The Underground Railroad

Chapter 18 Summary

The chapter opens with a bulletin dated May 17, put out by a John Dark of Chatham County. It offers a $25 reward for a Black girl named Peggy, who has a scar on her neck due to a burn. The bulletin states that Peggy will try to pass as free, although she is not particularly intelligent.

We are presented with an image of Jasper, another enslaved man captured by Ridgeway, singing, “Jesus, carry me home, home to that land” (202). Ridgeway shouts for Jasper to shut up, but he will not. Sometimes, they halt so that Boseman can hit Jasper on the head. But Jasper inevitably resumes his singing, even after a beating. Cora recognizes some of his hymns, but also suspects that he makes some of them up. She finds Jasper’s voice and appearance unpleasant.

The posse picked up Jasper when they were three days into their journey away from North Carolina. He ran from a Florida cane field and arrived in Tennessee before a tinker apprehended him pilfering food from his pantry. The deputy found Jasper’s owners, but the tinker had no way to transport him—so Ridgeway struck a deal. He hadn’t bargained on Jasper’s singing ruckus.

Rain falls and Cora finds herself enjoying the breeze—before she begins feeling ashamed for finding pleasure in something. When the rain stops, the party stops to eat. Boseman slaps Jasper and laughs, and then kneels before Cora to make a lascivious remark before unchaining them from the wagon floor—although their wrists and ankles remain shackled. It is the longest time that Cora has ever been in chains.

Crows fly overhead, and the party of travelers finds the landscape scorched as far as their eyes can perceive. Local settlers started a fire to clear a specific plot of land, but the fire escaped their control. Cora sees nowhere to hide in the landscape. An elderly white man passes the party on a horse, and he slows with curiosity: “[T]he colored boy [named Homer] in the black suit driving the wagon and his queer smile discomfited strangers” (204). The old man also takes stock of Boseman, wearing the necklace of human ears, and the fearsome Ridgeway, and resumes his travel.

Homer apportions and distributes the food. Ridgeway has taken to allowing his charges a full share of food: It cuts down on complaints, and the costs are covered. Jasper continues to sing, and Boseman condescendingly goads him. Cora says that Jasper is refusing to eat, which he has done for the past few meals. Ridgeway is unbothered, and Homer capers over to devour Jasper’s portion. The boy can sense Cora staring at him, and he breaks into a grin without meeting her eyes.

Homer is described as “an odd little imp” (205). He is 10 years old but possesses “the melancholy grace of an elderly house slave” (205). He is judicious about his nice black suit and stovepipe hat. His duties include driving the team, assorted maintenance, and “bookkeeping," meaning that he records Ridgeway’s business accounts and inscrutably selected remarks in a small notebook that he keeps in his coat pocket.

One night, Ridgeway asserts that the one day he spent technically owning Homer was the only time he ever possessed an enslaved person. Ridgeway had been riding through Atlanta on a job when he happened upon a butcher attempting to clear a gambling debt by selling Homer. Ridgeway was compelled by the boy’s odd sensibility: “Homer’s shining eyes, set in his round pudgy face, were at once feral and serene. A kindred spirit” (206). Ridgeway purchased him for $5 and drafted emancipation papers the following day. However, Homer remained tethered to Ridgeway despite Ridgeway’s lukewarm efforts to be rid of him. The butcher had allowed Homer to study with the children of freemen, and, to ease his boredom, Ridgeway aided the boy with his letters. Homer pretended he was of Italian extraction when he felt like it and delighted in watching others become bewildered by the lie.

Cora asks why Homer stays with Ridgeway if he’s free. Ridgeway replies, “He’s seen enough to know a black boy has no future, free papers or no. Not in this country. Some disreputable character would snatch him and put him on the block lickety-split. With me, he can learn about the world. Find purpose” (207). Every night, Homer removes a set of manacles from his satchel, chains himself to the driver’s seat, and sleeps. It is the only way that he can sleep. Cora observes that the boy snores like a wealthy, elderly man every night.

Boseman, who now wears the necklace of human ears, has been traveling with Ridgeway for three years. He is a “rambler out of South Carolina [who] found his way to slave catching after a hardscrabble sequence: dockhand, collection agent, gravedigger” (207). He is not highly intelligent but has an uncanny ability to predict Ridgeway’s wishes. When Boseman joined Ridgeway’s posse, it was five men in number. However, this number dwindled for reasons that are not immediately apparent to Cora. An Indigenous man named Strong had worn the necklace before Boseman.

