The Underground Railroad

Chapter 13 Summary

The chapter opens with a bulletin dated August 28, 1839, that a Rigdon Banks of Granville County circulated. It appeals for the return of a Black girl named Martha, who is 21 years old and will try to pass as free.

We find Cora in the dark tunnel, awakened by rats. She thinks that it is the day after Sam’s house was burnt down, but she isn’t certain. Alone with her thoughts, she has visions of Caesar being lynched, of him being beaten beyond recognition and delivered to Randall. She imagines Sam tarred and feathered or imprisoned. She feels as if she is locked in the “Life on the Slave Ship” exhibit at the museum. She also has visions of Miss Lucy cutting her open and releasing a swarm of spiders from her bowels, and of her rape on Randall, with Terrance as the rapist.

Her aching stomach reminds her of the starvation periods she endured on the plantation—although they were always short because they interfered with labor. She grows nervous because the train should have arrived by now—and she knows that she does not have the strength to walk the miles of rail to an unknown destination.

Cora curses the decision that she and Caesar made to stay in South Carolina. If they had left, they would have reached the Free States by now. She feels that they were foolish to expect safety while they remained in the South, just one state over from Randall. She also sees the machinations of South Carolina as chains of a different devising than the ones belonging to the plantation.

Cora postulates that, if she had allowed Caesar to become her lover, they might not be currently separated. She feels herself a stray: “[Y]ears ago, she had stepped off the path of life and could no longer find her way back to the family of people” (147). She hears the ground rumbling and we are told that, in the ensuing days, she will associate the sound of the train not with the arrival of the train, but with the arrival of a truth that she had always innately sensed: “She was a stray in every sense. The last of her tribe” (147).

The train enters the tunnel and initially speeds past Cora, but then the engineer backs the train up and collects Cora. He gives Cora his waterskin and sandwich. He is a young and lively person whose manner of speech reminds Cora of white boys, and Cora feels that his attitude is incongruous with his work. He tells Cora that he sped past her because the Georgia station has been closed, and the conductors have been instructed to avoid it. Cora finds ropes in the bottom of the boxcar, used to wrap cargo. She wraps them around herself as if they are reins. As Cora watches the darkness of the tunnel that almost entombed her recede, she hopes that the next Underground Railroad traveler will persist until they are free.

Cora is unable to sleep during this leg of her journey—unlike her first leg, during which she slept next to Caesar. The blustering wind makes it difficult for her to even catch her breath at times, and this engineer is more reckless than the last one. He sings unfamiliar songs from the North and is rough on turns. The driver stops the car for a break and checks on how Cora is doing. She flaps her reins. When the train resumes its progress, Cora realizes that she has not asked where it is going.

Chapter 14 Summary

Cora arrives at the North Carolina station. In contrast to the station beneath Lumbly’s farm, and the one beneath Sam’s home, this station displays no colored stones or wooden plank walls. Instead, Cora finds herself standing in “the guts of a mountain” (151). She tries to stay with the engineer, but his train is a maintenance one, and he has been instructed to aid in the testing of all the lines after the Georgia station’s shutdown—and to return to the junction after inspecting. He has just enough fuel to check a station further south, and then head back to the depot. Cora, dead set against going further south, decides to stay inside the station. The engineer assures her that a station agent will soon arrive and departs.

Cora explores the tunnel, with only a torch and water as provisions. There are rusting tools amid the mountain rubble, and she discovers a ladder bolted to the mountain stone, which leads to a tight passage. She climbs it and finds a dead end. A pile of rocks and dirt cuts off the tunnel. Thinking herself trapped, she collapses into tears and falls asleep. She is awakened by the station agent, who introduces himself as Martin Wells. He is “a barrel-shaped man deep in his middle age, pasty-complected and soft” (153), with a nervous personality despite his work on the railroad.

