in the low and familiar. And so there was no time to think and submit to the cowardly parts of me. I spent my last days in counsel and reflection. I talked with Micajah Bland about what to expect. I walked the woods and thought of all that I once took for normal, but would soon be without.
Those of us working in some new terrain had to take up a new identity and be furnished with papers. The house agent never made his own. They were furnished by other house agents from other stations, for it was thought that no man could author his own life. They began with the root of my occupation—woodworking at a local company that was a cover for the Underground’s operations. I was to be a man who’d purchased his freedom, and fled in the wake of certain recent laws that choked the rights of the free coloreds in the South. I was given two sets of working clothes and another set for church. My name stayed the same with one addition—the surname Walker.
There was still the matter of how, precisely, to get there. Ryland’s Hounds trawled the roads, harbors, and railways. We were aided by the fact that there would be no runaway report for me, and thus no Ryland searching for a man of my description. We decided on the train. I would be joined by Hawkins and Micajah Bland. Our plan was simple. I was a freeman. Hawkins, a slave belonging to this Bland, a white man, his proprietor. Should I, at any point, find my papers under challenge, Bland would offer testimony as to the identity.
“Act like a freeman,” Hawkins advised. “Lift your head. Look them in the eye—though not for too long. You are still colored. Bow before the ladies. Be sure to bring some of them books of which you are so fond. Remember, own the acre, or they will see right through you.”
On our day out, I held these notions, and when my nerves came upon me, as when procuring my ticket, as when handing my trunk to the boy for stowing, as when the train pulled off and the South, and everything I had known, fell away, I simply told myself this thing that must become my truth. I am free.
15
I DEPARTED WITH FEW EFFECTS to my name and no real farewells. I saw neither Corrine nor Amy that last evening, and assumed them both involved in some mischief of their own. I left on a hot summer Monday morning, four months after my arrival at Bryceton. We walked most of that day, Hawkins, Bland, and I, and spent that night in a small farmhouse of an old widower sympathetic to our cause. Then, that Tuesday, we set out separately for the town of Clarksburg, where the first leg of our journey would commence. The plan was to cross through the state, by the Northwestern Virginia Railroad, and then in western Maryland we’d link up with the Baltimore and Ohio, proceed east and then north up into the free-lands of Pennsylvania, and find our destination in Philadelphia. There was a shorter route due north, but there had been some recent troubles along the rail there with Ryland’s Hounds, and it was felt that the audacity of this direct approach right through the slave-port of Baltimore would not be expected.
When I reached the Clarksburg station, I spotted Hawkins and Bland sitting beneath a red awning. Hawkins was fanning himself with his hat. Bland was looking down the track, in the opposite direction from where the train would approach. A flock of blackbirds sat on the awning. On the platform I saw a white woman in bonnet and blue hoop dress holding the hands of two well-dressed toddlers. Some distance away, outside the shade of the awning, a low white with what I guessed to be all his possessions in a carpet-bag smoked a tobacco. I stood off to the side, not wanting to inspire suspicion with any presumption of cooling shade. The low white finished his tobacco and then greeted the woman. They were still talking when the blackbirds flew from the awning, and the great iron cat roared around the bend, all black smoke and ear-splitting clanking. I watched as the wheels turned slower and slower and came to a screeching stop. I had never seen anything like it outside of a book. I presented my ticket and papers to the conductor gingerly. He barely looked