Ridgeway, a dedicated reader of gazettes because of the bulletins within them, explains to Cora that they are currently on what was once Cherokee land. However, the Cherokee had been summarily removed by the settlers, whose treaties were bunk and who needed more land. Some of Ridgeway’s friends had been army men who rounded up the Indigenous people and forced them to march west of the Mississippi, on “the Trail of Tears and Death, as one Cherokee sage put it later” (208).

As they enter Tennessee, Cora observes that the fire has stained the sky in hues of crimson and purple. She realizes that this is the first time she has crossed a state line independent of the Underground Railroad: “The red sky [makes] her dread the rules of this next territory” (209) and inspires Jasper to begin singing hymns about the wrath of God.

At the edge of the fire, they come upon a group of escapees. Cora hears the cries of a horde of white babies, which is unfamiliar to her. She reserves her sympathies for the numerous Black babies whom she has heard scream in agony and confusion during her lifetime. Cora surveys the land and, although she does not know what specific tribe called it home, her eyes and her senses tell her that America once belonged to Indigenous people.

By now, Cora has tried to run several times. On her last attempt, she ran near a stream at dusk. The slippery stones sent her careening into the water. Ridgeway beat her, and she stopped running. Cora realizes that the party is heading west rather than south. She asks Ridgeway about his plans. He tells her that a Georgia planter named Hinton has employed Ridgeway to return one of his slaves—“a wily and resourceful buck who [has] relatives in one of the colored settlements in Missouri” (211). Ridgeway has received reliable word that the man now works as a trapper and lives in the open. Hinton’s impatience to see his enslaved person returned is the reason for the party’s current path.

Ridgeway does nothing to hide his contempt for Terrance Randall and his “ornate” imagination for discipline. He casually tells Cora that, when he was dispatched to Randall after her escape, there were three gallows lining the road to the big house. In one was Lovey, “hooked through her ribs by a large metal spike and dangling […] the dirt below [her] dark with […] blood” (212). Cora collapses on the ground at this news, unable to contain her screams. Townspeople simply step over her prostrate body on their way to their shopping.

Ridgeway notes that the house, once lively and welcoming when Terrance’s father was alive, has become terrible in atmosphere. Terrance’s meanness is infectious. While Ridgeway is completely aware that the southern newspapers printed false propaganda about happy enslaved people, he also finds Randall to be a particularly grim example of a plantation: “The place was haunted. Who could blame the slaves their sad comportment with that corpse twisting on a hook outside?” (213).

Ridgeway then describes his most recent visit to Randall. Terrance, drunk and not bothering to wear anything but a robe, received Ridgeway in the parlor. Ridgeway laments the way that money has shaped Terrance into a far lesser man than his father. Terrance remembered Ridgeway due to Ridgeway’s previous failure to bring Mabel back to the plantation. He says his father had been particularly moved by Ridgeway’s decision to inform him of his failure to catch Mabel in person. Ridgeway then claims that he could have slapped Terrance across the face and still kept the contract. However, he has decided to wait to do so until he has delivered both Cora and Caesar. He guesses that, for the price Terrance is willing to pay for her return, Cora must be his concubine. Cora denies this.

That day, Terrance told Ridgeway that Connelly informed him that Caesar was frequently in Fletcher’s shop, supposedly selling his wooden bowls through the man’s store. He also informed Ridgeway that Caesar was originally from Virginia, and Ridgeway asserted that that was why the man was “soft” (214). Terrance specified that he wanted Cora back alive but didn’t care about how Caesar returned. Terrance also told Ridgeway to keep the law at bay—if it was known that the pair was wanted for murder, a lynch mob would inevitably claim them before their delivery back to Randall. Ridgeway left, vowing to himself that he would not return to apologize to another Randall: He would deliver. He heard a sound, and when he turned back to the house, realized it was Lovey. She wasn’t dead yet and was rumored to have survived for another half day.

Fletcher’s lies gave way instantaneously, and he gave up Lumbly’s name. But Lumbly had disappeared after taking Caesar and Cora out of the state. Ridgeway asks Cora if Lumbly was also the one who brought Mabel north, but Cora is silent. She finds it easy to envision the fate of Fletcher, and perhaps of his wife. She also realizes that Ridgeway hadn’t found the tunnel beneath Lumbly’s farm. She hopes that someone else will use it to find freedom.

Ridgeway learned Martin’s name from the interrogation of a station master in south Virginia. Ridgeway then targeted Martin for surveillance to get an idea of the workings of his station and of the railroad at large. Finding Cora with him had been an unexpected treat. Jasper joined the party the day after this exchange between Cora and Ridgeway. When Cora tried to speak to Jasper about his story, he would only respond in hymns and devotions.

