The Underground Railroad

Chapter 21 Summary

The chapter opens with a bulletin dated October 4 and circulated by a James Aykroyd. It states that an enslaved girl named Sukey fled without provocation. It states that her Methodist allegiance can identify her, along with her physical characteristics.

Cora arrives at Valentine farm. Here, she finds herself a struggling student among 6- and 7-year-olds, not unlike the elderly Harold in South Carolina, who wept during lessons. Many of the children speak with precision and maturity. They study and recite the words of the Founding Fathers, and the Declaration of Independence.

Four months pass. The harvest is finished. New arrivals to the farm ease Cora out of her place as the outcast. Cora watches them marvel at their schoolbooks. She begins to settle in, knowing the rhythms of the farm and her favorite places to get some privacy. She has settled into a friendship with her teacher Georgina—who, like all the women from Delaware—likes to gossip.

Cora has also developed a tender friendship with a child named Molly, the child with whom Cora lives, along with Sybil, the girl’s mother. Not since Chester has she been an adult treasured by a child. Occasionally, when Sybil is working, Cora aids in Molly’s care by braiding her hair and walking the girl to school.

It is Saturday, and a grand feast is in the works. Jimmy, the barbecue pit master, is tending to a hog using the Jamaican culinary secrets he learned from his father, who was a Maroon dweller. Jimmy is elderly and only has two teeth: He likes the meat extra tender. The meal will surely be delectable.

The farm has many cabins, several of which went up hastily to accommodate large influxes of people accustomed to varying plantation cabin set-ups. Several of the newer dwellings, however, were with more care. A woman named Harriet used to live with Cora, Sybil, and Molly, but she married and moved out. Cora therefore finds herself with the good fortune to have her own room. Sybil and Molly have painted the house and tend wildflowers outside of it during the warm season: they take pride in their dwelling.

Sybil is 12 years older than Cora. She is slender, but Cora knows she possesses a deep strength. Cora delights in watching “[t]he silent theater of Sybil and Molly’s love” (248), which moves her always. It is a foreign thing to watch a Black mother tend to her child in a serene setting. Sybil ran away with Molly when Molly was only two. She had caught word that her enslaver would sell her to make up for a loss from a bad crop. With the full moon’s blessing and a silent Molly, whom she claims knew what was going on, she fled into the forest. She risked a visit to the cottage of a Black farmer, who fed them and arranged for them to be picked up by the Underground Railroad.

Many fugitives have passed through Valentine farm. When Cora arrived, she began asking people if they had met her mother. A girl named Lindsey postulates that perhaps Mabel went to Canada. Lindsey possesses a cheerfulness that Cora cannot understand: The girl is from Tennessee, and all Cora remembers of Tennessee is fire, illness, and brutality.

Supper is held outside the meeting house, which is the largest building on the farm. Those who work as masons on the courthouse come back from their work famished. Seamstresses who work for local white women come back and put on their lovely dresses. The temperance rule is lifted for Saturdays alone. Cora tugs a crispy ear off of one of the deliciously cooked hogs and gives it to Molly, knowing it is the girl’s favorite.

Valentine no longer keeps a steady count of how many families live on his land, although it is at least 100. Black farmers also purchased land nearby and started their own similar operations. There are many young children. Georgina and Cora agree that freedom promoted the coming of new life. Cora thinks darkly of the way in which women in South Carolina believed they were free, but the doctors’ knives said otherwise.

Then, a meeting convenes, although many of the farm’s leaders, and Valentine himself, are out of town. Cora looks out at the crowd. She was hoping that Jimmy’s roast hogs would persuade Royal to come back early, but he and his associates are still engaged in a mission for the Underground Railroad. Royal is the name of the bespectacled man who rescued her from Ridgeway. Cora has heard rumors about a recent, grisly lynching nearby of men who supposedly work for the railroad.

Gloria Valentine, John Valentine’s wife, officiates the meeting in his stead. Valentine likes to tell new arrivals to the farm that his wife is “the most delicious vision [his] eyes ever held” (252). Although John didn’t normally work with enslavers, he went in on a feed shipment with Gloria’s former owner, an indigo plantation enslaver. After catching sight of Gloria working in the laundry, he purchased her and then wedded her a week later.

