And in all of these words, and each of these stories, I saw as much magic as anything I’d seen in the Goose, souls conducted as surely as I was out from its depths. And I saw them coming up on railroads, barges, river-runner, skiff, and bribery coach. Coming up on horseback over hard snow and March melting ice. They were fitted in ladies’ dress and came up, in gentry clothes and came up, in dental bandage and came up, in sling and came up, in rags not worth the laundry lady’s washing, but came up. They bribed low whites and stole horses. Crossed the Potomac in wind, storm, and darkness. Came up, as I had, driven by the remembrance of mothers or wives sold south for the high crime of standing contrary before lust. They came up devoured by frost. They came up with tales of hard drinkers and overseers who took glee in applying the lash. They came up stowed like coffee in boats, braving turpentine, scarred and singed by salt-water anointing, guilt-racked for finding themselves so broken that they should bow before their own flogging, for having held their brothers down under the master’s lash.
In the stories that day, I saw them running out into the forest, clutching a Brussels carpet bag, yelling, “I shall never be taken!” I saw them boarding ferries, singing low and only to themselves:
God made them birds and the greenwood tree
And all has got their mate, but soul-sick me.
I saw them that day at the Philadelphia docks, praying, “Hide the outcast, betray not him that wandereth.” I saw them wandering on Bainbridge and crying for all their dead, those who had taken ship for the final harbor from whence none shall return. All of them came to me, from the papers, from the memories, all of them drawn up from Pandemonium, up from Slavery, up out of the jaw of the Abomination, up out from under the juggernaut’s wheels, singing before the sorcery of this Underground.
* * *
—
The following evening, I went to Micajah Bland. I was still shaken from being stolen off the streets of the city. I analyzed everyone from afar. When people walked close behind, I stopped to let them pass. Low whites of a particular style and dress became particularly suspicious to me, as hounds so often drew allies from their ranks. And there were low whites all over Philadelphia, indeed they were the largest class—and they were found especially near Bland’s home, by the Schuylkill docks. There were coloreds here too. I stood catercorner from Bland’s house, watching for a full ten minutes. I saw a shabbily dressed colored man dart out of the row house next door. He moved down the hot street with speed, and right behind him I saw a colored woman chasing and yelling all manner of vulgarity. And then behind her an older black woman yelling after and giving chase, and finally two little colored girls standing in the doorway wailing. I thought that I might should do something, and then the older woman—a grandmother perhaps—returned and shooed the little girls inside, the door still open.
I had heard stories of coloreds like this, different than Raymond and his family, living penny to penny, beaten and run off jobs for daring to apply themselves to that which was held to be “white man’s work.” I had not noticed them at first because it was the relative opulence of all the other coloreds that struck me. But watching there, across the street, I remembered that Otha had warned clients of the Underground of this fate, for these coloreds were usually runaways themselves, men and women who made no connection with society, with certain churches, and thus found freedom hard upon them. And it occurred to me then that this fear that I felt, this study I put on every face, was their lifetime and worse, for if they were caught by the hounds, no Bland would rally to them.
As for the man himself, I found him at home expecting me. A young woman answered the door, smiled, and then called out his name. She introduced herself as Laura, and mentioned that she was Bland’s sister. It was a modest house—one of the better ones in the quarter but not as nice as Raymond’s or the White family home on the other side of the river. But it was clean and well-appointed.