Four days pass. Cora takes in the utter burnt destruction of the landscape around her. She observes that there are 10 rings on the floor of the wagon—enough for 10 enslaved people. Jasper settles into his favorite spot on the bench and resumes singing. Ridgeway says Boseman’s name quietly, who says “Oh” (216). Ridgeway then climbs into the wagon for the first time since he obtained Cora, and shoots Jasper in the face: “The blood and bone [cover] the inside of the canopy, splashing Cora’s filthy shift” (216). Ridgeway wipes his face and explains that Jasper’s $50 reward was not enough to bear his singing. Homer opens his notebook and checks his boss’s figuring. He declares that Ridgeway is right.

Chapter 19 Summary

As the band travels with Cora in tow, she watches the Tennessee landscape transform from unsalvageable burnt wreckage to robust cornfields. Then, they encounter a sign at a crossroads. The sign warns that the town up the road has been lost to yellow fever. All travelers are directed to an alternative, smaller trail leading southwest. Ridgeway observes that the sign is fresh—therefore, the contagion is not likely contained.

Boseman recounts the terrible death of his two younger brothers due to yellow fever. Their skin jaundiced and they bled from their eyes and anuses while seizing violently. Their dead bodies were hauled off on a wheelbarrow. He grows twitchy and nervous, wanting to put as much distance between himself and the fever as possible. Ridgeway calls the fever, which comes from the West Indies, a “tax on progress” (218). Two more signs on the alternate trail repeat the warning. The roads into the towns display no sign of the doom ahead, and the unseen quality of the threat makes it more terrifying.

As they travel a long way without stopping, Cora begins assembling lists in her head which parallel the voluminous ledgers kept on enslaved people—“every name an asset, breathing capital, profit made flesh” (219). Cora’s lists “inventory [the] loss of people [who are] not reduced to sums but multiplied by their kindnesses. People she had loved, people who had helped her” (219). She puts the Hob women, Lovey, Martin and Ethel, and Fletcher on one list, and thinks of her list of the disappeared: Caesar, Sam, Lumbly. Jasper might as well be counted as one of her own dead as well.

Cora feels that Tennessee is cursed. Initially, she sees the fire as a form of divine justice: a punishment for white people for the way that they enslaved and massacred her race and stole Indigenous land. She inventories the series of events that has led to her current state: her shielding of the boy Chester, the whip, and the sin of running away, which has led to the death of every generous person who came to her aid. Then, she looks for a reason that the fire engulfed one field and not another but realizes that there is no rhyme or reason for it. While plantation justice allowed for the wicked to run free while the innocent were tied to the whipping tree, the natural disasters of Tennessee were untethered to the crimes of homesteaders: “If Tennessee had a temperament, it took after the dark personality of the world, with a taste for arbitrary punishment. No one was spared, regardless of the shape of their dreams or the color of their skin” (220).

A young man intercepts the party. He tells them that a large settlement known to be of rambunctious character lies ahead. He assures them that the settlement is free of yellow fever as of the current morning. Cora sees that the town is the biggest she has seen since her time in North Carolina, although it is younger. At night, it still bustles. Boseman, fearing the proximity of the fever-struck towns, is adamantly opposed to spending the night. Ridgeway, annoyed, agrees to camp on the road after re-supplying.

Cora stays chained in the wagon while the men run their errands. Hard-faced passersby catch glimpses of her in the gaps between the canvas and look away. She notices that their clothes are rougher than those of white folks in eastern towns. Homer returns bearing a dress and badly fitting wooden shoes for Cora. The dress is made of soft dark blue cotton and has white buttons and a medicinal scent. When she holds up the dress, it blocks the bloodstains on the inside of the canvas from view. The peculiar Homer, who does not have a place in Cora’s lists, undoes her chains. Cora evaluates her chances if she were to run and concludes that the white people around her would be quick to form a lynch mob—especially if they know that she is wanted for murder. Homer watches her dress as if he is her loyal valet. She tells him that, while she is being forced to stay with Ridgeway, Homer is free. Homer looks mystified and records something in his notebook.

Ridgeway returns and announces that he is taking Cora to supper. Her clanking chains function like a cowbell as she trudges behind the man. She notices a young Black man, who appears to be a freeman, leaning against the wall of a stable. She feels that he must regard her as she did the people whom she once watched on their marches past the plantation: “To see chains on another person and be glad they are not your own—such was the good fortune permitted colored people, defined by how much worse it could be at any moment. If your eyes met, both parties looked away” (222). But this man does not divert his gaze. He nods at her before passersby obscure him from view.

