They picked up Jasper three days out of North Carolina. Jasper was a delivery. He absconded from the Florida cane fields and made it to Tennessee before a tinker caught him stealing food from his pantry. After a few weeks the deputy located his owner, but the tinker had no means of transport. Ridgeway and Boseman were drinking in a tavern around the corner from the jail while little Homer waited with Cora and the wagon. The town clerk approached the famous slave catcher, brokered an arrangement, and Ridgeway now had the nigger chained in the wagon. He hadn’t reckoned the man for a songbird.
The rain tapped on the canopy. Cora enjoyed the breeze and then felt ashamed for enjoying something. They stopped to eat when the rain let up. Boseman slapped Jasper, chuckled, and unchained the two fugitives from the wagon floor. He offered his customary vulgar promise as he knelt before Cora, sniffing. Jasper’s and Cora’s wrists and ankles remained manacled. It was the longest she had ever been in chains.
Crows glided over. The world was scorched and harrowed as far as they could see, a sea of ash and char from the flat planes of the fields up to the hills and mountains. Black trees tilted, stunted black arms pointing as if to a distant place untouched by flame. They rode past the blackened bones of houses and barns without number, chimneys sticking up like grave markers, the husked stone walls of ravaged mills and granaries. Scorched fences marked where cattle had grazed; it was not possible the animals survived.
After two days of riding through it, they were covered in black grime. Ridgeway said it made him feel at home, the blacksmith’s son.
This is what Cora saw: Nowhere to hide. No refuge between those black stalks, even if she weren’t fettered. Even if she had an opportunity.
An old white man in a gray coat trotted by on a dun horse. Like the other travelers they passed on the black road, he slowed in curiosity. Two adult slaves were common enough. But the colored boy in the black suit driving the wagon and his queer smile discomfited strangers. The younger white man with the red derby wore a necklace adorned with pieces of shriveled leather. When they figured out these were human ears, he bared a line of intermittent teeth browned by tobacco. The older white man in command discouraged all conversation with his glowering. The traveler moved on, around the bend where the road limped between the denuded hills.
Homer unfolded a moth-eaten quilt for them to sit on and distributed their portions on tin plates. The slave catcher allowed his prisoners an equal share of the food, a custom dating to his earliest days in the job. It reduced complaints and he billed the client. At the edge of the blackened field they ate the salt pork and the beans Boseman had prepared, the dry flies screeching in waves.
Rain agitated the smell of the fire, making the air bitter. Smoke flavored every bite of food, each sip of water. Jasper sang, “Jump up, the redeemer said! Jump up, jump up if you want to see His face!”
“Hallelujah!” Boseman shouted. “Fat little Jesus baby!” His words echoed and he did a dance, splashing dark water.
“He’s not eating,” Cora said. Jasper had foregone the last few meals, screwing his mouth shut and crossing his arms.
“Then it doesn’t eat,” Ridgeway said. He waited for her to say something, having grown used to her chirping at his remarks. They were on to each other. She kept silent to interrupt their pattern.
Homer scampered over and gobbled down Jasper’s portion. He sensed Cora staring at him and grinned without looking up.
The driver of the wagon was an odd little imp. Ten years old, Chester’s age, but imbued with the melancholy grace of an elderly house slave, the sum of practiced gestures. He was fastidious about his fine black suit and stovepipe hat, extracting lint from the fabric and glaring at it as if it were a poison spider before flicking it. Homer rarely spoke apart from his hectoring of the horses. Of racial affinity or sympathy, he gave no indication. Cora and Jasper might as well have been invisible most of the time, smaller than lint.
Homer’s duties encompassed driving the team, sundry maintenance, and what Ridgeway termed “bookkeeping.” Homer maintained the business accounts and recorded Ridgeway’s stories in a small notebook he kept in his coat pocket. What made this or that utterance from the slave catcher worthy of inclusion, Cora could not discern. The boy preserved worldly truism and matter-of-fact observations about the weather with equal zeal.
Prompted by Cora one night, Ridgeway maintained that he’d never owned a slave in his life, save for the fourteen hours Homer was his property. Why not? she asked. “What for?” he said. Ridgeway was riding through the outskirts of Atlanta—he’d just delivered a husband and wife to their owner, all the way from New York—when he came upon a butcher trying to square a gambling debt. His wife’s family had given them the boy’s mother as a wedding gift. The butcher had sold her during his previous stretch of bad luck. Now it was the boy’s turn. He painted a crude sign to hang around the boy’s neck advertising the offer.
The boy’s strange sensibility moved Ridgeway. Homer’s shining eyes, set in his round pudgy face, were at once feral and serene. A kindred spirit. Ridgeway bought him for five dollars and drew up emancipation papers the next day. Homer remained at his side despite Ridgeway’s halfhearted attempts to shoo him away. The butcher had held no strong opinions on the subject of colored education and had permitted the boy to study with the children of some freemen. Out of boredom, Ridgeway helped him with his letters. Homer pretended he was of Italian extraction when it suited him and let his questioners sit with their bewilderment. His unconventional attire evolved over time; his disposition remained unchanged.
“If he’s free, why don’t he go?”
“Where?” Ridgeway asked. “He’s seen enough to know a black boy has no future, free papers or no. Not in this country. Some disreputable character would snatch him and put him on the block lickety-split. With me, he can learn about the world. Find purpose.”
Each night, with meticulous care, Homer opened his satchel and removed a set of manacles. He locked himself to the driver’s seat, put the key in his pocket, and closed his eyes.
Ridgeway caught Cora looking. “He says it’s the only way he can sleep.”
Homer snored like a rich old man every night.
—
BOSEMAN, for his part, had been riding with Ridgeway for three years. He was a rambler out of South Carolina and found his way to slave catching after a hardscrabble sequence: dockhand, collection agent, gravedigger. Boseman was not the most intelligent fellow but had a knack for anticipating Ridgeway’s wishes in a manner equal parts indispensable and eerie. Ridgeway’s gang numbered five when Boseman joined, but his employees drifted off one by one. The reason was not immediately clear to Cora.
The previous owner of the ear necklace had been an Indian named Strong. Strong had promoted himself as a tracker, but the only creature he sniffed out reliably was whiskey. Boseman won the accessory in a wrestling contest, and when Strong disputed the terms of their match, Boseman clobbered the red man with a shovel. Strong lost his hearing and ditched the gang to work in a tannery in Canada, or so the rumor went. Even though the ears were dried and shriveled, they drew flies when it was hot. Boseman loved his souvenir, however, and the revulsion on a new client’s face was too delectable. The flies hadn’t harassed the Indian when he owned it, as Ridgeway reminded him from time to time.
Boseman stared at the hills between bites and had an uncharacteristically wistful air. He walked off to urinate and when he came back said, “My daddy passed through here, I think. He said it was forest then. When he came back, it had all been cleared by settlers.”
“Now it’s doubly cleared,” Ridgeway responded. “It’s true what you say. This road was a horse path. Next time you need to make a road, Boseman, make sure you have ten thousand starving Cherokee on hand to clear it for you. Saves time.”