“She’s Cora,” Ridgeway said. “You know me. That’s Boseman, and that’s Homer.”
At his name, Homer threw the lantern at the man holding the knife. The glass didn’t break until it hit the ground after bouncing off the man’s chest. The fire splashed. The leader fired at Ridgeway and missed. The slave catcher tackled him and they both tumbled into the dirt. The red-headed rifleman was a better shot. Boseman flew back, a black flower blooming suddenly on his belly.
Homer ran to get a gun, followed by the rifleman. The boy’s hat rolled into the fire. Ridgeway and his opponent scuffled in the dirt, grunting and hollering. They rolled over to the edge of the burning oil. Cora’s fear from moments ago returned—Ridgeway had trained her well. The slave catcher got the upper hand, pinning the man to the ground.
She could run. She only had chains on her wrists now.
Cora jumped on Ridgeway’s back and strangled him with her chains, twisting them tight against his flesh. Her scream came from deep inside her, a train whistle echoing in a tunnel. She yanked and squeezed. The slave catcher threw his body to smear her into the ground. By the time he shook her off, the man from town had his pistol again.
The runaway helped Cora to her feet. “Who’s that boy?” he said.
Homer and the rifleman hadn’t returned. The leader instructed the man with the knife to have a look, keeping the gun on Ridgeway.
The slave catcher rubbed his thick fingers into his ravaged neck. He did not look at Cora, which made her fearful again.
Boseman whimpered. He burbled, “He’s going to look in your soul and see what you done, sinner…” The light from the burning oil was inconstant, but they had no trouble making out the widening puddle of blood.
“He’s going to bleed to death,” Ridgeway said.
“It’s a free country,” the man from town said.
“This is not your property,” Ridgeway said.
“That’s what the law says. White law. There are other ones.” He addressed Cora in a gentler tone. “If you want, miss, I can shoot him for you.” His face was calm.
She wanted every bad thing for Ridgeway and Boseman. And Homer? She didn’t know what her heart wanted for the strange black boy, who seemed an emissary from a different country.
Before she could speak, the man said, “Though we’d prefer to put irons on them.” Cora retrieved his spectacles from the dirt and cleaned them with her sleeve and the three of them waited. His companions returned empty-handed.
Ridgeway smiled as the men shackled his wrists through the wagon wheel.
“The boy is a devious sort,” the leader said. “I can tell that. We have to go.” He looked at Cora. “Will you come with us?”
Cora kicked Ridgeway in the face three times with her new wooden shoes. She thought, If the world will not stir itself to punish the wicked. No one stopped her. Later she said it was three kicks for three murders, and told of Lovey, Caesar, and Jasper to let them live briefly again in her words. But that was not the truth of it. It was all for her.
Caesar
THE excitement over Jockey’s birthday allowed Caesar to visit his only refuge on Randall. The dilapidated schoolhouse by the stables was generally empty. At night lovers sneaked in, but he never went there at night—he required light, and he was not going to risk lighting a candle. He went to the schoolhouse to read the book Fletcher gave him after much protest; he went when feeling low, to weep over his burdens; he went to watch the other slaves move about the plantation. From the window it was as if he were not one of their unlucky tribe but only observing their commerce, as one might watch strangers stroll past one’s front door. In the schoolhouse it was as if he were not there at all.
Enslaved. In fear. Sentenced to death.
If his scheme came to fruition, this would be the last time he celebrated Jockey’s birthday. God willing. Knowing him, the old man was apt to announce another one next month. The quarter was so jubilant over the tiny pleasures they scavenged together on Randall. A made-up birthday, a dance after toiling under the harvest moon. In Virginia the celebrations were spectacular. Caesar and his family rode in the widow’s buggy to the farms of freemen, they visited relatives on estates for the Lord’s holidays and New Year’s Day. The pigs and venison steaks, ginger pies and corn-bread cakes. The games went all day long, until Caesar and his companions fell in panting collapse. The masters in Virginia kept their distance those festival days. How could these Randall slaves truly enjoy themselves with that dumb menace waiting at the sidelines, poised to swoop? They didn’t know their birthdays so had to invent them. Half these folks didn’t know their mothers and fathers.
I was born on August 14th. My mother’s name is Lily Jane. My father is Jerome. I don’t know where they are.
Through the schoolhouse window, framed by two of the older cabins—their whitewash smeared to gray, worn down like those who slept inside them—Cora huddled with her favorite at the starting line. Chester, the boy who prowled the quarter with such enviable cheer. Obviously he’d never been beaten.
The boy turned his head shyly from something Cora said. She smiled—quickly. She smiled at Chester, and Lovey and the women from her cabin, with brevity and efficiency. Like when you see the shadow of a bird on the ground but look up and nothing’s there. She subsisted on rations, in everything. Caesar had never spoken to her but had this figured out about her. It was sensible: She knew the preciousness of what little she called her own. Her joys, her plot, that block of sugar maple she perched on like a vulture.
He was drinking corn whiskey with Martin in the barn loft one night—the boy wouldn’t say where he got the jug—when they started talking about the women of Randall. Who was most likely to mush your face into their titties, who’d scream so loud the whole quarter would know, and who would never tell. Caesar asked about Cora.
“Nigger don’t fool with no Hob woman,” Martin said. “They cut your thing off and make soup with it.” He told him the old story of Cora and her garden and Blake’s doghouse, and Caesar thought, That sounds about right. Then Martin said she liked to sneak out to fornicate with swamp animals, and Caesar realized the cotton picker was dumber than he thought.
None of the Randall men was that bright. The place had undone them. They joked and they picked fast when the bosses’ eyes were on them and they acted big, but at night in the cabin after midnight they wept, they screamed from nightmares and wretched memories. In Caesar’s cabin, in the next cabins over, and in every slave village near and far. When the work was done, and the day’s punishments, the night waited as an arena for their true loneliness and despair.
Cheers and shouts—another race done. Cora set her hands on her hips, head tilted as if hunting after a tune hidden in the noise. How to capture that profile in wood, preserve her grace and strength—he didn’t trust himself not to botch it. Picking had ruined his hands for delicate woodwork. The slope of a woman’s cheek, lips in the midst of a whisper. His arms trembled at the end of the day, muscles throbbing.
How the old white bitch had lied! He should have been living with his mother and father in their cottage, rounding off barrels for the cooper or apprenticed to another of the town’s craftsmen. His prospects were limited by his race, to be sure, but Caesar had grown up believing he was free to choose his own fate. “You can be whatever you want to be,” his father said.
“Even go to Richmond?” From all reports, Richmond sounded far away and splendid.