“Where did they go?” Cora asked. After her nights with Martin, she had a sense of when white men were on the brink of a story. It gave her time to consider her options.
Ridgeway was an ardent reader of gazettes. The fugitive bulletins made them a requirement in his line of work—Homer maintained a thorough collection—and current affairs generally upheld his theories about society and the human animal. The type of individuals in his employ had made him accustomed to explaining the most elementary facts and history. He could hardly expect a slave girl to know the significance of their environs.
They sat on what was once Cherokee land, he said, the land of their red fathers, until the president decided otherwise and ordered them removed. Settlers needed the land, and if the Indians hadn’t learned by then that the white man’s treaties were entirely worthless, Ridgeway said, they deserved what they got. Some of his friends had been with the army at that time. They rounded up the Indians in camps, the women and children and whatever they could carry on their backs, and marched them west of the Mississippi. The Trail of Tears and Death, as one Cherokee sage put it later, not without cause, not without that Indian flair for rhetoric. Disease and malnutrition, not to mention the biting winter that year, which Ridgeway himself remembered without fondness, claimed thousands. When they got to Oklahoma there were still more white people waiting for them, squatting on the land the Indians had been promised in the latest worthless treaty. Slow learners, the bunch. But here they were on this road today. The trip to Missouri was much more comfortable than it had been previously, tamped by little red feet.
“Progress,” Ridgeway said. “My cousin got lucky and won some Indian land in the lottery, in the north part of Tennessee. Grows corn.”
Cora cocked her head at the desolation. “Lucky,” she said.
On their way in, Ridgeway told them that a lightning strike must have started the fire. The smoke filled the sky for hundreds of miles, tinting the sunset into gorgeous contusions of crimson and purple. This was Tennessee announcing itself: fantastic beasts twisting in a volcano. For the first time, she crossed into another state without using the underground railroad. The tunnels had protected her. The station master Lumbly had said that each state was a state of possibility, with its own customs. The red sky made her dread the rules of this next territory. As they rode toward the smoke, the sunsets inspired Jasper to share a suite of hymns whose central theme was the wrath of God and the mortifications awaiting the wicked. Boseman made frequent trips to the wagon.
The town at the edge of the fire line was overrun with escapees. “Runaways,” Cora declared and Homer turned in his seat to wink. The white families swarmed in a camp off the main street, inconsolable and abject, the meager possessions they were able to save piled around their feet. Figures staggered through the street with demented expressions, wild-eyed, their clothes singed, rags tied around burns. Cora was well-accustomed to the screams of colored babies in torment, hungry, in pain, confused by the mania of those charged to protect them. Hearing the screams of so many little white babies was new. Her sympathies lay with the colored babies.
Empty shelves greeted Ridgeway and Boseman in the general store. The shopkeeper told Ridgeway that homesteaders had started the fire while trying to clear some scrub. The fire escaped them and ravaged the land with bottomless hunger until the rains came finally. Three million acres, the shopkeeper said. The government promised relief but no one could say when it would arrive. The biggest disaster in as long as anyone could remember.
The original residents had a more thorough list of wildfires and floods and tornadoes, Cora thought when Ridgeway shared the shopkeeper’s words. But they were not here to contribute their knowledge. She didn’t know which tribe had called this territory home, but knew it had been Indian land. What land hadn’t been theirs? She had never learned history proper, but sometimes one’s eyes are teacher enough.
“They must have done something to make God angry,” Boseman said.
“Just a spark that got away is all,” Ridgeway said.
They lingered by the road after their lunchtime meal, the white men smoking pipes by the horses and reminiscing an escapade. For all his talk of how long he had hunted her, Ridgeway displayed no urgency about delivering Cora to Terrance Randall. Not that she hurried toward that reunion. Cora stutter-stepped into the burned field. She’d learned to walk with irons. It was hard to believe it had taken this long. Cora had always pitied the downcast coffles marching in their pathetic line past the Randall place. Now look at her. The lesson was unclear. In one respect she had been spared an injury for many years. In another, misfortune had merely bided time: There was no escape. Sores puckered on her skin beneath the iron. The white men paid her no mind as she walked to the black trees.
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.”