the camp. I could see people talking amongst each other in groups and those groups shifting among others to share whatever rumor or intelligence they’d garnered of Micajah Bland’s fate. And then I looked down and saw a satchel not far from where Otha and Raymond had stood. On instinct I reached for the satchel and carried it back into my tent, and when I opened it, I found a collection of newspapers, detailing the saga of Micajah Bland and Lydia White. The first item told the tale—“Runaway Negroes Taken.” The second confirmed that it was, indeed, the family of Otha White. My hands trembled as I thumbed through the third—“Thief of Negroes Returned to Alabama.” And then finally a dispatch from an Indiana agent, who wrote with great sorrow, communicating the news—the body of Micajah Bland had that morning washed up on the shore. Head stove in. Hands bound behind him in chains.
By then, I had been trained to package away misery. And so what I thought of in that moment was not Micajah Bland, but the simple task of getting those papers back to Raymond and Otha. I moved among the crowd. A few people, knowing my affiliation with the Philadelphia station, tried to stop me and ask what I might know. I ignored them, and scanned among the tents for a clue as to where they might have taken Otha. I saw some of the agents of the western Underground before a tent. One of them waved to me—“Here,” he said. Then another parted the entrance for me, and walking in I saw Otha seated there with Raymond. Otha was calmer now, though still smoldering. There were a few others whom I recognized as clearly senior within the loose leadership of the Underground. Harriet was there, and most shockingly, seated calmly—Corrine Quinn.
There was not much time to weigh her presence. The conversation halted when I entered.
“I am sorry,” I said, walking over to Raymond, “but I thought you might need these.”
Raymond thanked me, and I took my leave, allowing the meeting to continue. I walked away from the camp, back toward the woods where I’d met Harriet a day before. I sat there, on that same boulder where Harriet had sat. Would that I could open a door right here in the woods, I thought, and pull the cotton fields of Alabama to the forests of New York. But I had nothing. A power was within me, but with no thought of how to access it or control it, I was lost.
I returned and found the camp still in mourning. It was afternoon by then. I went to my tent and lay down. When I awoke, Otha was there seated in a chair next to me. Otha was a man of true feeling, but never wild in his passions, or flagrant in his rages. I had never seen him as he was two days before in joy, nor as he was that morning in agony.
“Otha,” I said. “I’m sorry. I…I don’t even know what to say. I have never met Lydia or your children, but I have heard so much of them now that I feel them as family.”
“He was my brother, Hiram,” Otha said. “Micajah Bland was not my blood, but he was so much my brother that he would die for me and mine. I am not young to any of this. I lived divided from my blood, and made brothers wherever I lived, and grieved every time we were divided—and we were always divided. But I have never, for an instant, shied away from connection, from love.
“I am sorry about my anger this morning. Raymond did not deserve it, and I am sorry you saw me as such.”
“There’s no need, Otha.”
He was silent for a few minutes. I said nothing, thinking that this was Otha’s time.
“I want to tell you a story about dreaming. I want to tell you, specifically, because I know you have struggled to see your place, struggled to touch that power they all say is in you. And if in this pain I can give something to you, that would well soothe me too.”
I sat up in my pallet and listened.
“I met my wife, Lydia, shortly after Lambert died. Lambert was older, stronger, and braver. He was my heart, and my faith, and whenever I fell to despair, it was his unflagging belief that set me straight. And then to see him go under as he did, feeling