said. “Go back! I want to see them. I told them and they did not heed me. We have to show them! They have to see!”
And so I turned back around and headed toward the center of town, where, by then, the gentry had gathered themselves, along the streets for the last bit of intercourse before parting for the day. But when we rode past in the Millennium chaise, instead of any show of respect, the men and women of Quality glanced our way, nodded without smiling, and went back to their conversation. I don’t know what precisely Maynard wanted or why he expected to get it. I don’t know what was in him that made him believe that this time they would at last acknowledge the merit of his blood, or forgive his impulses and outbursts. But when it was clear he would find no satisfaction, he growled and ordered me to turn to the far edge of town, where I was to leave him at the pleasure house and recover him in an hour.
I was now alone, and grateful for the privacy of my thoughts. I hitched the horse and began to wander the town. I was recalled again to recent events, to my dream, to the realization of the unending night of slavery, to that morning, when I watched the daylight of Sophia fade like dying sun over the blue Virginia mountains. I do not claim to have loved Sophia then, though I thought I did. I was young and love to me was a fuse that was lit, not a garden that was grown. Love was not concerned with any deep knowledge of its object, of their wants and dreams, but mainly with the joy felt in their presence and the sickness felt in their departure. And in Sophia’s own private moments, did she love me? I did not think so, but in another world, a world beyond the Task, I thought she might.
There were two roads leading to such a world—buying one’s freedom and running. What I knew of the first consisted of a cluster of free coloreds, living in the southern corner of Starfall, who, in the era of red earth and booming tobacco, were allowed to save some small wage and then buy back their bodies. But that road was closed to me. Virginia had changed. Even as the old lands of Elm County, of Lockless, declined, the luster of those who tasked among them increased. What was lost in their labor upon the land could be recouped in their sale, at a premium, Natchez-way, where the land still bloomed. So where once the Tasked could work their way to freedom, they were now too precious to be granted the right of paying their own ransom.
If the first road was blocked, the second was unthinkable. Every single person I’d ever known who’d run from Lockless was either returned by Ryland’s Hounds, the patrols of low whites who enforced the order of the Quality, or they had lost their heart and returned themselves. In any case, so total was my ignorance of the world beyond Virginia that running seemed insane. But there was one who was said to know more.
No man was more esteemed among the coloreds and the whites of Elm County than Georgie Parks. He was the mayor, the ambassador, the dream, though the dream took its meaning from whatever vantage it was glimpsed from. Back when he was tasked, Georgie worked the fields and, much like Big John, seemed to have a preternatural understanding of agriculture and all its cycles. He could spend an hour walking among your wheat fields and tell you about the harvest three years from now or put his hand on your tobacco hillocks, feel for the heartbeat of the earth, and reveal whether your tobacco ears would be elephants or mice. And he had warned the Quality of what they courted with their love of tobacco, in a sideways manner so that his warning was not remembered by them in spite, but with a good-natured regret. But there was a tantalizing shadow about Georgie. He would disappear for long periods or be seen out in Starfall or glimpsed in the woods at the oddest of hours. We had an explanation for these mysteries. Georgie was tied to the Underground.
And what was this Underground? It was said among the Tasked that a secret society of colored men had built their own separate world deep in