day, that I understood the genius of Corrine Quinn. I tell you, I was at a point in my life, and had seen so much, that I was prepared to believe that she herself had laid waste to the tobacco fields of Virginia, for what I now saw, looking around, was that the faces of these men, these low whites, were not unfamiliar at all, were in fact men I’d seen in training back at Bryceton, and in this manner I comprehended exactly what had happened—right there in the heart of once-storied Elm County, Corrine Quinn had opened a Starfall station.
Within the hour everyone was in meetings. I was excused from these, having my assignment, which would begin on the morrow. I walked out of the back of the inn and then circled around until I was on the street where we had entered. I turned up the collar of my coat to my cheeks, then pulled my hat low. A manic curiosity had taken hold of me only minutes earlier—What of Freetown? What of Edgar and Patience? What of Pap and Grease? Of Amber and the baby? I could have very easily asked Hawkins or Amy, but I think I knew what they would say, because deep in my heart, I was neither mystified nor confused as to what had come, for I well knew the price for what we put upon Georgie Parks.
What I found then was what I expected, there in the shadow of Ryland’s Jail—which itself seemed to contain half the life left in Starfall. Freetown was in ruins, but not the kind that now afflicted the rest of Starfall. The shanties were nearly destroyed, and what remained were wooden planks black from burning, ashes, and among those structures still standing, doors torn off hinges, as though crashed in by some tremendous force. Such was the home of Georgie Parks. I walked in and saw that everything was smashed—the bed broken in two, a chest of drawers axed down the middle, the shards of pottery, a pair of spectacles. I stood there for a few moments taking in the fruit of my ways, the harvest of the Underground’s terrible revenge, which had not merely vented itself on Georgie Parks but on the entirety of Freetown. And I felt a deep and pervading shame. That was when I saw it—in the corner, a small toy horse, which I had given to Georgie on the birth of his child. I bent down to pick up the horse, and then walked back outside. It was now early evening. Ryland’s Jail stood a block away in a stony silence. The sun was falling over the trees in the distance. I felt a gray menace blowing up the abandoned street. I put the toy horse in my coat pocket and walked on.
III.
The negroes, in the meantime, who had gotten off, continued dancing among the waves, yelling with all their might, what seemed to me a song of triumph….
ALEXANDER FALCONBRIDGE
28
THE FOLLOWING AFTERNOON, I took the horse and chaise from the stables and out of Starfall, steering away from the stone bridge, Dumb Silk Road, and the Falling Creek turnpike, for the proper way back to Lockless. I was drowning in a bleed of feelings, and what bled most was not the proposed meeting with my father, was not shame at my last words for Thena, was not even the sight of Sophia. All of that was there, but reigning high above it all was a deep-seated and boyish hope that the decay that I could now see had overrun Elm County had somehow spared my Lockless.
Who knows why we love what we do? Why we are what we are? I tell you I was, by then, mortgaged to the Underground. All that I knew of true humanity, of allegiance and honor, I had learned in that last year. I believed in the world of Kessiah and Harriet and Raymond and Otha and Mars. Still, the boy in me had not died. I was what I was and could no more choose my family, even a family denied me, than I could choose a country that denies us all the same.
But when I turned off the West Road, into Lockless, I understood, almost immediately, that my wish would not be granted. Like the race-way, the main road had begun to submit to the growth of the forest. And then I rode farther, past the fields, and saw that the regular