Martin is surprised and concerned to find Cora, who is not supposed to be there, and helps her over the rubble and out into the world. He explains that the night riders are on active patrol. Although the station is hidden in an abandoned mica mine, the cave-in has been staged to deter the riders’ searches, which are aggressive and thorough. He is wholly unprepared to harbor Cora. He tells her that he must fetch a wagon, and Cora is uncertain that he will actually return. However, he does return with a dilapidated wagon drawn by two skinny horses. He stashes Cora inside of it, nestled between sacks of grain and covered by a tarpaulin.

Shortly into their trip, and before the sun has risen, Martin lifts the tarp and bids Cora to look at something that he wants to show her. Initially confused, Cora spots shapes in the darkness. Upon closer examination, she sees that these shapes are corpses hanging from trees. Some are naked, while others wear trousers with stains on them from the emptying of their bowels after the snapping of their necks. There is a castrated man and a woman with a curved belly. Martin informs Cora that the road is called the Freedom Trail, and that it is strewn with bodies for the entire path to town.

When they arrive at Martin’s home, Cora sneaks in through the back. The sun has begun to rise, and any neighbors awakened by the noise of the wagon could easily see her. In the kitchen, she finds a tall white woman named Ethel, who refuses to look at her. She tells Cora, “You’re going to get us murdered” (155). Cora then knows that a quarrel about her has happened between Ethel and Martin. Cora steals a quick glance at the home’s parlor, which is modest, before rushing past the window to evade detection. Ethel tells Cora that she stinks, and bids her to wash herself quickly in the washroom. After this, Ethel directs her into the home’s tiny, hot attic, which is full of junk. Ethel then opens a hatch in the attic roof, and Cora climbs into it. Then, Ethel brings Cora food, a jar of water, and a chamber pot. She looks at Cora for the first time, and informs her that their house girl, Fiona, will be arriving soon, and that her daughter, Jane, and her family will also be coming for a visit that afternoon. She tells Cora that if anyone hears her, they will all be immediately reported and killed. When Cora asks how long she will have to stay in there, Ethel replies, “You stupid thing. Not a sound. Not a single sound. If anyone hears you, we are lost” (157). Then, she closes the hatch.

There is a crude hole in the wall that faces the street—the handiwork of a previous lodger. Through it, Cora observes the comings and goings of the park that sits across the street from the home, as well as the neighborhood, which is uniform and well-kept. Brick walkways snake across the park, and a fountain garbles near its main entrance. White men, women, children, and a well-fed dog (whom Cora names “Mayor”) idyllically enjoy the park at all hours of the day. Cora thinks about the way that Black people and white people mixed in South Carolina, as a matter of course for commerce.

As the sun reaches its hottest and the park bustles with visitors, Cora tasks herself with moving around the hatch to find some relief from the scorching heat. While Fiona works during the day, neither Martin nor Ethel check up on Cora. Cora listens to Fiona, who is a young Irish girl, accomplish her duties while cursing her employers under her breath. She also listens to Jane, whose light and cheerful manner makes Cora think that she must take after her father. At one point, Jane’s young daughters nearly enter the attic, but the notion of ghosts dissuades them.

Cora resumes watching the park’s activities. A banner emblazoned with the words “Friday Festival” is hung, and a band assembles on the park stage. Cora finds their music uninspiring compared to colored music—although they also play renditions of Black songs, which are received most enthusiastically by the crowd. An intoxicated man in a wrinkled linen suit, whom Cora later learns is Judge Tennyson, delivers a short yet garbled welcome speech. Then, a minstrel show starring white men painted black with burnt cork ensues. The two men, donning clownish clothes and chimney-pot hats, perform pratfalls in several skits that earn much laughter from the crowd. They twist their voices into caricatures of Black speech, and the skit in which one of them takes off a withered shoe to count his toes repeatedly, while constantly losing count, earns the most praise from the crowd. 

