owner was an associate of Raymond White’s, and a large number of those who labored there were fugitives. I worked there three days a week and three for the Underground.
After work I would usually walk alone through the city, taking in the incredible alchemy of sounds, odors, and sensations, all of which proceeded late into the night. But still and all, among that incredible amalgam of people, I somehow felt alone. It was Mary Bronson who’d done it, her longing, her hunger for a freedom that extended to all of her blood. For what did it mean to be free, in a city such as this, when those you hold to most are still Tasked? What was I without Sophia, without my mother, without Thena? Thena. Boy like you should be more careful with his words, she said. Never know when they the last ones he might put upon a person. And I should have been, I knew that even then. But I was now aging faster than my years, so that Thena’s words redounded with the lamenting of a man much older than my twenty years. My treatment of her was the worst thing I’d done in my short life. I saw now that I had been little more than a boy lusting after a dream. And now the dream was gone, like Mary Bronson’s boys were gone, carried off into the deep, far from any means the Underground might muster to recover it.
One Friday morning, as I was leaving for work, Otha approached me and said, “A man can’t be too long without family.”
I stared back and said nothing.
He smiled. “Still, it might be nice to be with some folks who care, Hiram. Supper? Tonight? At my momma’s. What do you say? Whole family’ll be there. We good folks, I tell you, and would very much welcome you as our own.”
“All right, Otha,” I said.
“Lovely. Just lovely,” he said. Then he tendered directions and said, “See you tonight.”
The White family home was across the Delaware River. I caught the ferry that evening, then walked along a cobbled road until it turned to clay and then to dust. The heat of the city, the air damp and thick, faded behind me, and a refreshing breeze swirled up the road. It was good to be out. It was my first time in anything like the country since my arrival, and I now realized everything that I missed about my old Southern home—the wind in the fields, the sun pushing through the trees, the drawn-out afternoons. Everything happened at once in Philadelphia, all of life one ridiculous crush of feeling.
The parents of Raymond and Otha lived in a large house with a porch wrapping around and a pond out front. I stood for some time on that porch, staring at the front door. Inside, I could hear children and mothers, fathers and brothers, their words and laughter mixing into a happiness that took me back to Holiday down at the Street. Even before I stepped inside the house, all their accumulated affection radiated out. I had felt something like it before. Under the Goose. Where I was in reunion with a mother whom I could not remember. Where I saw my cousins, and Honas and Young P. And no sooner did I recall this feeling than it all came upon me again. The summer breeze grew chill. I shivered. And everything before me went blue. The door to the Still home expanded into many doors all in a row, and these doors pulled away from each other like bellows. I felt myself falling away. A door opened. I looked in. I saw my mother’s hand reaching out from the smoke. She walked toward me, her hand reaching for mine, and when she grabbed it, the blue faded, and the yellow heat of that summer afternoon returned. And in the doorway I saw a woman, who was not my mother, but about the age she would have been. And just behind her I saw Otha, who, seeing me, stopped, waved, and smiled.
“Hiram?” the woman asked. And before I could respond, she said, “That must be you. You look like you seen the devil himself.”
She gripped my hand tight and then looked into my eyes. “Uh-huh. Hunger’ll do that to a man. What Raymond and Otha got you eating down there? Why, don’t just stand there—come on in!”
I followed for a couple of steps until the woman stopped and said, “Viola