Gloria is still beautiful and has the comportment of a white lady who went to finishing school (although Cora hears her slip into plantation inflections when conversations become folksy). When Valentine becomes stern as a result of his practicality, Gloria smooths things over.

Gloria apologizes for her husband’s absence. He is off taking advantage of the farm’s big harvest to re-negotiate his loan. Mingo, a stout man, sits in Valentine’s usual place. In an acknowledgement of the farm’s political arguments, he says “Amen” when Gloria asserts, “Lord knows, there’s so much in the offing, it’s nice to have a little peace of mind” (253). While many advocate that the settlement move entirely out west, “[t]o places that didn’t share a border with slave states [and] had never countenanced the abomination of slavery” (253), Mingo is in favor of staying in Indiana—with a vast reduction in sheltering runaways. The steady stream of famous visitors, as well as a thriving Black community, makes the farm a target.

Sybil, sensing an imperious, scheming nature in Mingo, does not like him. Although Cora respects his honorable story—he hired himself out from his enslaver for weekend labor and then purchased the freedom of his wife, child, and then himself—she also feels a bit of suspicion about him. His manner reminds her of the preening Blake, whom she had known during her Randall days. While Mingo has no use for a doghouse, he is certainly looking to expand his domain. He will address the crowd with Lander, the farm’s abolitionist orator, at next month’s meeting to address the farm’s future.

The time for dancing and entertainment arrives. The previous Saturday, a pregnant opera singer from Montreal had entertained the crowd. The Saturday before that, a violinist from Connecticut moved half of the women to tears. This week, the farm hosts a poet whose black suit and bow tie make him look “like a traveling preacher” (255). Cora couldn’t quite sort out much of the man’s material:

 Poems were too close to prayer, rousing regrettable passions. Waiting for God to rescue you when it was up to you. Poetry and prayer put ideas in people’s heads that got them killed, distracting them from the ruthless mechanism of the world (256).

Yet the poetry primes the crowd for the ensuing dancing, and Cora would not begrudge anyone their joy.

The entire Valentine farm is a miracle beyond Cora’s imagination. Yet, given the brutal turn of her experience in South Carolina, and the feeling that she had surrendered to its seeming solace so easily, she finds herself less able to accept the joys that the farm hosts: “a young girl taking her hand” and “A man she’d come to feel for” (256). As the music starts, she makes her way back to the cabin.

When she arrives, Royal is standing on her porch. She notices his fresh black eye and buries her face in his neck. He assures her that the bruise is from a minor scuffle. He presents a gift to her: a new farmer’s almanac.

Chapter 22 Summary

Royal had taken Cora to an Underground Railroad ghost tunnel after her first month at the Valentine farm. Cora began working on her second day at the farm, in allegiance to the farm’s motto: “Stay and contribute” (258). The laundry woman named Amelia had to tell her not to abuse the clothes: working with her hands had stirred the “old, fearful industry” (258) that Cora had been forced to display at Randall. Cora then moved to different tasks on the farm. In each assignment, she felt haunted by the gaze of the overseer.

This chapter also gives us details about Elijah Lander, the famous abolitionist orator who is connected to the Valentine farm. Lander was born to a “rich white lawyer in Boston who lived openly with his colored wife” (258-59). The couple’s associates gossiped about them behind their backs, calling Elijah, borne of “an African goddess and a pale mortal” (259), a demigod. By age six, Elijah revealed himself as a piano prodigy. Family friends arranged for him to become the first Black student at one of the most prominent white colleges. He later said, “They gave me a slave pass […] and I used it for mischief” (259). He eventually became valedictorian of the school. Lander could have become anything he wanted to, easily using his gifts for his own advancement alone. Instead, he used them to make room for others. He settled on becoming an orator. His speaking engagements moved him from his parents’ parlor, addressing prominent Bostonians, to the homes of those Bostonians, to Black meeting houses and Methodist churches, and then to lecture halls across New England: “Sometimes, he was the first colored person to set foot the buildings apart from the men who built them [and] the women who cleaned them” (259).

