widened, as if he’d been waiting for her to approach. After this first conversation Ridgeway included her in their plans as if she had a vote. “You were a surprise,” he said, “but don’t worry, we’ll get you home soon enough.”
She was correct, he said. They were headed west. A Georgia planter named Hinton had commissioned Ridgeway to return one of his slaves. The negro in question was a wily and resourceful buck who had relatives in one of the colored settlements in Missouri; reliable information confirmed Nelson plied his trade as a trapper, in broad daylight, without concern of retribution. Hinton was a respected farmer with an enviable spread, a cousin of the governor. Regrettably, one of his overseers had gossiped with a slave wench and now Nelson’s behavior made his owner an object of ridicule on his own land. Hinton had been grooming the boy to be a boss. He promised Ridgeway a generous bounty, going so far as to present a contract in a pretentious ceremony. An elderly darky served as witness, coughing into his hand the while.
Given Hinton’s impatience, the most sensible course was to travel on to Missouri. “Once we have our man,” Ridgeway said, “you can be reunited with your master. From what I’ve seen, he’ll prepare a worthy welcome.”
Ridgeway didn’t hide his disdain for Terrance Randall; the man had what he called an “ornate” imagination when it came to nigger discipline. This much was plain from the moment his gang turned down the road to the big house and saw the three gallows. The young girl was installed in hers, hooked through her ribs by a large metal spike and dangling. The dirt below dark with her blood. The other two gallows stood waiting.
“If I hadn’t been detained upstate,” Ridgeway said, “I’m sure I’d have scooped up the three of you before the trail got cold. Lovey — was that its name?”
Cora covered her mouth to keep in her scream. She failed. Ridgeway waited ten minutes for her to regain her composure. The townspeople looked at the colored girl laying there collapsed on the ground and stepped over her into the bakery. The smell of the snacks filled the street, sweet and beguiling.
Boseman and Homer waited in the drive while he talked to the master of the house, Ridgeway said. The house had been lively and inviting when the father was alive — yes, he had been there before to search for Cora’s mother and come up empty-handed. One minute with Terrance and the cause of the terrible atmosphere was evident. The son was mean, and it was the kind of meanness that infected everything around. The daylight was gray and sluggish from the thunderheads, the house niggers slow and glum.
The newspapers liked to impress the fantasy of the happy plantation and the contented slave who sang and danced and loved Massa. Folks enjoyed that sort of thing and it was politically useful given the combat with the northern states and the antislavery movement. Ridgeway knew that image to be false — he didn’t need to dissemble about the business of slavery — but neither was the menace of the Randall plantation the truth. The place was haunted. Who could blame the slaves their sad comportment with that corpse twisting on a hook outside?
Terrance received Ridgeway into the parlor. He was drunk and had not bothered to dress himself, lounging on the sofa in a red robe. It was tragic, Ridgeway said, to see the degeneration that can happen in just one generation, but money does that to a family sometimes. Brings out the impurities. Terrance remembered Ridgeway from his earlier visit, when Mabel disappeared into the swamp, just like this latest trio. He told Ridgeway that his father had been touched that he came in person to apologize for his incompetence.
“I could have slapped the Randall boy twice across the face without losing the contract,” Ridgeway said. “But in my mature years I decided to wait until I had you and the other one in hand. Something to look forward to.” He assumed from Terrance’s eagerness and the size of the bounty that Cora was her master’s concubine.
Cora shook her head. She had stopped sobbing and stood now, her trembling under control, hands in fists.
Ridgeway paused. “Something else, then. At any rate, you exert a powerful influence.” He resumed the story of his visit to Randall. Terrance briefed the slave catcher on the state of affairs since Lovey’s capture. Just that morning his man Connelly had been informed that Caesar frequented the premises of a local shopkeeper — the man sold the nigger boy’s woodwork, supposedly. Perhaps the slave catcher might visit this Mr. Fletcher and see what developed. Terrance wanted the girl alive but didn’t care how the other one came back. Did Ridgeway know that the boy came from Virginia originally?
Ridgeway did not. This was some sort of jousting about his home state. The windows were closed and yet a disagreeable smell had moved into the room.
“That’s where he learned his bad habits,” Terrance had said. “They’re soft up there. You make sure he learns how we do things in Georgia.” He wanted the law kept out of it. The pair was wanted for the murder of a white boy and wouldn’t make it back once the mob got wind. The bounty accounted for his discretion.
The slave catcher took his leave. The axle of his empty wagon complained, as it did when there was no weight to quiet it. Ridgeway promised himself it would not be empty when he returned. He wasn’t going to apologize to another Randall, certainly not that whelp who ran the place now. He heard a sound and turned back to the house. It came from the girl, Lovey. Her arm fluttered. She was not dead after all. “Lingered another half day, from what I heard.”
Fletcher’s lies collapsed immediately — one of those weak religious specimens — and he relinquished the name of his associate on the railroad, a man named Lumbly. Of Lumbly there was no sign. He never returned after taking Cora and Caesar out of state. “To South Carolina was it?” Ridgeway asked. “Was he also the one who conveyed your mother north?”
Cora kept her tongue. It was not hard to envision Fletcher’s fate, and perhaps his wife’s as well. At least Lumbly made it out. And they hadn’t discovered the tunnel beneath the barn. One day another desperate soul might use that route. To a better outcome, fortune willing.
Ridgeway nodded. “No matter. We have plenty of time to catch each other up. It’s a long ride to Missouri.” The law had caught up with a station master in southern Virginia, he said, who gave up the name of Martin’s father. Donald was dead, but Ridgeway wanted to get a sense of the man’s operation if he could, to understand the workings of the larger conspiracy. He hadn’t expected to find Cora but had been utterly delighted.