Then he changed course. “We accomplished the impossible,” Mingo said, “but not everyone has the character we do. We’re not all going to make it. Some of us are too far gone. Slavery has twisted their minds, an imp filling their minds with foul ideas. They have given themselves over to whiskey and its false comforts. To hopelessness and its constant devils. You’ve seen these lost ones on the plantations, on the streets of the towns and cities—those who will not, cannot respect themselves. You’ve seen them here, receiving the gift of this place but unable to fit in. They always disappear in the night because deep in their hearts they know they are unworthy. It is too late for them.”
Some of his cronies in the back of the room amened. There are realities we have to face, Mingo explained. White people aren’t going to change overnight. The farm’s dreams are worthy and true, but require a gradual approach. “We can’t save everyone, and acting as if we can will doom us all. You think the white folks—just a few miles from here—are going to endure our impudence forever? We flaunt their weakness. Harboring runaways. Underground railroad agents with guns coming and going. People who are wanted for murder. Criminals.” Cora made fists as Mingo’s gaze fell on her.
The Valentine farm had taken glorious steps into the future, he said. White benefactors supplied schoolbooks for their children—why not ask them to pass the hat for entire schools? And not just one or two, but dozens more? By proving the negro’s thrift and intelligence, Mingo argued, he will enter into American society as a productive member with full rights. Why jeopardize that? We need to slow things down. Reach an accommodation with our neighbors and, most of all, stop activities that will force their wrath upon us. “We’ve built something astounding here,” he concluded. “But it is a precious thing, and it needs to be protected, nourished, or else it will wither, like a rose in a sudden frost.”
During the applause, Lander whispered to Mingo’s daughter and they giggled again. She removed one of the cloth flowers from her bouquet and twisted it into the top buttonhole of his green suit. Lander pretended to sniff its fragrance and mock-swooned.
“It’s time,” Royal said as Lander shook Mingo’s hand and assumed his place at the lectern. Royal had spent the day with him, walking the grounds and talking. Royal didn’t share what Lander would speak on that night, but he had an optimistic air. Formerly, when the subject of relocating came up, Royal told Cora he favored Canada over the west. “They know how to treat free negroes there,” he said. And his work with the railroad? Have to settle down sometime, Royal said. Can’t raise a family while running around on railroad errands. Cora changed the subject when he engaged in such talk.
Now she’d see for herself—they’d all see—what the man from Boston had in mind.
“Brother Mingo made some good points,” Lander said. “We can’t save everyone. But that doesn’t mean we can’t try. Sometimes a useful delusion is better than a useless truth. Nothing’s going to grow in this mean cold, but we can still have flowers.
“Here’s one delusion: that we can escape slavery. We can’t. Its scars will never fade. When you saw your mother sold off, your father beaten, your sister abused by some boss or master, did you ever think you would sit here today, without chains, without the yoke, among a new family? Everything you ever knew told you that freedom was a trick—yet here you are. Still we run, tracking by the good full moon to sanctuary.
“Valentine farm is a delusion. Who told you the negro deserved a place of refuge? Who told you that you had that right? Every minute of your life’s suffering has argued otherwise. By every fact of history, it can’t exist. This place must be a delusion, too. Yet here we are.
“And America, too, is a delusion, the grandest one of all. The white race believes—believes with all its heart—that it is their right to take the land. To kill Indians. Make war. Enslave their brothers. This nation shouldn’t exist, if there is any justice in the world, for its foundations are murder, theft, and cruelty. Yet here we are.
“I’m supposed to answer Mingo’s call for gradual progress, for closing our doors to those in need. I’m supposed to answer those who think this place is too close to the grievous influence of slavery, and that we should move west. I don’t have an answer for you. I don’t know what we should do. The word we. In some ways, the only thing we have in common is the color of our skin. Our ancestors came from all over the African continent. It’s quite large. Brother Valentine has the maps of the world in his splendid library, you can look for yourself. They had different ways of subsistence, different customs, spoke a hundred different languages. And that great mixture was brought to America in the holds of slave ships. To the north, the south. Their sons and daughters picked tobacco, cultivated cotton, worked on the largest estates and smallest farms. We are craftsmen and midwives and preachers and peddlers. Black hands built the White House, the seat of our nation’s government. The word we. We are not one people but many different people. How can one person speak for this great, beautiful race—which is not one race but many, with a million desires and hopes and wishes for ourselves and our children?
“For we are Africans in America. Something new in the history of the world, without models for what we will become.
“Color must suffice. It has brought us to this night, this discussion, and it will take us into the future. All I truly know is that we rise and fall as one, one colored family living next door to one white family. We may not know the way through the forest, but we can pick each other up when we fall, and we will arrive together.”
—
WHEN the former residents of the Valentine farm recalled that moment, when they told strangers and grandchildren of how they used to live and how it came to an end, their voices still trembled years later. In Philadelphia, in San Francisco, in the cow towns and ranches where they eventually made a home, they mourned those who died that day. The air in the room turned prickly, they told their families, quickened by an unseen power. Whether they had been born free or in chains, they inhabited that moment as one: the moment when you aim yourself at the north star and decide to run. Perhaps they were on the verge of some new order, on the verge of clasping reason to disorder, of putting all the lessons of their history to bear on the future. Or perhaps time, as it will, lent the occasion a gravity that it did not possess, and everything was as Lander insisted: They were deluded.
But that didn’t mean it wasn’t true.
The shot hit Lander in the chest. He fell back, dragging down the lectern. Royal was the first one to his feet. As he ran to the fallen man, three bullets bit into his back. He jerked like one of Saint Vitus’s dancers and dropped. Then came a chorus of rifle fire, screams, and broken glass, and a mad scramble overtook the meeting hall.
The white men outside whooped and howled over the carnage. Pell-mell the residents hastened to the exits, squeezing between pews, climbing over them, climbing over one another. Once the main entrance bottlenecked, people crawled over the windowsills. More rifles crackled. Valentine’s sons helped their father to the door. To the left of the stage, Gloria crouched over Lander. She saw there was nothing to be done and followed her family out.
Cora held Royal’s head in her lap, just as she had the afternoon of the picnic. She ran her fingers through his curls and rocked him and wept. Royal smiled through the blood that bubbled on his lips. He told her not to be afraid, the tunnel would save her again. “Go to the house in the woods. You can tell me where it goes.” His body went slack.