Irate sheriffs arrested him for sedition. He was imprisoned when the gatherings he presided over were called riots. An honorable Maryland judge issued a warrant for his arrest on the grounds that he promulgated “an infernal orthodoxy that imperils the fabric of good society” (260). A white mob brutalized him until he was rescued by those who had traveled to hear him read from his “Declarations of the Rights of the American Negro” (260). Across the swath of Florida to Maine, people burned his pamphlets and autobiography, along with effigies of him. Throughout it all, he maintained an inscrutably placid countenance. He regarded his own hybridity as “a new beauty come into the world, and it is in bloom all around us” (260).

The day after Cora first heard one of Lander’s speeches, Royal took her to the ghost station. They stopped for a picnic on the side of a meadow on the way there, and Cora permitted Royal to rest his head in her lap. She held off from stroking his hair the way she wanted to when a memory of old violence rose up in her.

Royal led her to a desolate and dilapidated cottage, which she hesitated to enter. Royal counted off six paces and then began digging. When the trapdoor was exposed, they entered. In comparison to the other stations, this one was a mess. Royal told her that the tunnel was not made for a train, as it was too small, and also that the station did not connect to the rest of the line. It had never been used, and no one knew when it was made or who used to live in the house. Cora is beset by the notion that this station is a terminus rather than a beginning point.

Then, Cora thinks of the last station she was in, in Tennessee. The names of Royal’s compatriots in Tennessee were Red (the man with red hair) and Justin (the runaway). After Cora agreed to go with them, they rushed to hide the signs of the struggle. The notion of Homer watching them from the dark made the affair more urgent. Red guarded with his rifle while Justin and Royal chained Boseman and Ridgeway to the wagon. Ridgeway was silent and smirked at Cora with his bloodied mouth. She instructed the men to secure him to the wagon using the ring that the captors had used for Jasper’s chains. They drove the wagon to the far end of the pasture, so that it was hidden from the road. Red used every shackle in the wagon to chain Ridgeway. He tossed the keys into the grass and shooed the horses away. Homer was nowhere to be seen, and Boseman let out a frightful sound that Cora took to be his death rattle as they left. Justin and Cora were stowed in the back of Royal’s cart, with a blanket thrown over them. They were not blindfolded (for the security of the depot) until the party had traveled several miles.

The Tennessee station was covered in white tile, and the group waited at a table covered in a white tablecloth. They sat in luxuriously upholstered chairs and looked at the paintings that hung from the walls. Cora never learned the name of the person who owned the stable that the station was situated beneath. Justin found a jug of wine in a cupboard and drank thirstily from it, as Red's murder of Boseman disturbed him.

Royal was the first born freeman that Cora had ever encountered. He was brought up in Connecticut by his mother, a midwife, and his father, a barber. They were also freemen originally from New York City. By their mandate, Royal apprenticed for a printer as soon as he was old enough to work. His family envisioned that each generation of their family would become more accomplished than the one that preceded it. They predicted the fall of the institution of enslavement, and triumph and wealth for their descendants.

Royal left for Manhattan at 18 and became a barber, until he met the famous white abolitionist Eugene Wheeler. He began working for the Underground Railroad after undertaking many surreptitious duties to aid Wheeler. White people recognized him as a freeman through his demeanor. Neither constables nor kidnappers touched him.

Royal began working with Red at the Indiana posting. Red was from North Carolina. He absconded after the regulators lynched his wife and son. He traversed the Freedom Trail for mile after mile, searching for their bodies for a final farewell. He never found them. Once he made it north, he became a loyal Railroad worker, possessed of a “sinister resourcefulness” (266-67). When he heard of Cora’s slaying of the boy in Georgia, he said, “good” (267).

The mission to rescue Justin had been peculiar from its inception. Tennessee was beyond Royal’s posting, and the railroad’s local contact had become unreachable due to the fire. Royal’s superiors fitfully sent him and Red, two Black agents, on the mission deep in the badlands of Tennessee. The guns were Red’s contribution to the mission. Royal confessed to Cora that he had never used a gun prior to that night. Cora assured him that he looked fearsome anyway:

On the agreed-upon day, Justin set off for work: “Justin’s master often hired him out for masonry work and a sympathetic employer made arrangements with the railroad on his behalf” (267). However, he was in the back of Red and Royal’s wagon by the time the clock struck 10. His employer claimed that he never arrived, and his flight was not discovered until nighttime.