A play is also mounted. It tells the story of an enslaved person (again played by a white man in blackface) who fled north after a minor disagreement with his master. He complains of his flight, which includes hunger and wild animals. In the North, a white saloon owner takes him on, but abuses him ceaselessly. The enslaved man makes his way back to his enslaver in the South and pleads to be enslaved once more. The master courteously explains that North Carolina has irrevocably changed, and that he cannot assume his former life. The enslaver then whistles, and two patrollers haul the enslaved man away. This play is met with raucous applause.

Then, the ultimate purpose of the night is revealed. A strapping man with a handlebar mustache enters the stage. His name is Jamison, and Cora does not have to strain to hear his voice. He tells the crowd that he awakens, bursting with vigor, every Friday—because he knows that Friday is the day that the town celebrates its good fortune—and states, “Sleep used to come so hard to me, in the days before our regulators secured the darkness” (161). A fearsome band of 50 regulators flanks the stage, and they wave when the crowd cheers. Jamison also makes a show of introducing the newest in the regulators’ ranks: a thin, red-haired young man named Richard. This man’s youth and slenderness remind Cora of her latest engineer on the Underground Railroad, and she marvels at the two young men’s wildly divergent fates. Jamison boasts that Richard has made a catch during his first week, which is a rarity.

Then, two night riders drag a Black girl on stage: “She [has] a house girl’s tender physique and [shrinks] further in her simpering” (162). Her tunic is badly soiled with dirt and blood. Jamison informs the crowd that the girl’s name is Louisa, and that she escaped from her plantation and has been living in the woods. She was stashed in a steamship headed for Tennessee when she was discovered. Cora sees Louisa struggling through bloody eyes to see her tormentors.

Then, Jamison raises his fists in the air. He expounds that, “[i]n the dark […] colored miscreants [lurk] to violate the citizens’ wives and daughters. In the deathless dark, their southern heritage [lays] defenseless and imperiled. The riders [keep] them safe” (162). He praises North Carolina for separating itself from the North, and from the “contamination of a lesser race,” while spurning the emancipation taken up by South Carolina. He says that their duty is clear when they find any escapees.

Cora watches as the crowd moves with precision and familiarity. With Jamison in the lead, the night riders haul Louisa to the large oak tree that stands in the middle of the park. Cora sees a wheeled platform placed beneath it and remembers that children frolicked upon the platform earlier in the day. When Jamison calls for volunteers, many rush enthusiastically forward. A noose is placed around Louisa’s neck as she is prodded up the stairs of the platform. A night rider throws the other end of the rope over a sturdy branch with a practiced hand. One person who has volunteered to push the platform is removed because he has had a turn at a previous festival, and a young girl wearing a polka-dot dress rushes to take his place. Cora retreats to the opposite side of the hatch before the final act: “It [is] as far from the park, the miserable thumping heart of the town, as she [can] get” (163). Jamison gives the signal.

Chapter 15 Summary

Martin explains the context of Cora’s sequestration. As more enslaved people were imported, cotton exports grew—which led to the ability of plantation owners to buy more land and thus produce more cotton. Whites were greater in population than enslaved people by a ratio of two to one in North Carolina, but the proportions were near 50/50 in Louisiana and Georgia. In South Carolina, Black people outnumbered whites by more than a hundred thousand. This led to white people fearing the possible wrath of Black enslaved people, whose growing population was seen as a threat to the white social and economic order. Revolts occurred in Georgia and Kentucky, as well as in South America and the Caribbean. In the Southampton rebellion, Nat Turner and his band slaughtered 65 men, women, and children. Vigilantes and patrollers then lynched three times that amount—including people uninvolved in the rebellion—to send a message.

In Martin’s area, the closest thing they had to a constable is the patroller. Cora tells him that, in most areas, “Patroller will harass you anytime they feel like” (165). Patrollers serve enslavers, and they are “the law: white, crooked, and merciless. Drawn from the lowest and most vicious segment, too witless to become overseers” (165). Enslaved people off the plantation must have passes or face jailtime. Free Black people always carry manumission papers and are sometimes taken by force to the auction block anyway. Any Black person who refuses to surrender is shot, and patrollers ransack and rape at will in both enslaved people's villages and the homes of the free.

