“I’m caught,” Cora said. “You choose to be with him.”
Homer looked puzzled. He took out his notebook, turned to the last page, and scribbled. When he was finished, the boy fixed her manacles again. He gave her ill-fitting wooden shoes. He was about to chain Cora to the wagon when Ridgeway said to bring her outside.
Boseman was still out after a barber and a bath. The slave catcher handed Homer the gazettes and the fugitive bulletins he’d collected from the deputy in the jail. “I’m taking Cora for some supper,” Ridgeway said, and led her into the racket. Homer dropped her filthy shift into the gutter, the brown of the dried blood seeping into the mud.
The wooden shoes pinched. Ridgeway didn’t alter his stride to accommodate Cora’s hindered pace, walking ahead of her and unconcerned that she might run. Her chains were a cowbell. The white people of Tennessee took no notice of her. A young negro leaned against the wall of a stable, the only person to register her presence. A freeman from his appearance, dressed in striped gray trousers and a vest of cowhide. He watched her move as she had watched the coffles trudge past Randall. To see chains on another person and be glad they are not your own—such was the good fortune permitted colored people, defined by how much worse it could be any moment. If your eyes met, both parties looked away. But this man did not. He nodded before passersby took him from view.
Cora had peeked inside Sam’s saloon in North Carolina but never crossed the threshold. If she was an odd vision in their midst, one look from Ridgeway made the patrons return to their own business. The fat man tending the bar rolled tobacco and stared at the back of Ridgeway’s head.
Ridgeway led her to a wobbly table against the rear wall. The smell of stewed meat rose above that of the old beer soaked into the floorboards and the walls and the ceiling. The pigtailed maid was a broad-shouldered girl with the thick arms of a cotton loader. Ridgeway ordered their food.
“The shoes were not my first choice,” he told Cora, “but the dress suits you.”
“It’s clean,” Cora said.
“Now, well. Can’t have our Cora looking like the floor of a butcher’s shop.”
He meant to elicit a reaction. Cora declined. From the saloon next door, a piano started up. It sounded as if a raccoon ran back and forth, mashing on the keys.
“All this time you haven’t asked about your accomplice,” Ridgeway said. “Caesar. Did it make the newspapers up in North Carolina?”
This was going to be a performance then, like one of the Friday-night pageants on the park. He had her dress up for night at the theater. She waited.
“It’s so strange going to South Carolina,” Ridgeway said, “now that they have their new system. Had many a caper there in the old days. But the old days aren’t that far off. For all their talk of negro uplift and civilizing the savage, it’s the same hungry place it always was.”
The maid delivered bread heels and bowls full of beef and potato stew. Ridgeway whispered to her while looking at Cora, something she couldn’t hear. The girl laughed. Cora realized he was drunk.
Ridgeway slurped. “We caught up with it at the factory at the end of its shift,” he said. “These big colored bucks around it, finding their old fear again after thinking they’d put it behind them. At first, wasn’t no big fuss. Another runaway caught. Then word spread that Caesar was wanted for the murder of a little boy—”
“Not little,” Cora said.
Ridgeway shrugged. “They broke into the jail. The sheriff opened the door, to be honest, but that’s not as dramatic. They broke into the jail and ripped its body to pieces. The decent people of South Carolina with their schoolhouses and Friday credit.”
News of Lovey had broken her down in front of him. Not this time. She was prepared—his eyes brightened when he was on the verge of a cruelty. And she had known Caesar was dead for a long time now. No need to ask after his fate. It appeared before her one night in the attic like a spark, a small and simple truth: Caesar did not make it out. He was not up north wearing a new suit, new shoes, new smile. Sitting in the dark, nestled into the rafters, Cora understood that she was alone again. They had got him. She had finished mourning him by the time Ridgeway came knocking on Martin’s door.
Ridgeway plucked gristle from his mouth. “I made a little silver for the capture at any rate, and returned another boy to its master along the way. Profit in the end.”
“You scrape like an old darky for that Randall money,” Cora said.
Ridgeway laid his big hands on the uneven table, tilting it to his side. Stew ran over the rim of the bowls. “They should fix this,” he said.
The stew was lumpy with the thickening flour. Cora mashed the lumps with her tongue the way she did when one of Alice’s helpers had prepared the meal and not the old cook herself. Through the wall the piano player bit into an upbeat ditty. A drunken couple dashed next door to dance.
“Jasper wasn’t killed by no mob,” Cora said.
“There are always unexpected expenses,” Ridgeway said. “I’m not going to get reimbursed for all the food I fed it.”
“You go on about reasons,” Cora said. “Call things by other names as if it changes what they are. But that don’t make them true. You killed Jasper in cold blood.”
“That was more of a personal matter,” Ridgeway conceded, “and not what I’m talking about here. You and your friend killed a boy. You have your justifications.”
“I was going to escape.”
“That’s all I’m talking about, survival. Do you feel awful about it?”
The boy’s death was a complication of her escape, like the absence of a full moon or losing the head start because Lovey had been discovered out of her cabin. But shutters swung out inside her and she saw the boy trembling on his sickbed, his mother weeping over his grave. Cora had been grieving for him, too, without knowing it. Another person caught in this enterprise that bound slave and master alike. She moved the boy from the lonely list in her head and logged him below Martin and Ethel, even though she did not know his name. X, as she signed herself before she learned her letters.
Nonetheless. She told Ridgeway, “No.”
“Of course not—it’s nothing. Better weep for one of those burned cornfields, or this steer swimming in our soup. You do what’s required to survive.” He wiped his lips. “It’s true, though, your complaint. We come up with all sorts of fancy talk to hide things. Like in the newspapers nowadays, all the smart men talking about Manifest Destiny. Like it’s a new idea. You don’t know what I’m talking about, do you?” Ridgeway asked.
Cora sat back. “More words to pretty things up.”
“It means taking what is yours, your property, whatever you deem it to be. And everyone else taking their assigned places to allow you to take it. Whether it’s red men or Africans, giving up themselves, giving of themselves, so that we can have what’s rightfully ours. The French setting aside their territorial claims. The British and the Spanish slinking away.
“My father liked his Indian talk about the Great Spirit,” Ridgeway said. “All these years later, I prefer the American spirit, the one that called us from the Old World to the New, to conquer and build and civilize. And destroy that what needs to be destroyed. To lift up the lesser races. If not lift up, subjugate. And if not subjugate, exterminate. Our destiny by divine prescription—the American imperative.”
“I need to visit the outhouse,” Cora said.