personal, but costly. We need someone to assist Bland, someone to ensure he can leave for Alabama at the appropriate time.”
“Of course. It’s why I’m here.”
“No, this is personal. This is not the Underground as you understand it, and this is certainly not Corrine. There are those who would object to this and so I need you to understand—this is of your own free will. Indeed if you cannot help us in this, we will still proceed with the rescue of your family. As I’ve said, it is my feeling that you have endured more than what was just. We do this for you as a way of bringing matters into balance, no matter Corrine’s feelings on things.”
“Yeah, I figured,” I said. “This ain’t really Corrine’s sort of deal. She is a good woman, I think. And they are, no doubt, in a good fight. But what I have seen up here, what I have seen of your momma, your cousins, your uncles, ain’t just the fight. I have seen the future. I have seen what we are fighting for. I am thankful for Corrine. I am thankful for the fight. But I am most thankful to have seen all that is coming.”
And now here, I did something very curious—I smiled. And it was an open and generous smile, one that rose up out of a feeling with which I was so rarely acquainted—joy. I was joyous at the thought of what was coming. I was joyous at the thought of my role in this.
“So I am in, Raymond,” I said. “Whatever that means, I am in.”
“Excellent.” Raymond smiled and said, “And you’re welcome to remain here as long as you like with these correspondences. As you saw, there are more upstairs. My wife will return soon and the children in the afternoon, but don’t let that stop you. Explore as you need. May we never forget why we do this, Hiram.”
I spent the rest of that day lost in Raymond’s files, as thrilling as any Ivanhoe or Rob Roy. In the evening I joined the family for dinner and accepted an invitation to stay the night and thus continued my reading by lantern-light. I left the next morning after a small breakfast. I felt myself unbalanced by all that I had so quickly consumed, for it was only now, through those files, that I came to understand the great span of the Underground’s operations, and the lengths to which its clients had gone to escape the Task. There in my hands, in those files, legends came alive—the resurrection of “Box” Brown, the saga of Ellen Craft, the flight of Jarm Logue. These stories were incredible, and taken together they gave me some sense of why Raymond and Otha would dare such a thing as a liberation up out of the Alabama coffin. They had dared so much already. In Virginia what mattered was immediate and invisible. And while Raymond would not wish these files to be exposed to the world, not just then, the safety of a free state made him bold. Freedom was what mattered to him. Freedom was his gospel and his bread.
Leafing through the pages, I felt the stories come alive before me. I saw them as though I was right there, so that on the walk to the ferry, on the ferry itself, and then all the way to the Philadelphia station, legions of colored people, panoramas of their great escapes, overlay the geography, so that I saw them all before me, saw them coming up from Richmond and Williamsburg, from Petersburg and Hagerstown, from Long-green and Darby, from Norfolk and Elm. And I saw them fly from Quindaro, to take haven in Granville, then bed down in Sandusky, and rejoice just west of Bird in Hand, not so far from Millersville, a small pass to Cedars.
And I saw them fleeing with Irish girls, absconding with mementos of lost children, running with salt pork and crackers, running with biscuits, flying with cuts of beef, inhaling the last of the master’s terrapin soup, taking drags of his Jamaican rum, and then out into winter, thoughtless and shoeless, but freedom-bound. Black maids running with dreams of holy union, running with double-barreled pistol and dirk, so that when confronted by hounds, they pulled out, yelling, “Shoot! Shoot!” They fled with young children dosed into slumber, with old men who shuffled out into the frost, who died exposed in the wood with these words on their lips: “Man