The Underground Railroad Read Online Free PDF Page A

arm away. “I ain’t trying to get killed by Connelly, or patrollers,or snakes.”
    Cora was still squinting over his idiocy when she got her first bowl of the soup. White man trying to kill you slow every day, and sometimes trying to kill you fast. Why make it easy for him? That was one kind of work you could say no to.
    She found Lovey, but did not ask her what the girls whispered about Caesar and Frances. If he was serious about his plan, Frances was a widow.
    It was the most any young man had talked to her since she moved to Hob.
    They lit the torches for the wrestling matches. Someone had unearthed a stash of corn whiskey and cider, which circulated in due course and fed the spectators’ enthusiasm. By now, the husbands who lived on other plantations had come for their Sunday-night visits. Walking miles, time enough to fantasize. Some wives were happierat the prospect of marital relations than others.
    Lovey giggled. “I’d wrestle with him,” she said, nodding at Major.
    Major looked up as if he heard her. He was turning out to be a prime buck. Worked hard and rarely forced the bosses to raise the whip. He was respectful to Lovey because of her age and it wouldn’t surprise if Connelly arranged a match one day. The young man and his opponent twistedin the grass. Take it out on each other if you cannot take it out on the ones who deserve it. The children peeked between their elders, making bets they had nothing to back up with. They pulled weeds and worked in trash gangs now, but one day the field work would make them as big as the men grappling and pinning each other to the grass. Get him, get that boy, teach him what he needs to learn.
    When the music started and the dancing commenced, they appreciated the extent of their gratitude for Jockey. Once again he picked the right day for a birthday. He had been attuned to a shared tension, a communal apprehension beyond the routine facts of their bondage. It had built up. The last few hours had dispelled much of the ill feeling. They could face the morning toil and the following morningsand the long days with their spirits replenished, however meagerly, by a fond night to look back on and the next birthday feast to look forward to. By making a circle of themselves that separated the human spirits within from the degradation without.
    Noble picked up a tambourine and tapped it. He was a fast picker in the rows and a joyful instigator outside of them; he brought both kinds of dexterityto this night. Clap hands, crook elbows, shake hips. There are instruments and human players but sometimes a fiddle or a drum makes instruments of those who play them, and all are put in servitude to the song. So it was when George and Wesley picked up their fiddle and banjo on days of carousing. Jockey sat in his maple chair, tapping his bare feet on the dirt. The slaves moved forward anddanced.
    Cora did not move. She was wary of how sometimes when the music tugged, you might suddenly be next to a man and you didn’t know what he might do. All the bodies in motion, given license. To pull on you, take both of your hands, even if they were doing it with a nice thought. One time on Jockey’s birthday, Wesley treated them to a song he knew from his days up north, a new sound none ofthem had heard before. Cora had dared to step out among the dancers and close her eyes and twirl and when she opened them Edward was there, his eyes alight. Even with Edward and Pot dead—Edward strung up after shorting the scale by loading his sack with stones and Pot in the ground after a rat bite turned him black and purple—she shrank from the idea of loosening her leash on herself. George sawedwith his fiddle, the notes swirling up into night like sparks gusted from a fire. No one approached to pull her into the lively madness.
    —
    THE music stopped. The circle broke. Sometimes a slave will be lost in a brief eddy of liberation. In the sway of a sudden reverie among the furrows or while untangling the