Tennessee proceeded in a series of blights. The blaze had devoured the next two towns on the cindered road. In the morning the remains of a small settlement emerged around a hill, an arrangement of scorched timber and black stonework. First came the stumps of the houses that had once contained the dreams of pioneers, and then the town proper in a line of ruined structures. The town farther along was larger but its rival in destruction. The heart was a broad intersection where ravaged avenues had converged in enterprise, now gone. A baker’s oven in the ruins of the shop like a grim totem, human remains bent behind the steel of a jail cell.
Cora couldn’t tell what feature of the landscape had persuaded the homesteaders to plant their futures, fertile earth or water or vistas. Everything had been erased. If the survivors returned it would be to confirm the resolution to try again somewhere else, scurrying back east or ever west. No resurrection here.
Then they escaped the wildfire’s reach. The birches and wild grasses vibrated with impossible color after their time in the burned land, Edenic and fortifying. In jest, Boseman imitated Jasper’s singing, to mark the change in mood; the black scenery had worked on them more than they knew. The robust corn in the fields, already two feet high, pointed to an exuberant harvest; with equal force the ruined territory had advertised reckonings to come.
Ridgeway called for a stop shortly after noon. The slave catcher stiffened as he read aloud the sign at the crossroads. The town up the road was overcome by yellow fever, he said. All travelers warned away. An alternative trail, smaller and uneven, led southwest.
The sign was new, Ridgeway observed. Most likely the sickness had not run its course.
“My two brothers passed of yellow fever,” Boseman said. He grew up on the Mississippi, where the fever liked to visit when the weather turned warm. His younger brothers’ skin turned jaundiced and waxen, they bled from their eyes and asses and seizures wracked their tiny bodies. Some men took away their corpses in a squeaky wheelbarrow. “It’s a miserable death,” he said, his jokes taken from him again.
Ridgeway knew the town. The mayor was a corrupt boor, the food turned your guts runny, but he held a good thought for them. Going around would add considerable time to their trip. “The fever comes on the boats,” Ridgeway said. From the West Indies, all the way from the dark continent, following in the wake of trade. “It’s a human tax on progress.”
“Who’s the taxman came to collect it?” Boseman said. “I never saw him.” His fear made him skittish and petulant. He didn’t want to linger, even this crossroads too close to the fever’s embrace. Not waiting for Ridgeway’s order—or obeying a signal shared only by the slave catcher and the boy secretary—Homer drove the wagon away from the doomed town.
Two more signs along the southwesterly course maintained the warning. The trails feeding into the quarantined towns displayed no sign of the danger ahead. Traveling through the handiwork of the fire for so long made an unseeable menace more terrifying. It was a long time, after dark, before they stopped again. Time enough for Cora to take stock of her journey from Randall and make a thick braid of her misfortunes.
List upon list crowded the ledger of slavery. The names gathered first on the African coast in tens of thousands of manifests. That human cargo. The names of the dead were as important as the names of the living, as every loss from disease and suicide—and the other mishaps labeled as such for accounting purposes—needed to be justified to employers. At the auction block they tallied the souls purchased at each auction, and on the plantations the overseers preserved the names of workers in rows of tight cursive. Every name an asset, breathing capital, profit made flesh.
The peculiar institution made Cora into a maker of lists as well. In her inventory of loss people were not reduced to sums but multiplied by their kindnesses. People she had loved, people who had helped her. The Hob women, Lovey, Martin and Ethel, Fletcher. The ones who disappeared: Caesar and Sam and Lumbly. Jasper was not her responsibility, but the stains of his blood on the wagon and her clothes might as well have represented her own dead.
Tennessee was cursed. Initially she assigned the devastation of Tennessee—the blaze and the disease—to justice. The whites got what they deserved. For enslaving her people, for massacring another race, for stealing the very land itself. Let them burn by flame or fever, let the destruction started here rove acre by acre until the dead have been avenged. But if people received their just portion of misfortune, what had she done to bring her troubles on herself? In another list, Cora marked the decisions that led her to this wagon and its iron rings. There was the boy Chester, and how she had shielded him. The whip was the standard punishment for disobedience. Running away was a transgression so large that the punishment enveloped every generous soul on her brief tour of freedom.
Bouncing on the wagon springs, she smelled the damp earth and the heaving trees. Why had this field escaped while another burned five miles back? Plantation justice was mean and constant, but the world was indiscriminate. Out in the world, the wicked escaped comeuppance and the decent stood in their stead at the whipping tree. Tennessee’s disasters were the fruit of indifferent nature, without connection to the crimes of the homesteaders. To how the Cherokee had lived their lives.
Just a spark that got away.
No chains fastened Cora’s misfortunes to her character or actions. Her skin was black and this was how the world treated black people. No more, no less. Every state is different, Lumbly said. If Tennessee had a temperament, it took after the dark personality of the world, with a taste for arbitrary punishment. No one was spared, regardless of the shape of their dreams or the color of their skin.
A young man with curly brown hair, pebbly eyes dark beneath his straw hat, drove a team of workhorses from the west. His cheeks were sunburned a painful red. He intercepted Ridgeway’s gang. A big settlement lay ahead, the man said, with a reputation for a rambunctious spirit. Free of yellow fever as of that morning. Ridgeway told the man what lay ahead of him and gave his thanks.
Immediately the traffic on the road resumed, even the animals and insects contributing activity. The four travelers were returned to the sights and sounds and smells of civilization. On the outskirts of the town, lamps glowed in the farmhouses and shacks, the families settling in for the evening. The town rose into view, the biggest Cora had seen since North Carolina, if not as long established. The long main street, with its two banks and the loud row of taverns, was enough to bring her back to the days of the dormitory. The town gave no indication of quieting for the night, shops open, citizens a-prowl on the wooden sidewalks.
Boseman was adamant about not spending the night. If the fever was so close it might strike here next, perhaps it already churned in the bodies of the townspeople. Ridgeway was irritated but gave in, even though he missed a proper bed. They’d camp up the road after they resupplied.
Cora remained chained to the wagon as the men pursued errands. Strollers caught her face through the openings in the canvas and looked away. They had hard faces. Their clothes were coarse and homespun, less fine than the white people’s clothes in the eastern towns. The clothes of settlers, not of the settled.
Homer climbed in the wagon whistling one of Jasper’s more monotonous ditties. The dead slave still among them. The boy held a bundle wrapped in brown paper. “This is for you,” he said.
The dress was dark blue with white buttons, soft cotton that gave off a medicinal smell. She held up the dress so that it blocked the blood stains on the canvas, which were stark on the fabric from the streetlamps outside.
“Put it on, Cora,” Homer said.
Cora raised her hands, the chains making a noise.
He unlocked her ankles and wrists. As she did every time, Cora considered the chances of escape and came up with the dead result. A town like this, rough and wild, made good mobs, she figured. Had news of the boy in Georgia reached here? The accident she never thought about and which she didn’t include in her list of transgressions. The boy belonged on his own list—but what were its terms?
Homer watched her as she dressed, like a valet who had waited on her since the cradle.