The train that Cora boarded in Tennessee was the most luxurious one she had ever seen. Its luxurious appointments reminded her of the trains she’d read about in her almanacs, and she was delighted. She slept peacefully draped across three seats, “free from chains and attic gloom for the first time in months” (268).

Justin said that he had family in Canada. He would spend a few days at the farm and then continue his journey to them. Royal assured him that the Railroad would convey him on his way. He extended the same assertion to Cora.

White people assumed that John Valentine was "one of them." However, Black people recognized immediately recognized his Ethiopian blood. His mother was a seamstress, and his father a white peddler. The only time his father acknowledged him outside of the home was when he died and bequeathed his estate to him. Valentine then began potato farming. He employed six freemen in the endeavor: “He never claimed to be that which he was not, but did not disabuse people of their assumptions” (268-69). No one batted an eyelash when he bought Gloria. No one save John, Gloria, and a judge on the opposite side of the state knew that Gloria was actually free. John taught her how to read and raised two sons with her, whom he also emancipated. When his older son turned five, one of his teamsters was lynched for looking at a white woman, who had been trying to stir the jealousies of a paramour. He then decided to move his family out of Virginia.

Valentine learned how to cultivate corn and had three prosperous seasons in a row. He invited his old associates from Virginia to come work and live on his expanding acreage. However, the seed for what the farm was to become arrived when a runaway from Delaware, named Margaret, arrived at his door during a winter storm. She had been wending from town to town with a traveling dentist when he became violent and she ran away from him and toward the lights of the Valentine farm. Although Gloria and the doctor tried to save Margaret’s life, she died a few days later.

When Valentine next traveled east for business, “a broadsheet promoting an antislavery meeting stopped him in his tracks. The woman in the snow was the emissary of a dispossessed tribe. He bent himself to their service” (270). Come autumn, his farm was an Underground Railroad office. The steady stream of runaways who were welcome to stay if they worked, and orators and artists who performed at Saturday feasts. A freewoman from Delaware who had fallen on hard times was recruited to become the teacher to the numerous children who began occupying the farm.

Royal used his white-passing privilege to purchase nearby parcels of land for Black people. He found his purpose and built his bustling Black farm in the middle of the formerly unpopulated Indiana wilderness. Half of the white stores in the area came to rely on the farm’s patronage.

Royal didn’t let on about the philosophical differences that prevailed during the weekly meetings. He said nothing of “Mingo, with his schemes for the next stage in the progress of the colored tribe, [nor of] Lander, whose elegant but opaque appeals offered no easy remedy” (271). He also did not speak of the mounting white resentment against the farm. These tensions would make themselves known as time went by.

Just as he said he would, Justin stayed for two days on the farm before departing for Canada. A letter signed by him and his two young nieces confirmed his arrival. Cora took refuge in the earthbound labor of the farm, thinking city life too foreign for her.

Before they left, Cora asked Royal why he brought her to the ghost station. He offered, “I showed you because you’ve seen more of the railroad than most. […] I wanted you to see this—how it fits together. Or doesn’t” (272). He told her that the railroad was bigger than just its operators, and that it included her too. He told her that it had many mysterious workings, such as this ghost station, that no one could quite piece together: “If we keep the railroad running, and none of us can figure it out, maybe you can” (272). She replied that she didn’t know why the station was there, or where it led to: “All she knew is that she didn’t want to run anymore” (272).

Chapter 23 Summary

The cold of November descends on the Valentine farm, but two events cheer Cora. The first is the arrival of Sam. When he shows up at her cabin door, she engulfs him in an embrace, and they both weep. His beard has turned gray and his stomach has grown fatter, but he is the same jovial man.

