The Underground Railroad

Author:Colson Whitehead
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Publisher: Doubleday
Published: 2016-09-13T00:00:00+00:00

To explain why he and his wife kept Cora imprisoned in their attic, Martin had to go back a ways. As with everything in the south, it started with cotton. The ruthless engine of cotton required its fuel of African bodies. Crisscrossing the ocean, ships brought bodies to work the land and to breed more bodies.

The pistons of this engine moved without relent. More slaves led to more cotton, which led to more money to buy more land to farm more cotton. Even with the termination of the slave trade, in less than a generation the numbers were untenable: all those niggers. Whites outnumbered slaves two to one in North Carolina, but in Louisiana and Georgia the populations neared parity. Just over the border in South Carolina, the number of blacks surpassed that of whites by more than a hundred thousand. It was not difficult to imagine the sequence when the slave cast off his chains in pursuit of freedom—and retribution.

In Georgia and Kentucky, South America and the Caribbean Isles, the Africans turned on their masters in short but disturbing encounters. Before the Southampton rebellion was smothered, Turner and his band murdered sixty-five men, women, and children. Civilian militias and patrollers lynched three times that in response—conspirators, sympathizers, and innocents—to set an example. To clarify the terms. But the numbers remained, declaring a truth unclouded by prejudice.

“Around here, the closest thing to a constable was the patroller,” Martin said.

“Most places,” Cora said. “Patroller will harass you anytime they feel like.” It was after midnight, her first Monday. Martin’s daughter and her family had returned home, as had Fiona, who lived down the road in Irishtown. Martin perched on a crate in the attic, fanning himself. Cora paced and stretched her sore limbs. She had not stood in days. Ethel declined to appear. Dark blue drapes hid the windows and the small candle licked at the gloom.

Despite the hour, Martin spoke in a whisper. His next-door neighbor’s son was a night rider.

As the slave owners’ enforcers, the patrollers were the law: white, crooked, and merciless. Drawn from the lowest and most vicious segment, too witless to even become overseers. (Cora nodded in agreement.) The patroller required no reason to stop a person apart from color. Slaves caught off the plantation need passes, unless they wanted a licking and a visit to the county jail. Free blacks carried proof of manumission or risked being conveyed into the clutches of slavery; sometimes they were smuggled to the auction block anyway. Rogue blacks who did not surrender could be shot. They searched slave villages at will and took liberties as they ransacked the homes of freemen, stealing hard-earned linens or making licentious advances.

In war—and to put down a slave rebellion was the most glorious call to arms—the patrollers transcended their origins to become a true army. Cora pictured the insurrections as great, bloody battles, unfurling beneath a night sky lit by vast fires. From Martin’s accounts, the actual uprisings were small and chaotic. The

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