She told him what he’d missed, the poet and the meal.
“There’ll be more,” he said. “I got you something.” He rummaged in his leather satchel. “It’s this year’s edition, but I thought you’d appreciate it even though it’s October. When I get to a place where they got next year’s, I’ll pick it up.”
She grabbed his hand. The almanac had a strange, soapy smell and made a cracking noise like fire as she turned the pages. She’d never been the first person to open a book.
Royal took her to the ghost tunnel after a month on the farm.
Cora started working her second day, thoughts in a knot over Valentine’s motto: “Stay, and contribute.” A request, and a cure. She contributed first in the washhouse. The head of the laundry was a woman named Amelia who’d known the Valentines in Virginia and followed two years later. Gently she warned Cora against “abusing the garments.” Cora was quick with her labor on Randall. Working with her hands stirred her old, fearful industry. She and Amelia decided that she might prefer another chore. She helped in the milk house for a week and did a stint with Aunty, watching the babies while their parents worked. After that, she spread manure in the fields when the leaves of the Indian corn turned yellow. As Cora bent in the rows she looked out for an overseer, haunted.
“You look weary,” Royal told her one August evening after Lander delivered one of his speeches. Lander’s talk verged on a sermon, concerning the dilemma of finding your purpose once you’ve slipped the yoke of slavery. The manifold frustrations of liberty. Like the rest of the farm, Cora regarded the man with awe. He was an exotic prince, traveling from a far land to teach them how people conducted themselves in decent places. Places so far away they eluded all maps.
Elijah Lander’s father was a rich white lawyer in Boston who lived openly with his colored wife. They suffered the rebukes of their circle and in midnight whispers characterized their offspring as the union of an African goddess and a pale mortal. A demigod. To hear the white dignitaries tell it in their long-winded introductions to his speeches, Lander demonstrated his brilliance from an early age. A sickly child, he made the family library his playground, poring over volumes he struggled to lift from the shelves. At the age of six, he played the piano like a European master. He performed concerts to the empty parlor, bowing to silent applause.
Family friends interceded to make him the first colored student at one of the prestigious white colleges. “They gave me a slave pass,” as he described it, “and I used it for mischief.” Lander lived in a broom closet; no one would room with him. After four years his fellows elected him valedictorian. He skittered between obstacles like a primeval creature who had outwitted the modern world. Lander could have been anything he wanted. A surgeon, a judge. Brahmins urged him to go to the nation’s capital to make his mark in politics. He’d broken through into a small corner of American success where his race did not curse him. Some might have lived in that space happily, rising alone. Lander wanted to make room for others. People were wonderful company sometimes.
In the end, he chose to give speeches. In his parents’ parlor to an audience of distinguished Bostonians, then in the homes of those distinguished Bostonians, in colored meeting houses and Methodist churches and lecture halls throughout New England. Sometimes he was the first colored person to set foot in the buildings apart from the men who built them, the women who cleaned them.
Red-faced sheriffs arrested him for sedition. He was jailed for inciting riots that weren’t riots but peaceful gatherings. The Honorable Judge Edmund Harrison of Maryland issued a warrant for his arrest, accusing him of “promulgating an infernal orthodoxy that imperils the fabric of good society.” A white mob beat him before he was rescued by those who had come to hear him read from his “Declarations of the Rights of the American Negro.” From Florida to Maine his pamphlets, and later his autobiography, were burned in bonfires along with his effigy. “Better in effigy than in person,” he said.
What private aches nagged him beneath that placid demeanor, none could say. He remained imperturbable and strange. “I’m what the botanists call a hybrid,” he said the first time Cora heard him speak. “A mixture of two different families. In flowers, such a concoction pleases the eye. When that amalgamation takes its shape in flesh and blood, some take great offense. In this room we recognize it for what it is—a new beauty come into the world, and it is in bloom all around us.”
—
WHEN Lander finished his address that August night, Cora and Royal sat on the meeting-house steps. The other residents streamed past them. Lander’s words had set Cora in a melancholy place. “I don’t want them to put me out,” she said.
Royal turned over her palm and slid a thumb across her fresh calluses. No need to fret about that, he said. He proposed a trip to see more of Indiana, as a break from her labors.
The next day they set out in a buggy pulled by two piebald horses. With her wages she had bought a new dress and bonnet. The bonnet covered the scar on her temple, for the most part. The scar made her nervous lately. She’d never thought overlong about brands before, the Xs and Ts and clovers slave masters burned into their chattel. A horseshoe puckered on Sybil’s neck, ugly and purple—her first owner had raised draft horses. Cora thanked the Lord that her skin had never been burned in such a way. But we have all been branded even if you can’t see it, inside if not without—and the wound from Randall’s cane was the very same thing, marking her as his.
Cora had been to town plenty, even climbed the steps of the white bakery to buy a cake. Royal took them in the opposite direction. The sky was a sheet of slate but it was still warm, an August afternoon that let you know its kind was running out. They stopped for a picnic at the side of a meadow, under a crab apple tree. He’d packed some bread, jam, and sausage. She let him put his head in her lap. She considered running her hands through the soft black curls by his ears but refrained when a memory of old violence reared up.
On the way back Royal turned the buggy down an overgrown path. Cora wouldn’t have seen it otherwise. Cottonwood swallowed the entrance. He said he wanted to show her something. She thought it might be a pond or a quiet place no one knew about. Instead they rounded a turn and stopped at a forlorn, ramshackle cottage, gray like chewed-up meat. Shutters slanted off, wild grasses bowing from the roof. Weather-beaten was the word—the house was a whipped mutt. She hesitated at the threshold. The grime and moss gave her a lonesome feeling, even with Royal there.
Weeds pushed out of the floor of the main room as well. She covered her nose from the stench. “It makes that manure smell sweet,” she said. Royal laughed and said he’d always thought manure smelled sweet. He uncovered the trapdoor to the cellar and lit a candle. The stairs creaked. Animals scurried in the cellar, outraged over the intrusion. Royal counted off six paces and started digging. He stopped when he had exposed the second trapdoor, and they descended to the station. He warned her about the steps, which were slick with a gray slime.
It was the sorriest, saddest station yet. There was no drop to the tracks—the rails started at the end of the steps and jetted into the dark tunnel. A small handcar rested on the tracks, its iron pump waiting for a human touch to animate it. As in the mica mine in North Carolina, long wooden planks and struts buttressed the walls and ceiling.
“It’s not made for a locomotive,” Royal said. “The tunnel is too small, see. It doesn’t connect to the rest of the line.”