Ridgeway’s arrival tore Sam from his life. He hadn’t reached Caesar at the factory in time. Sam’s frequent conversations with Caesar, his leaving the saloon in the middle of his shift, as well as the ill repute he earned from others due to his self-satisfied character was enough to get his house burned down. By the time that the lynch mob murdered Caesar, Sam had already paid a peddler for a ride and boarded a Delaware-bound ship.

A month later, and under the cover of darkness, railroad operatives closed off the entrance to the tunnel under his home, in accordance with railroad regulation. Lumbly’s station had also been closed off. The railroad found different ways to employ Sam. He took runaways to Boston and New York and even posed as a slavecatcher named James Olney to spring fugitives from jail. He was on Valentine farm on a mission—bringing a family of three who had been hiding in New Jersey to the farm. It was his final railroad mission, before he relocated to California to barkeep for pioneers. Cora, after seeing so many who came to her aid meet with pain and death, is enlivened to see Sam alive and well.

Sam also brings a second piece of good news to Cora: Terrance Randall has died. It was a general consensus that Terrance’s obsession with Cora’s return only grew deeper with time. His daily activities on the plantation “consisted of conducting sordid parties in the big house and putting his slaves to bleak amusements, forcing them to serve as his victims in Cora’s stead” (274). He continued to put out bulletins for her capture, the bounty swelling to absurd heights. He told any slave catcher with whom he could command an audience of Cora’s villainy, and scorned the incompetent Ridgeway. He died in New Orleans, in a Creole brothel. His weak heart gave out. This story softens Cora, although she also indulges morbid visions of the man’s demise.

Ridgeway has become a pariah. His violence and odd obsessions had already made it hard for him to assemble a stable posse, but Boseman’s death and being bested cemented his fate. Tales of Homer’s odd manner also “did nothing for Ridgeway’s standing—their arrangement fed unseemly speculations” (276). Ridgeway has faded into obscurity since summer, and Sam speculates that he and Homer have retired to some dank cave. In turn, Red’s murderous act, and his unabashed blood lust, caused the railroad to dispatch him.

Royal tells Cora that, with the death of Randall, she is free. She reflects that the miracle of the farm and the ways it nurtured life are beyond what she imagined freedom to be. Sam stays on the farm for three days, trying to woo Georgina to no avail. On the day of his departure, he receives a kiss on the cheek from Cora and promises to write when he has settled. A library has been built on the farm. It houses what Royal calls “the biggest collection of negro literature this side of Chicago” (278). Within its volumes, Cora sees the epic history of her people. It is here that Cora encounters John Valentine. Feeling that her debt to him is too great, she has never spoken to him.

Cora can see that the man has become weary due to his work managing the finances and philosophical conflicts of the farm. The debates with visiting scholars and prominent abolitionists about the future of the farm and the best way forward for colored people started at his kitchen table. It is Saturday, and a gathering including Lander is scheduled. Mingo has promised that it will be a memorable one.

The meeting has been delayed due to Lander’s numerous speaking engagements, and Mingo has used the intervening time to press for better relations with the surrounding white towns. Cora asks Valentine what will happen if she and those like her are asked to leave. Valentine asserts that Cora is one of them. However, he also asserts that white resentment at the burgeoning Black intellectual and economic community has grown in strength and number.

Cora realizes that she has become too lost in the delicious treasures of the Valentine farm to realize that they are too good to last. Valentine’s heritage has become known, and many whites feel hoodwinked by him. She tells Valentine of an incident the previous week: She was walking up the road and almost run down by a wagon driven by a white man who uttered vicious epithets at her. Other farm residents have reported similar occurrences. Valentine says that they have a legal right, as American citizens, to be there—but that the Fugitive Slave Act is also law. Last spring, two slave catchers arrived at the farm. Although the one they hunted was long gone, they ransacked cabins anyway. He asserts that the evil legacy of Indiana’s slave state status has seeped into its soil. Cora also tells him that she has seen that evil—not only that of Terrance and Ridgeway, but the kind belonging to the people who frequented the park in North Carolina—in the faces of white people in town.

