of ideas, that this secret war was waged against something more than the Taskmasters of Virginia, that we sought not merely to improve the world, but to remake it.
I was pulled out of my thoughts by a man milling around nearby. I was greeted by a messenger who handed me a parcel, with a seal, which I immediately recognized as the mark of Micajah Bland. My heart leapt. My greatest urging then was to open this letter. But it was Otha’s family, and it should be he who first understood their fate. I found him with Raymond, still near the bonfire, still enraptured by the slave songs that were ringing out. I handed the letter to Raymond, who was the better reader. On Otha’s face, alight with the bonfire’s glow, was all the trepidation we could expect. But then Raymond smiled and said, “Micajah Bland has Lydia and the children. They have passed out of Alabama. At the time of this letter, they were traversing Indiana.”
“My God,” said Otha. “My God.”
He turned to me and said, “It’s gonna happen. After all of these years, my Lydia, my boys—all of them—my God, I wish Lambert had made it to see this.”
Otha then turned back to Raymond and burst into tears. Raymond broke his usual solemn mask, and held Otha close as they wept. I turned away, thinking they needed their time, overrun by a day filled with more wonders than I could fathom.
21
ONCE I’D DREAMED OF ruling, as my father had done, back at Lockless, and it is tough to say it as such, that it was my dream, even if I had not thought it all through. But I had found the Underground, or the Underground had found me, and for this fact I was at last happy. On the Underground, I found meaning. In Raymond White, in Otha, in Micajah, I found family. And now in Kessiah, I felt that I had even found some lost part of myself.
The next evening, after another day of exhortations and amusements, I decided to walk through the woods, high into the hills above the field, and that’s where I saw her, Moses, seated on a large rock, her legs folded. She was still and at peace and I thought perhaps to leave her to her thoughts, but when I began to walk away I heard her voice cut through the quiet night air.
“Evening.”
I turned and saw her already walking toward me, her eyes fixed on my head. When close enough, she reached out to feel the spot where I had taken Ryland’s blow. Then she stepped back, smiled, and said, “I knew we would have our time to speak, and it is good to do so out here, far removed from them. Heard a lot about you,” she said. “And then Kessiah said you spoke more just yesterday.”
“Yes,” I said. “We’re from the same home-place, as it happens.”
“Uh-huh, she told me as much. Good to see someone from home, ain’t it? Give you some sense of roots. It must be hard on you to be so far from your roots.”
“Aren’t we all?” I asked.
“No,” she said. “Me, I’m home fairly often, even if the masters would like it different. I work in one place, and it is the place I know best—the far shore of Maryland, my home. Someday I shall return there for good, but not like this, not as no agent, but in the bright and open sun. But in the by-time, I am there fairly often and it is good to get back, good to remember.”
“I remember plenty,” I said.
“I know you do. Way I hear it, your talent is such that you are as good working in the house of Philadelphia as you were in the fields of Virginia. And I have heard it whispered that you, particularly, might be able to work even more.”
“I’ve heard that too,” I said. “But it’s all horse and no saddle.”
“Huh,” she said. “Give it time.”
“I think it ain’t really up to me. I want my people out. But I see it. There are so many people. And I can see them all now.”
“Oh, I am so glad to hear you say that,” she said. She was smiling at me mischievously. And I felt, in fact knew, that I had just then enrolled myself into something. “Here is the thing, friend, I work small and I work alone. I move by my own time and my particular vigilance. But for