It is past midnight on Cora’s first Monday in Martin’s home. Jane and Fiona have returned home. Dark shades cover the attic windows, and Martin speaks in a whisper. His next-door neighbor’s son is a night rider. According to Martin, the uprisings have been small and disorganized—although the patrollers take them as an occasion to rise as a veritable army. Tipped off by Black informants, the patrollers devise ornate ambushes, picking off rebels with aid from the US Army and civilian volunteers. The homes of the free are burned down and those deemed guilty—as well as the innocent—are lynched. This is done to avenge the loss of any white life, and more importantly, to repay the assault against the white order in excess.

The rebellions are put down, but the number of enslaved people remains. Martin tells Cora that, last autumn, the power brokers of North Carolina (politicians, wealthy farmers, lawyers, and Jamison representing his interests as a senator and local planter) met to discuss the issue. As they spent hours convening, Martin wondered why so much time was devoted to the rebellions and the North’s influence on congress, instead of on the issue of who would pick the cotton. In the ensuing days, newspapers printed the numbers. North Carolina held three hundred thousand enslaved people, and the same number of Europeans (mostly Germans and Irish people fleeing starvation and political strife) were arriving at the harbors of Boston, New York, and Philadelphia in droves. Savvy southerners asserted that they should not let the North claim this population, which could be used as a labor force. They placed ads in overseas newspapers which extoled the benefits of term labor, while advance agents recruited in saloons, town meetings, and poorhouses. The European refugees filled ships bound for America.

The powers that be in North Carolina saw the transition from enslaved labor to European indentured servitude as a political, economic, and social boon. While they could not treat white laborers in the same manner as they did enslaved people, and they did have to pay living wages, European immigrants who fulfilled the terms of their contracts would become voting citizens (with a full vote, not three-fifths of one) loyal to the system that nurtured them. The North Carolina government bought enslaved people from farmers at good rates, in the same manner that Great Britain had when it abolished enslavement some decades hence. Other cotton states such as Florida and Louisiana absorbed the stock.

North Carolina whites bemoaned the intermixing of white people and Black people, and they took the demographics of Bourbon Street as distasteful evidence of the evils that accompanied the pollution of white blood. New race laws outlawed racial commingling, and freemen who resisted being uprooted were massacred. Indian War veterans made good use of their skills, earning money as mercenaries. Then, the patrollers maintained order in their wake.

When Cora awakens the following Saturday, she delays looking out the spyhole. But when she does, she finds that Louisa’s body has been cut down, and children are playing beneath the spot where it once hung. She asks Martin how far the so-called Freedom Trail stretches. He responds that it goes as far as there are bodies to supply it. He also clarifies that white people are not hung and displayed the way Black people are. He tells Cora that North Carolina has a long history of running off abolitionists, and that being in possession of abolitionist literature was enough for a white person to be sent to jail. The de facto punishment for harboring enslaved people is death. And after a slow period of white arrests, some towns made the rewards for informing on white slave-harborers higher. People exploited this to settle scores in their businesses and neighborhoods, as well as their own families. Children tutored in the signs of sedition by their schoolteachers informed on their parents. Patrollers with expanded powers routinely searched not only Black households, but white ones too—“in the name of public safety” (170). In these conditions, Martin would never make it far with Cora as a stowaway.

Patrollers searched Martin’s home twice prior to Cora’s arrival. While they were perfectly courteous, their second visit prompted Martin to cease his Underground Railroad activities. He tries to use this to excuse Ethel’s terror and rudeness, but Cora asks him if he feels like an enslaved person, and if he was born into the world with that terror. This puts an end to their conversation.