Valentine, seeing Cora’s discouragement, says that he is proud of what the community has built on the farm, and he assures her that, with the help of his two strong sons, the same can be accomplished elsewhere, again. When Cora tells him that Mingo will ask her to leave, Valentine affirms the value of explicitly deciding matters, and says that he will abide by the consensus of the farm. Finally, seeing the man’s weariness, Cora asks him why he carries on with the work. He replies, “I thought you were one of the smart ones. […] Don’t you know? White man ain’t going to do it. We have to do it ourselves” (283).

Chapter 24 Summary

The narrator tells us that the final gathering on Valentine farm convened on a cold December night. The survivors recount their versions of what happened that night, as well as the reasons. Until her dying day, Sybil will maintain that Mingo was the informant. By then, she will be a grandmother living in Michigan. In her account, Mingo informed the constables that fugitives were living at the farm and furnished details that would ensure an effective ambush. A spectacular raid would end the farm’s connections to the railroad and provide for the continued existence of the farm. But Sybil will fall silent when asked if Mingo predicted the violence.

Tom, a blacksmith who also survived, will offer the observation that the law had been tracking Lander for months, and that Lander was the desired target of the raid. Lander’s speeches were too inflammatory, too rebellious: “[H]e was too uppity to allow to run free” (284). Joan Watson is another survivor who was born on the farm and was 6 years old at the time of the attack. After the attack, she will meander in the forest for days, eating acorns until people in a wagon train find her. When she grows up, she will label herself “a student of American history, attuned to the inevitable,” adding that the surrounding white towns consorted to sabotage the thriving Black community: “That is how the European tribes operate. […] If they can’t control it, they destroy it” (284-85).

If anyone knew ahead of time what was to come, there were no indications. Saturday unfolds in an idyllic calm. Cora passes most of the day in her room with the most recent almanac given to her by Royal. He obtained it while traveling in Chicago and knocked on her door at midnight the previous night to give it to her. Then, for the first time, she allowed him into her room.

The sight of next year’s almanac moved her to tears. She had told Royal about the days she spent in the attic in North Carolina, “but seeing the year on the cover—an object conjured from the future—spurred Cora to her own magic” (285). She had also told him about her early years at Randall, where she picked cotton as a child. She told him about her grandmother Ajarry, who was taken by force from her family in Africa and tended to a tiny plot of land at Randall as her lone possession. She has also spoken of Mabel—the mother who abandoned her—to him. He also knows about Blake, the doghouse, and the hatchet confrontation. When she told him about her rape behind the smokehouse, she said sorry for allowing the assault to happen. He hushed her, assuring her that she was the one who had been wronged. He told her that justice awaited those who had hurt her—in this life or the next. During the night that they spent together, he asserted his belief that justice would ultimately prevail. Cora didn’t believe him, but still found pleasure in his assertion. When she woke up the next morning feeling better, however, she had to concede that she believed him a little bit.

On Saturday morning, Sybil teases Cora about Royal’s late call, and tells her that Lander has arrived at the farm. Sybil fears that Mingo will bring an end to life as they know it on the farm, and while Cora assures her that Valentine would not allow it, she is not so sure of her assertion after the conversation that she shared with Valentine in the library.

At the meeting, Cora and Royal sit in the front row next to Mingo and his family, “the wife and children he had rescued from slavery” (286). His wife, Angela, is known to be silent except behind closed doors with her husband. His daughters have donned bright blue dresses and colorful hair ribbons. Lander plays guessing games with the younger girl, named Amanda. The girl holds a bouquet of cloth flowers, about which she and Landers share a private joke.

Cora notices Lander’s long, delicate fingers, which have never picked cotton. She finds it strange “that one who’d never picked a boll or dug a trench or experienced the cat-o’-nine-tails had come to speak for those who had been defined by those things” (287). He is a slender man whose complexion announces his mixed heritage. His words were surprisingly forceful and strong in relation to his calm and gentle demeanor.

Cora surveys the room and notes that there are no white visitors. There are hundreds of people there—everyone who lives and works on the farm, as well as Black people from the nearby farms. There are people Cora has never seen before, including a “mischievous little boy who winked at her when their eyes met” (287). Cora finds herself deeply moved by the large crowd that has gathered: “She [is] surrounded by men and women who’d been born in Africa, or born in chains, who had freed themselves or escaped. Now they [are] here. They [are] free and black and stewards of their own fates” (287).

