The three of them worked wordlessly for a while. A cheer went up over by the barbecue pit, as it did each time they turned the hogs. Cora was too distracted to reverse her mistakes in the quilt. The silent theater of Sybil and Molly’s love moved her always. The way the child asked for assistance without speaking and the mother pointed, nodded, and pantomimed her child out of a fix. Cora wasn’t accustomed to a quiet cabin—on Randall there was always a shriek or cry or sigh to break a moment—and certainly not accustomed to this type of maternal performance.
Sybil had absconded with Molly when her daughter was only two, toting her child all the way. Rumors from the big house held that their master meant to dispose of some property to cover debts from the disappointing crop. Sybil faced a public sale. She left that night—the full moon gave its blessing and guidance through the forest. “Molly didn’t make no sound,” Sybil said. “She knew what we were up to.” Three miles over the Pennsylvania border they risked a visit to the cottage of a colored farmer. The man fed them, whittled toys for the little girl, and, through a line of intermediaries, contacted the railroad. After a spell in Worcester working for a milliner, Sybil and Molly made their way to Indiana. Word had spread of the farm.
So many fugitives had passed through Valentine—there was no telling who might have spent time there. Did Sybil happen to make the acquaintance of a woman from Georgia? Cora asked her one evening. Cora had been with them for a few weeks. Slept the night through once or twice, put back some of the weight she’d lost in the attic. The dry flies cut out their noise, leaving an opening in the night for a question. A woman from Georgia, maybe went by the name of Mabel, maybe not?
Sybil shook her head.
Of course she hadn’t. A woman who leaves her daughter behind becomes someone else to hide the shame of it. But Cora asked everyone on the farm sooner or later, the farm being its own kind of depot, attracting people who were between places. She asked those who’d been on Valentine for years, she asked all the new people, pestered the visitors who came to the farm to see if what they’d heard was true. The free men and women of color, the fugitives who stayed and the ones who moved on. She asked them in the cornfield between a work song, rumbling in the back of a buggy on the way to town: gray eyes, scar across the back of her right hand from a burn, maybe went by the name of Mabel, maybe not?
“Maybe she in Canada,” Lindsey answered when Cora decided it was her turn. Lindsey being a slim, hummingbird woman fresh out of Tennessee, who maintained a demented cheer that Cora couldn’t understand. From what she saw, Tennessee was fire, disease, and violence. Even if it was there that Royal and them had rescued her. “Lot of folks, they fond of Canada now,” Megan said. “Though it’s awful cold.”
Cold nights for the coldhearted.
Cora folded her quilt and retired to her room. She curled up, too distracted thinking on mothers and daughters. Fretting over Royal, three days overdue. Her headache approached like a thunderhead. She turned her face to the wall and did not move.
—
SUPPER was held outside the meeting house, the biggest building on the property. Legend had it that they put it up in a single day, before one of the first big gatherings, when they realized the assembled no longer fit inside Valentine’s farmhouse. Most days it served as a schoolhouse. Sundays, a church. On Saturday evenings the farm got together for a common meal and diversions. Masons who worked on the courthouse downstate came back hungry, seamstresses returned from daywork for local white ladies and put on their nice dresses. Temperance was the rule except for Saturday night, when those with a taste for spirits partook and had something to think about at the next morning’s sermon.
The hogs were the first order of business, chopped on the long pine table and covered in dipney sauce. Smoky collards, turnips, sweet potato pie, and the rest of the kitchen’s concoctions sat in the Valentines’ nice dishes. The residents were a reserved bunch, save for when Jimmy’s barbecue came out—prim ladies used their elbows. The pit master lowered his head at every compliment, already thinking of improvements for the next roast. In a deft maneuver Cora tugged off a crispy ear, Molly’s favorite, and presented it to the girl.
Valentine no longer kept count of how many families lived on his land. One hundred souls was a sturdy number to stop at—a fantastic figure by any measure—and that didn’t account for the colored farmers who’d purchased adjacent land and got their own operations going. Of the fifty or so children, most were under the age of five. “Liberty make a body fertile,” Georgina said. That, and the knowledge they will not be sold, Cora added. The women in the colored dormitories of South Carolina believed they knew liberty, but the surgeons’ knives cut them to prove otherwise.
Once the hogs disappeared, Georgina and some of the younger women took the children to the barn for games and sing-alongs. The children didn’t sit still for all the talk at the meetings. Their absence placed the stakes of the discussions into relief; ultimately, it was for the young ones that they schemed. Even if the adults were free of the shackles that had held them fast, bondage had stolen too much time. Only the children could take full advantage of their dreaming. If white men let them.
The meeting house filled. Cora joined Sybil in a pew. Tonight was to be a subdued affair. Next month after the shucking bee, the farm would host the most important gathering yet, to address the recent debates about picking up stakes. In advance, the Valentines had reduced the Saturday-night entertainments. The pleasant weather—and the warnings of the coming Indiana winter, which scared those who’d never seen snow—kept them occupied. Trips to town turned into dallying expeditions. Social calls stretched into the evening now that so many colored settlers had put down roots, the advance guard of a great migration.
Many of the farm’s leaders were out of town. Valentine himself was in Chicago meeting with the banks, his two sons in tow now that they were old enough to help with the farm’s accounts. Lander traveled with one of the new abolitionist societies in New York, on a speaking tour of New England; they kept him busy. What he learned during this latest excursion into the country would doubtless shape his contribution to the big meeting.
Cora studied her neighbors. She’d held out hope that Jimmy’s hogs would lure Royal back in time, but he and his partners were still engaged in their mission for the underground railroad. There was no word from their party. Gruesome reports reached the farm concerning a posse that had strung up some colored troublemakers the previous night. It had happened thirty miles downstate, and the victims supposedly worked for the railroad, but nothing specific on top of that. A freckled woman unfamiliar to Cora—so many strangers these days—carried on about the lynchings in a loud voice. Sybil turned and shushed her, then gave Cora a quick hug as Gloria Valentine stepped to the lectern.
Gloria had been working in the laundry of an indigo plantation when John Valentine met her. “The most delicious vision these eyes ever beheld,” Valentine liked to tell the new arrivals, drawing out delicious as if ladling hot caramel. Valentine didn’t make a habit of visiting slavers in those days, but he’d gone in on a shipment of feed with Gloria’s owner. By the end of the week he had purchased her freedom. A week after that they wed.
She was still delicious, and as graceful and composed as if she’d gone to a finishing school for white ladies. She protested that she didn’t enjoy filling in for her husband, but her ease in front of a crowd argued otherwise. Gloria worked hard on eliminating her plantation inflections—Cora heard her slip when conversation took a folksy turn—but she was naturally impressive, whether she spoke colored or white. When Valentine’s addresses took a stern tone, his practical disposition overcoming his generosity, Gloria stepped in to smooth matters.