Cora soon establishes a routine. She sleeps in her tiny space and retreats to the furthest side of the hatch during Friday Festivals. She watches the park and works on her reading. She bears the blistering heat that builds up in the hatch. After midnight, she descends into the attic proper, stretches her limbs, and eats the food that Martin brings her. Then, she must return to the hatch. There, she reads the old farmer’s almanacs stored in the attic, an old copy of The Last of the Mohicans, as well as the abolitionist literature that belonged to Martin’s father.

After a few months, Cora stops asking Martin for word from the Underground Railroad, which has gone silent. Newspaper reports of raided depots and murdered station agents trickles in, but those are common fables. She listens to Fiona’s steady stream of curses against her employers, and they remind her of the enslaved people's complaints on the plantation—“the small rebellion of servants everywhere” (174). While Cora keeps tracks of the park regulars from her peephole, Fiona never takes that path, and so Cora does not know what the woman’s face looks like. She imagines Caesar either safely in the North or dead, and conjectures about the horrific and elaborate things that Terrance will devise for her punishment if she should be caught. She also nurses fantasies about raising her own family in a home not unlike Martin’s, and of finding her mother a beggar whose beggar’s cup she would upend. Martin will not let Cora leave for fear of the consequences that would draw upon himself and his family.

Cora scarcely thinks of the boy she murdered. While Terrance’s psyche provided a model for understanding the white people of North Carolina, she finds the sheer scale of the white terrorism difficult to account for. She concludes that the whites of North Carolina are motivated in greater measure by fear than by greed. She feels that they are right to be afraid: One day their order will collapse in violence and bloodshed. She thinks of herself as a rebellion of one, and America as her warden.

Chapter 16 Summary

It’s a week before the summer solstice. Martin has been seeing bad omens. Firstly, a week ago, Cora knocked over her chamber pot while Fiona was working in the kitchen and Ethel was out. Cora has made noise in the hatch before while Fiona was present, but Fiona never reacted. That day, Fiona was hosting a fellow girl from Irishtown for lunch, which took up much of her work time, and she either didn’t notice the odor of Cora’s mess or ignored it to spare herself the chore of cleaning it. When Martin came to clean it later, he told Cora to keep the mishap from Ethel.

Martin is an unlikely emissary of the Underground Railroad. His father, Donald, had always been rather taciturn and never openly took a side on the issue of enslavement. At age 18, Martin left North Carolina and became a clerk in a shipping office in Norfolk. There, he met Ethel. After five years, Donald fell ill, and Martin came home. On his deathbed, Donald forced Martin to promise that he would continue his work, which Martin took to mean that Donald wanted him to assume charge of his feed store. Martin also found a map among his father’s things, which he took to be a map to gold. But it turned out to be a map to an Underground Railroad station. There, he found his father’s diary in a special place of shrine-like honor. The diary described the man’s thoughts on enslavement: Donald had been disgusted with the practice of enslavement since his boyhood and found it to be an affront to God. The work trips he would take frequently during Martin’s childhood were abolitionist missions. By the time of his death, Donald had aided a dozen people in getting to the Free States. Martin had not been as successful. His nervous constitution had not served him well.

In another bad omen, the regulators come for a second inspection. Cora listens to it from above. Martin and Ethel courteously allow them to search the house and answer their questions—although anyone who knows Ethel would take her politeness as evidence that she was hiding a secret. When the regulators ask to see the attic, Martin tells them that they don’t often go up there because raccoons have made a nest there.

Cora resumes her observations of the park. She sees the dazed park regulars, caught in a repeating cycle of their foibles, as ghosts, “caught between two worlds: the reality of their crimes, and the hereafter denied them for those crimes” (180-81). A final bad omen arrives: A mob lynches a husband and wife who were harboring two Black boys in their barn. Their daughter, jealous of the attention, informed on them. Despite their tender age, the boys joined the gallery of bodies on the Freedom Trail.