Valentine is the first to take the lectern. He recounts the story of his own birth as a freeman, and of Margaret, the woman he took in from the storm who changed his entire life course. He then expresses his gratitude for everyone in attendance: “Whether you have been among us for years or just a few hours, you have saved my life” (288). When he falters, Gloria joins him and embraces him. He recovers and tells the crowd that there is enough room for disagreement among them, especially “[w]hen the night is dark and full of treacherous footing” (288).

Next, Mingo takes the stage. He tells the story of how he toiled for many years to purchase his family’s freedom, but then changes his tack. He tells the crowd that not everyone has the wherewithal to achieve the impossible, and that some Black people are beyond salvation. He says that everyone has encountered individuals who are too far gone, the ones that “disappear in the night because deep in their hearts they know they are unworthy” (289). He expounds that there are concessions that have to be made, because white people will not change overnight. He asserts that the farm’s connection to the Underground Railroad and its harboring of runaways, criminals, and people who are wanted for murder (he catches Cora’s eye as he says this) only invite the wrath of the surrounding white communities. He argues that such things prevent both the flow of white resources and money into the community, and the entrance of Black people into American society.

As the crowd applauds, Mingo’s daughter places one of her cloth flowers into Lander’s lapel. He pretends to catch its fragrance and swoon. Royal has spent the day talking with Lander. Royal has also told Cora that he likes the idea of relocating to Canada better than the idea of moving west. He thinks that Canada is a better place for Black people to raise their families, and that he will have to give up his Underground Railroad activities to settle down at some point. Cora always changes the subject when he talks in this manner.

Then, Lander takes the stage. He concedes that Mingo has some good points but asserts that the fact that they can’t save everyone does not mean that they shouldn’t try. He also says that the idea that they can escape slavery is a delusion: they will each always be scarred by the horrors that they endured. He also says that Valentine farm itself is a delusion in the sense that it defies the brutal reality that America has always inflicted on Black people. Yet, the farm is also in fact real. He continues on this theme, stating that America—built on stolen land, secured through war and enslavement—is also a delusion that should not exist—if there were any justice in the world. And yet, again, it still exists. He says that he does not know what the community should do but emphasizes their unity and common origins. He also states that no one person can decide the fate of the entire race. The fact that they are Africans in America means that there is no precursor to their condition, for their path—but their fates are bound to each other through the color of their skin: “All I truly know is that we rise and fall as one, one colored family living next door to one white family. We may not know the way through the forest, but we can pick each other up when we fall, and we will arrive together” (292).

A bullet hits Lander in the chest. He falls back, pulling the lectern down with him. Royal is the first to rise, and as he runs toward Lander, he is hit in the back by three bullets. He drops to the floor and chaos ensues. The white men outside whoop and howl and release more shots as the crowd scrambles for the exits. Valentine’s sons help their father out, and Gloria stops to look at Lander before realizing that he is dead and joining her family.

Cora holds Royal’s head in her lap. She runs her fingers through his hair, rocks him, and cries. Royal smiles through the blood filling his mouth. He tells her “not to be afraid, the tunnel [will] save her again” (293). He tells her to return to the house in the woods, and that she can tell him where the tunnel leads. Then his body goes limp. Two men, one of whom is Oliver Valentine, pull Cora out of the building. She breaks away from them when she is outside. She sees white men dragging screaming people into the darkness of the woods. A musket tears down a carpenter who holds a baby, and both of them go crashing to the ground. Mingo’s daughter, isolated from her family, crumples in the dirt. She grips the denuded stems of her cloth flowers so tight that they cut into her hands. As an adult, she will read about the Great War in Europe, and take issue with its name: “The Great War had always been between the white and the black. It always would be” (294).

Cora calls for Molly, and feels that she cannot recognize anyone, so warped by terror are people’s faces. She feels the heat of the fire. Valentine’s house is engulfed in flames. It is then that Ridgeway grabs her. Homer is there too, and she realizes that Homer is the mischievous boy who winked at her earlier. Home says, “There’s a tunnel, sir. […] I heard him say it” (294).