The Underground Railroad

Chapter 1 Summary

This chapter introduces us to Ajarry, Cora’s grandmother: “This was her grandmother talking” (3). We are told that when Caesar first approached Cora about running north, she refused.

Ajarry never saw water before she arrived at the port of Ouidah, where she was kept in a dungeon prior to the ship’s arrival. Enslavers kidnapped the men of her village and returned for the women. Survivors informed her that the enslavers bashed her father’s head in and left him for dead when he could not keep up. Her mother had passed away several years prior.

After being sold and traded several times on the journey to the fort, Ajarry was put on a ship called the Nanny. The ship’s last stop before the open Atlantic was in Liverpool. Because of her “tender age” (4), sailors did not initially rape Ajarry, but this reprieve only lasted six weeks. Twice, she tried to die by suicide—first by starving and then by trying to jump off the ship. Sailors—men “versed in the schemes and inclinations of chattel” (4)—stopped her both times.

Although her family tried to stay together at auction, Ajarry became separated from the members of her extended family when they were sold to Portuguese traders and put on the Vivilia, which was next sighted adrift four weeks later—with everyone on board dead from plague. Ajarry knew nothing of this, and imagined her cousins, Isay and Sidoo, working for kind and generous masters in the North, spared labor in the fields. In her imaginings, they also eventually bought their freedom and lived as free people in Pennsylvania, a place that Ajarry once overheard two white men speaking about.

Next, Ajarry was kept in a pest house for a month on Sullivan’s Island and then sold when doctors officially declared her and the rest of the ship’s cargo disease-free. Enslaved people were put naked on the platform while a crowd enjoying fresh oysters and hot corn looked on. Ajarry was purchased by an agent wearing a white suit and glittering rings that shone in the sun when he pinched her nipples.

Each of Ajarry’s owners seemed destined to meet with misfortune, so she was sold many times. Ajarry rapidly learned to size up her surroundings each time she was sold—to separate the layabouts, the industrious, the snitches, and the compatriots among the enslaved people. And among the enslavers, there were the “the planters [who] wanted nothing more than to make a living” versus “who wanted to own the world,” as well as “the merely cruel” (6). She understood her place as property and minded her position.

Ultimately, a representative of the Randall plantation purchased Ajarry in Georgia. She lived on the Randall plantation for the rest of her life. She had three husbands over the course of her life. The first was sold to a sugarcane estate in Florida. The second, who liked to talk about the Bible stories that he had learned from a “liberal-minded” (7) former enslaver, died of cholera. The third stole honey and died from his punishment. Ajarry gave birth to five children. However, the only child that survived to the age of 10 was Mabel, Cora’s mother.

Ajarry died of what appeared to be an aneurysm, while she was working in the field. She died an anonymous death lacking in human dignity, forever knowing and minding her place, and believing freedom to be fundamentally impossible. Thus, it was Ajarry speaking when Caesar first asked Cora to run with him and Cora said no. Three weeks later, when Cora says yes, “it was her mother talking” (8).