Ridgeway leads Cora into a saloon and selects a table against its back wall. He tells Cora that the dress suits her. He then asks if news of Caesar made the North Carolina newspapers. Cora then figures out that Ridgeway has dressed her up to make her perform a piece of theater in the saloon. Ridgeway prefaces his story by saying that, despite all the state’s talk of racial uplift, it is still the hungry place it used to be. The saloon waitress delivers potato stew, which Ridgeway slurps. He whispers something about Cora to the waitress, which she laughs at, and Cora realizes that he is drunk.

Ridgeway tells Cora that he apprehended Caesar while he was at the end of his factory shift. When word spread that Caesar was wanted for the murder of a little boy—“not little” (224), Cora retorts—the lynch mob ripped him limb from limb after dragging him from the jail. While news of Lovey’s fate had reduced Cora to a sobbing mess, she steeled herself this time, prepared. Also, she had innately known, for a long time, that Caesar was dead. The simple fact of his death had presented itself to her on one of the nights she had spent in Martin’s attic, and she had already finished mourning him by the time Ridgeway arrived.

Ridgeway continues his story, stating that he made a bit of silver from Caesar’s capture, despite his death. Cora retorts, “You scrape like an old darky for that Randall money” (224). By way of response, Ridgeway tips the uneven saloon table and says that it should be fixed. Cora insolently tells Ridgeway that all his carrying on about reasons and logic does not make his pontifications true. She reminds him that he murdered Jasper in cold blood. He tells her that Jasper’s murder was a personal matter, not unlike her murder of the white boy. Cora responds that it happened as a matter of course during her attempted escape.

When Ridgeway asks Cora if she feels bad about the white boy’s death, she realizes that she has been grieving the boy subconsciously. She thinks of his grave, and of his mother weeping. He was simply another person caught up “in this enterprise that bound slave and master alike” (225). She mentally moves the boy from an isolated list in her head to the one that contains Martin and Ethel’s names. However, to answer Ridgeway’s question, she simply says “No” (225).

Ridgeway concedes that Cora is correct in a way—white people come up with all manner of fancy terms (like “Manifest Destiny,” which is trumpeted as a new idea, although it is not) to obscure the truth. He tells Cora, who hasn’t heard the term, that Manifest Destiny means:

taking what is yours, your property, whatever you deem it to be. And everyone else staying in their assigned places to allow you to take it. Whether it’s red men or Africans, giving up themselves, giving up themselves, so that we can have what’s rightfully ours. The French setting aside their territorial claims. The British and the Spanish slinking away (225-26).

Ridgeway then states that, while his father loved Indigenous talk about the Great Spirit, Ridgeway prefers the American Spirit, which called him and those like him from the Old World to the New World, to “conquer and build and civilize. And destroy that what needs to be destroyed. To lift up the lesser races. If not lift up, subjugate. And if not subjugate, exterminate” (226). He calls this “[o]ur destiny by divine prescription—the American imperative” (226).

Cora says that she needs to visit the outhouse, so he leads her out to it. Cora slams the outhouse door with Ridgeway on the other side, and this action is one of the greatest pleasures she has had in a long time. Ridgeway continues his speech unabated, however. He tells her that Mabel was stolen by wayward whites and Black people engaged in a criminal conspiracy. He recounts how he turned Boston and New York upside down pursuing her—only for her to end up in Canada, laughing at himself and the Randalls, which he takes as a personal affront. He bought Cora a new dress to deliver her to her master like a gift-wrapped present.

Cora realizes that Ridgeway hates her mother just as much as she does. Ridgeway tells her that her and her mother belong to a line that must be exterminated. He tells her that her head has been filled with abolitionist nonsense, but Cora knows that he is wrong. If she had made it to the Free States, she would have lived a life free of all white peoples’ terms.

Ridgeway tells her that everyone—slave and master, newly arrived Europeans, sheriffs and journalists, mothers and sons—plays their part in the grander scheme of America. He tells her that she and her mother represent the best of their race—while the weaklings are weeded out when they die on slave ships, of the European pox, or in the cotton and indigo fields. He tells her that, like fattened hogs, slaves need to be strong to perform their duty: “But we can’t have you too clever. […] We can’t have you so fit you outrun us” (227).

