The Underground Railroad

Chapter 25 Summary

This chapter is a vignette of Mabel: “The first and last things [Mabel] gave to her daughter were apologies” (297). While she was pregnant with Cora, Mabel apologized for the world that awaited her. Come another 10 years, Mabel would find herself apologizing to her daughter for “making her a stray” (297). But Cora did not hear either of these apologies.

During Mabel’s flight, Moses’ face flashed before her eyes. She remembered the man as a sickly baby that no one expected to survive. But his mother, Kate, ministered to him using “witch-woman cures […] poultices, and root potions” (297). She sang lullabies and other songs to him every night, and he lived longer than most of the boys who were also born that year. Everyone credited Kate for saving him from “the early winnowing that is every plantation slave’s first trial” (297).

Mabel remembered that Kate was sold once one of her arms became paralyzed. Moses then bore his first whipping for stealing a potato. When he was whipped the second time for idleness, Connelly commanded that his wounds be washed with hot pepper. But Moses did not grow mean until Connelly shaped him into a boss, “the master’s eyes and ears over his own kind. That’s when he became Moses the monster, Moses who made the other slaves quake, black terror of the rows” (298). Mabel resisted him the first time he beckoned her to the schoolhouse. But when he threatened to go after Cora, who was only eight at the time, she did not fight him anymore.

Mabel also thought of her mother dying in the cotton field, and of her sweet friend Polly, who shared a birth month with her. She and Polly were pregnant at the same time. But when Polly’s baby was stillborn, she hung herself in the barn.

Mabel determined that she was not going to die on Randall. One night, she decided to set out, in search of her own survival. As she made her way through the swamp, she wondered if she would be there if Cora’s father, Grayson, had lived. She remembered him: “Tall and black, sweet-tempered with a laughing eye. Swaggering even after the hardest toil. They couldn’t touch him” (299). She singled him out on his first day on the plantation and decided that he was the one: “When he grinned it was the moon shining down on her, a presence in the sky blessing her” (299). He promised to buy their freedom but died due to fever before Mabel even knew that she was carrying his child. After his death, she never spoke of him again.

While making her way through the swamp, Mabel decided to return to the plantation, to her daughter. She decided that her flight was the result of her hopelessness getting the best of her. She knew that she must return to tell her daughter that there was a world beyond the plantation—a world that could be hers if she kept up her strength.

But a cottonmouth snake found her not long into her sojourn back. It bit her twice in the leg. She tried to dismiss it as a water snake, but when she started to taste mint and her leg began to tingle, she knew the truth. She stumbled to a bed of soft moss, which felt like the right place to die. And then the swamp engulfed her.