The corners of his mouth sank. He gestured for her to walk in front. The steps to the back alley were slippery with vomit and he grabbed her elbow to steady her. Closing the outhouse door, shutting him out, was the purest pleasure she’d had in a long while.
Ridgeway continued his address undeterred. “Take your mother,” the slave catcher said. “Mabel. Stolen from her master by misguided whites and colored individuals in a criminal conspiracy. I kept an eye out all this time, turned Boston and New York upside down, all the colored settlements. Syracuse. Northampton. She’s up in Canada, laughing at the Randalls and me. I take it as a personal injury. That’s why I bought you that dress. To help me picture her wrapped like a present for her master.”
He hated her mother as much as she did. That, and the fact they both had eyes in their head, meant they had two things in common.
Ridgeway paused—a drunk wanted to use the privy. He shooed him away. “You absconded for ten months,” he said. “Insult enough. You and your mother are a line that needs to be extinguished. A week together, chained up, and you sass me without end, on your way to a bloody homecoming. The abolitionist lobby loves to trot out your kind, to give speeches to white people who have no idea how the world works.”
The slave catcher was wrong. If she’d made it north she would have disappeared into a life outside their terms. Like her mother. One thing the woman had passed on to her.
“We do our part,” Ridgeway said, “slave and slave catcher. Master and colored boss. The new arrivals streaming into the harbors and the politicians and sheriffs and newspapermen and the mothers raising strong sons. People like you and your mother are the best of your race. The weak of your tribe have been weeded out, they die in the slave ships, die of our European pox, in the fields working our cotton and indigo. You need to be strong to survive the labor and to make us greater. We fatten hogs, not because it pleases us but because we need hogs to survive. But we can’t have you too clever. We can’t have you so fit you outrun us.”
She finished her business and picked out a fugitive bulletin from the stack of paper to wipe herself. Then she waited. A pitiful respite, but it was hers.
“You heard my name when you were a pickaninny,” he said. “The name of punishment, dogging every fugitive step and every thought of running away. For every slave I bring home, twenty others abandon their full-moon schemes. I’m a notion of order. The slave that disappears—it’s a notion, too. Of hope. Undoing what I do so that a slave the next plantation over gets an idea that it can run, too. If we allow that, we accept the flaw in the imperative. And I refuse.”
The music from next door was slow now. Couples coming together to hold each other, to sway and twist. That was real conversation, dancing slow with another person, not all these words. She knew that, even though she had never danced like that with another person and had refused Caesar when he asked. The only person to ever extend a hand to her and say, Come closer. Maybe everything the slave catcher said was true, Cora thought, every justification, and the sons of Ham were cursed and the slave master performed the Lord’s will. And maybe he was just a man talking to an outhouse door, waiting for someone to wipe her ass.
—
CORA and Ridgeway returned to the wagon to find Homer rubbing his small thumbs on the reins and Boseman sipping whiskey from a bottle. “This town is sick with it,” Boseman said, slurring. “I can smell it.” The younger man led the way out of town. He shared his disappointments. The shave and bath had gone well; with a fresh face the man looked almost innocent. But he had not been able to perform like a man at the brothel. “The madam was sweating like a pig and I knew they had the fever, her and her whores.” Ridgeway let him decide how far was far enough to camp.
She had been asleep for a short time when Boseman crept in and put his hand over her mouth. She was ready.
Boseman put his fingers to his lips. Cora nodded as much as his grip permitted: She would not cry out. She could make a fuss now and wake Ridgeway; Boseman would give him some excuse and that would be the end of it. But she had thought about this moment for days, of when Boseman let his carnal desires get the best of him. It was the most drunk he’d been since North Carolina. He complimented her dress when they stopped for the night. She steeled herself. If she could persuade him to unshackle her, a dark night like this was made for running.
Homer snored loudly. Boseman slipped her chains from the wagon ring, careful not to let the links sound against each other. He undid her ankles and cinched her wrist chains to silence them. He descended first and helped Cora out. She could just make out the road a few yards away. Dark enough.
Ridgeway knocked him to the ground with a growl and started kicking him. Boseman started his defense and Ridgeway kicked him in the mouth. She almost ran. She almost did. But the quickness of the violence, the blade of it, arrested her. Ridgeway scared her. When Homer came to the back of the wagon with a lantern and revealed Ridgeway’s face, the slave catcher was staring at her with untempered fury. She’d had her chance and missed it and at the look on his face was relieved.
“What are you going to do now, Ridgeway?” Boseman wept. He was leaning against the wagon wheel for support. He looked at the blood on his hands. His necklace had snapped and the ears made it look like the dirt was listening. “Crazy Ridgeway, does as he pleases. I’m the last one left. Only Homer left to beat on when I’m gone,” he said. “I think he’ll like it.”
Homer chuckled. He got Cora’s ankle chains from the wagon. Ridgeway rubbed his knuckles, breathing heavily.
“It is a nice dress,” Boseman said. He pulled out a tooth.
“There’ll be more teeth if any of you fellows move,” the man said. The three of them stepped into the light.
The speaker was the young negro from town, the one who nodded at her. He didn’t look at her now, monitoring Ridgeway. His wire spectacles reflected the lantern’s glow, as if the flame burned inside him. His pistol wavered between the two white men like a dowser’s stick.
A second man held a rifle. He was tall and well-muscled, dressed in thick work clothes that struck her as a costume. He had a wide face and his long red-brown hair was combed up into a fan like a lion’s mane. The man’s posture said that he did not enjoy taking orders, and the insolence in his eyes was not slave insolence, an impotent pose, but a hard fact. The third man waved a bowie knife. His body shook with nerves, his quick breathing the night sound between his companion’s talk. Cora recognized his bearing. It was that of a runaway, one unsure of the latest turn in the escape. She’d seen it in Caesar, in the bodies of the new arrivals to the dormitories, and knew she’d exhibited it many times. He extended the trembling knife in Homer’s direction.
She had never seen colored men hold guns. The image shocked her, a new idea too big to fit into her mind.
“You boys are lost,” Ridgeway said. He didn’t have a weapon.
“Lost in that we don’t like Tennessee much and would rather be home, yes,” the leader said. “You seem lost yourself.”
Boseman coughed and traded a glance with Ridgeway. He sat up and tensed. The two rifles turned to him.
Their leader said, “We’re going to be on our way but we thought we’d ask the lady if she wanted to come with us. We’re a better sort of traveling companion.”
“Where you boys from?” Ridgeway said. He talked in a way that told Cora he was scheming.
“All over,” the man said. The north lived in his voice, his accent from up there, like Caesar. “But we found each other and now we work together. You settle down, Mr. Ridgeway.” He moved his head slightly. “I heard him call you Cora. Is that your name?”
She nodded.