Cora begins feeling ill. She takes stock of her condition, and marvels at the fact that living within a prison has become her only refuge. On the plantation, she was enslaved, but she could also move unrestricted within its bounds. She could smell the air and see the stars. Here, she was rid of her enslaver, but forced to live in a room in which she could not even stand.

Stomach spasms awaken Cora, and she descends into delirium. She awakens in a white room, atop a soft mattress. Ethel ministers to her, her manner surprisingly softened. Martin tells Fiona that he has contracted the Venezuelan pox, which he read about in a magazine, and says that he must be quarantined. He gives the girl a week’s wages, and she goes on her way without a word. While Cora recovers, she spars with Ethel about the Bible’s teachings about enslavement. Cora also picks up tips and tricks from the outdated almanacs, for use at an undetermined later date. Those almanacs helped Donald track the movements of the stars to better plan his abolitionist errands.

By Friday, Cora has recovered enough to return to the hatch on Monday, which is when Fiona is scheduled to resume work. Ethel allows Cora to stay in the extra bedroom, although no light or lingering near the window is permitted. At the start of the Friday Festival’s show, regulators knock on the front door and demand to search the home. The festival stops as the townsfolk vibrate with excitement over the commotion. Ethel tries to stall the regulators, and Cora knows that she will not make it to the creaking attic stair in time. She crawls under the bed, which is where she is discovered and dragged out onto the porch. She lays at the feet of four regulators, in their black and white uniforms, and another man—the tallest man she has ever seen, “solidly built with an arresting gaze” (189), surveys the scene and smirks at a private joke.

Four men are restraining Martin and Ethel. The townsfolk crowd the sidewalk and street, eager to take in this new diversion. Fiona, a young girl with red hair, pushes through the crowd and exclaims, “Venezuelan pox! I told you they had someone up there!” (189). Cora takes in the girl, whose voice she knows so well, but whose face she has never laid eyes upon. She finds it hard to believe that the cursing she has been hearing came from the small mouth, but the hardness in the eyes is proof. Martin tells the girl that she was treated well, but Fiona retorts that both he and Ethel had “an awful queer way” (189), and that they deserved whatever they got.

The crowd—tasked with the duty of not only being executioner, but also the jury—grows uneasy. Jamison, mopping his brow with a kerchief, arrives. He tells a trembling and crying Martin that his father would be ashamed of him. Ethel desperately cries that she had no idea what was going on, and that Martin had harbored Cora without her knowledge. Jamison signals and the night riders haul Martin and Ethel into the park. He eyes Cora, considering the treat of a double execution. The tall man says, “This one is mine. I’ve made it clear” (190). When Jamison asks his name, he gives it: Ridgeway.

As Jamison squirms to maintain his stature in front of the crowd and two young night riders move forward to crowd Ridgeway, Ridgeway remains unbothered. He asserts that the Fugitive Slave Law grants him the right to return an enslaved person to their enslaver. Earlier, he paid a visit to Judge Tennyson and insisted on a raid during the Festival. Cora’s head swims. Ridgeway dismissively informs Fiona that she will receive her reward. To Cora, he says, “You don’t have to be afraid […] [y]ou’re going home” (191).

A small Black boy of about 10 drives a wagon up the street and through the gathering:

 On any other occasion the sight of him in his tailored black suit and stovepipe hat would have been a cause of bewilderment. After the dramatic capture of the sympathizers and the runaway, his appearance nudged the night into the realm of the fantastical (191).

At the porch’s foot, Fiona tells a group of girls from Irishtown that a girl must look after her own interests if she is going to get a leg up in America.

The Black boy driving the wagon and “a tall white man with long brown hair and a necklace of human ears around his neck” (192) are Ridgeway’s posse. Cora’s ankles are shackled and secured to the floor of the wagon. Her head beats with agony in time with her heart. As the wagon pulls away, she watches Martin and Ethel being lashed to the oak tree. Mayor nips at their feet. A blond girl hurls a rock at Ethel’s face. Then the townsfolk descend upon the couple and Cora can see them no more.