at them. It may be hard to believe now, in these dark days, but there was no “nigger car.” Why would there be one? The Quality kept their Tasked ones close the way a lady keeps her clutch, closer even, for this was a time in our history when the most valuable thing a man could own, in all of America, was another man. I headed to the back, walking in the aisle between the two rows of seating. The train idled for a few minutes. I tried not to look nervous. But when I heard the conductor yell, and the great cat roared again, I felt every inch of me loosen and relax.
The entire journey took two days, so that I arrived at Gray’s Ferry Station, overlooking the Schuylkill River, on Thursday morning. I stepped off into a crowd of people searching for friends and family. I saw Hawkins and Bland as soon as I was off the train, but they gave me a wide berth, for it was known that even here in the city, Ryland prowled searching for runaways. I had been given no description of my escort. I was told to merely wait. There was an omnibus across the street, hitched to a team of horses. Several of the train passengers stepped on board.
“Mr. Walker?”
I turned and saw a colored man in gentleman’s clothes before me.
“Yes,” I said.
“Raymond White,” he said, extending his hand. He did not smile.
“This way,” he said and we walked over to the omnibus and boarded. The driver cracked a carriage whip and we pulled away, in the direction opposite of the river. We did not talk much during the ride, and this was to be expected given the business that had brought us together. Nevertheless, I was able to take the measure of this Raymond White. His dress was impeccable. He wore a perfectly cut gray suit that angled down from his shoulders to his cinched waist. His hair was neat and parted. His face seemed a stone with features cut into it, and for the whole of that ride no expression of pain, annoyance, joy, humor, nor concern moved those features. Yet I thought that I saw a sadness in his eyes that—despite all Raymond’s forbearing elegance—told a story, and I knew, if not how, that his life was somehow tied to the Task. And from that sadness I drew that his high manner, his nobility, was no simple matter of birth but of labor and struggle.
The omnibus cut away from the river and into the heart of the city. There were people everywhere on the streets. I could see them out the windows, so many people, so that it seemed to me as though race-day had gathered a hundred-fold, as though the whole of the world had gathered there, gathered to heave between the workshops and fur dealerships and druggists, to walk the stone-chipped streets, to inhale the acrid air. Every rank of person in every configuration—parent and child, rich and poor, black and white. And I saw that the rich were mostly white and the poor mostly black, but there were also members of both tribes in both classes. It was a shock to see it directly, for if whites held the power here, and they did, they did not seem to hold it exclusively. And I tell you, I had never seen more miserable specimens of the white race, and never more luxurious specimens of the colored race, than I saw that day. The coloreds here were not merely surviving, as they did in Starfall, they were sometimes dressed in garments more elegant than anything I’d seen on my father. And they were out there in the churning city, in their hats and gloves, and their ladies under their parasols, moving like royalty.
This astonishing portrait was set against the most offensive odors known to man. I did not smell the air here in this city so much as feel it. It seemed to be born in the gutters, then rose up to mingle with the dead horses in the street, and finally joined the fumes of manufacture and production, until the odor—an orchard left to rot—was an invisible fog that hung over the whole city. I was used to all the malicious odors of livestock, but alongside the gardens, the strawberry bushes, the woods. But the smell of Philadelphia offered no such balance; it hung everywhere, over every street, in the workshops and taverns,