Cora finishes uses fugitive bulletin as toilet paper. Ridgeway tells her that he does his work because allowing enslaved people to run freely would be the same as admitting a flaw in the American imperative, which he will never do. She hears the music that couples are dancing to and remembers the way that she refused to dance with Caesar, the only one who ever beckoned her to come closer. She considers that Ridgeway is telling the truth—maybe enslaved people were the accursed sons of Ham and enslavers were performing God’s will: “And maybe [Ridgeway] was just a man talking to an outhouse door, waiting for someone to wipe her ass” (228).

Ridgeway and Cora return to the wagon and find Homer and Boseman there. Boseman drinks whiskey from a bottle. His shave and haircut have been successfully obtained, but he says that he could not perform at the brothel, fearing that the prostitutes were infected by yellow fever.

Cora falls asleep, but is quickly awakened by Boseman, who has come to rape her. Cora has anticipated this moment. Unlike the time she was raped on the plantation, she has steeled herself for this assault. She also calculates that, if he removes her chains, the dark road might provide adequate cover for her flight. Boseman puts his finger to his lips and carefully slips her chains from the wagon ring. He unchains her ankles and tightens her wrist chains so that they are soundless. Ridgeway then appears suddenly and knocks Boseman to the ground with a growl. He begins to kick Boseman. Boseman begins to mount his defense, but Ridgeway kicks him in the mouth. Ridgeway’s rapid and merciless violence frightens Cora. She misses her chance to run. Homer comes running with a lantern and reveals Ridgeway’s face, which glowers furiously at her, but is also relieved that she has not fled. Boseman asks what Ridgeway will do without him to beat on. Boseman conjectures that Homer will like the beatings that are surely coming his way. Homer chortles, and fetches Cora’s ankle chains from the wagon.

“It’s a nice dress” (229), Boseman says, while pulling out a tooth.

Suddenly, the young Black man who nodded at Cora earlier that day says, “There’ll be more teeth if any of you fellows move” (229). His eyes are fixed on Ridgeway, and his wire-rimmed glasses reflect the lantern’s light. He alternates pointing his pistol at the two men. A second man, “tall and well-muscled” (229), holds a rifle. He possesses an insolence that is more autonomous than the enslaved man's impotent posturing. A third man waves a bowie knife. In this man’s body, Cora recognizes the tension that a runaway holds in his body. She knows she has exhibited the exact same bearing on many occasions. Cora has never seen Black people with guns. The reality shocks her and feels too large to hold in her mind.

Ridgeway, who doesn’t have a weapon, says, “You boys are lost” (230). The leader retorts that they are indeed lost—in the sense that they would rather be home than in Tennessee. He tells Ridgeway that he himself appears to be lost. He then says, “We’re going to be on our way but we thought we’d ask the lady if she wanted to come with us” (230). Ridgeway, searching for a clue in the man’s accent, asks where they are from, and the leader replies vaguely. He tells Ridgeway to settle down, and then asks Cora to confirm that her name is indeed Cora. Ridgeway recites the names of the entire group to the man.

At the sound of his own name, Homer tosses his lantern at the man holding the knife. It hits the man’s chest and then shatters on the ground, creating a fire. The leader of the new group of men fires a shot at Ridgeway and misses. Ridgeway tackles the man, and they wrestle in the dirt. The redheaded rifleman, a better shot, lands a bullet in Boseman’s stomach. Homer runs to retrieve a gun but is pursued by the rifleman. Homer’s hat goes tumbling into the fire. Soon, Ridgeway has the leader of the group pinned to the ground. Cora, with only wrist chains, can run. However, she jumps on Ridgeway’s back and begins viciously strangling him with her chains: “Her scream came from deep inside her, a train whistle echoing in a tunnel” (231). Ridgeway struggles to free himself of her, and in the meantime, the Black man from town retrieves his pistol. Boseman garbles the words of a hymn. Ridgeway says that he will bleed to death. When Ridgeway tells him that Cora is not his property, he replies that that is merely what white law says—there are other laws. He alters his tone into a gentler one to speak to Cora. He tells her that he can shoot Ridgeway for her. His face is calm.

Cora wants vengeance on Ridgeway and Boseman, although she is filled with ambiguity about Homer. Before she can reply, the man says that he’d prefer to put chains on Ridgeway. Cora retrieves the man’s glasses from the dirt and cleans them. The man’s compatriots return empty-handed. Ridgeway smiles as the men shackle his wrists through the wagon wheel. The leader says that Homer is devious, and that they must be on their way. He asks Cora to join them. Cora lands three savage kicks with her new wooden shoe on Ridgeway’s face. Later, she will say that these three kicks are for three murders: Lovey, Caesar, and Jasper. But the truth is that they are all for her.