NOW I KNEW. THAT was Conduction. The power was still with me, even if I did not quite understand how to call it forth. I dragged myself, exhausted, back to our building and fell asleep as soon as I returned to my room, with the sun still out, and did not wake again until early the next morning. I thought to try to access the power again, but the fatigue and malady that I now saw accompanied every Conduction dissuaded me. Instead, I decided to visit Mars’s bakery again and apologize for my rude manner. Then, perhaps, walk through the city more, to test the freedom, perhaps east this time toward the Delaware River, maybe even across it and into the small hamlet of Camden, where Raymond and his family lived. But just as I pulled on my brogans, I heard a knock at my bedroom door and then Otha’s voice.
“Hiram, you there?”
I opened my door and saw Otha already descending the staircase. He looked back up at me, still bounding down, and said, “Gotta go.”
I followed him down the steps and into the parlor, where we found Raymond pacing with a letter in hand. When he saw us, he walked to the door, grabbed his hat, and, without a word, dashed out. We followed him out onto Ninth Street and then to Bainbridge, which was already by then flush with the flow and miasma of Philadelphia.
“The law of our state is quite clear,” he said when we caught up to him. “No man or woman can be held under bondage—even if brought here under bondage. Haven, once requested, must be granted. But it must be requested. We cannot induce them to freedom. They cannot be wooed.”
“But the masters,” said Otha, looking at me. “They keep the law hidden. They tell their people lies, frighten ’em. Threaten their families and friends.”
“But when we have someone who clearly states their intentions,” said Raymond, “then we are empowered to make sure those intentions are respected. And this Bronson woman has made such a request—one that her captor dishonors. Forgive my rush, but time is short. If we are to make this man honor the law, it must be done right now.”
We were headed east now, along the same path I had thought to take earlier that morning. Before long we were at the docks, and I could see the Delaware lapping gently against the ships. It was now Saturday. Hot yet again, hotter in this city than anything I had ever known in Virginia. Shade had no meaning here. The heat followed you as sure as the odor, and the only relief I was coming to find was here at the shores of the city. We walked a few piers to the south until we stood before the gang-plank of a riverboat. We boarded quickly. Raymond surveyed the passengers but did not see anyone matching this Bronson woman he spoke of. Then a colored man said, “They down below, Mr. White.”
We walked to the back of the boat and found a set of stairs leading down, and there in the belly we saw another group of passengers. I recognized the “Bronson woman” before Raymond did. I needed no description. I had, in just my two days, seen my share of tasking folks. They were dressed as well as the free coloreds here, perhaps even better dressed, as though their captors sought to conceal the chain that extended between them. But if you watched long enough, you could see in their manner, in the particular way they attended, that some other power held them. And this Bronson woman was well-dressed, costumed even, the way Sophia would be costumed for Nathaniel, and I saw her arm was held tight by a tall thin white man, and that with her other hand she held tighter still to a boy no older than six. I watched her eyes spot Raymond, who was still searching, and then her eyes found mine, and then she looked away, turning her gaze to her son.
By then Raymond had caught on. He walked over and said, “Mary Bronson, I understand you have made a request. We are here to see this request done, in accordance with the law of our state, which shows neither respect”—and now Raymond fixed his eyes on the tall thin man—“nor regard for the customs of bondage.”
I was out of Virginia, cut from a world where our work was furtive, where I was a criminal who must respect the very customs I was working to destroy. But here I was in Philadelphia, watching an agent of the Underground operate in the wide open, with no choreography, no costume. Raymond’s words went off like a bomb. And the white man who held Mary Bronson felt it.
“Damn you,” said the white man, yanking at Mary Bronson’s hand, so that she stumbled off-balance a bit. “I mean to return with my property to my home country.”
Raymond ignored him.
“You are under no order to obey,” he said to Mary. “He will not detain you while I stand, and should you come with me, I assure you the law of this state will reinforce my efforts.”
“Damn you, I have her!” said the man. This he said with great force. But I saw he no longer held Mary’s arm. I did not know if she had slipped it free or if he, with his wrath focused on Raymond, had simply forgotten. By now a small crowd had gathered near us, some to reinforce, some to see the source of the commotion. They informed each other of the details of the story. They grumbled and motioned toward the man, who did not seem to perceive what little power he had withering around him. But Mary perceived it all. The crowd buoyed her. She took the hand of her child, and walked toward Raymond. The man fumed, called for Mary to return, but she ignored him, positioning herself behind Raymond, and the child behind her.
“Boy,” the man said, his eyes raging at Raymond. “If I were home I’d have you in your proper place, and break you good.” At this the grumbles grew into taunts, shouts, and threats.
There is a moment in the stormy lives of a few blessed colored people, a moment of revelation, when the sky opens up, the clouds part, and a streak of sun cuts through, conveying some infinite wisdom from above, and this moment comes not from Christian religion, but from the sight of a colored man addressing a white one as Raymond White now did as he turned to the white man.
“But you are not home.”
Then he looked back at the crowd, and the man following with his eyes began to understand his predicament. Rage and determination fled from him. Fear and panic closed in. The thin white man seemed to grow paler and thinner by the second. The crowd, agitated by the man’s threats, now murmured to each other as to what they ought to do next.
After we watched the boat shove off, Otha and I sat with Mary Bronson and her son back at the Ninth Street house. Raymond had gone off to begin the business of having Mary housed and, hopefully soon, employed. It was the custom in Philadelphia to take an account of the ordeal of all who passed through the Philadelphia station. It was yet another notion that was utterly unimaginable in Virginia, where such accounts might implicate a fugitive. But Raymond believed himself in the midst of history and felt strongly that all pertaining events should be well recorded.
Otha made coffee and gave Mary’s son a collection of toys—cows, horses, and other farm animals rendered from wood. I took the moment to walk over to Mars’s bakery, where he introduced me to his wife, Hannah. I managed a smile upon meeting her and did my best to apologize for my demeanor the day before. He handed me two loaves of warm bread and said, “Nothing to apologize for. Like I said, family.”
Back in the house, Mary was on the floor of the parlor playing with her son. I went to the kitchen with the bread, searched for a knife, a platter, and plates. There was a jar of preserves on the counter along with a wedge of cheese. With all of this I fashioned a spread and placed it upon the dining room table. Otha served up the coffee for everyone and brought Mary and her son to the table. There was a gentle air of relief and even celebration in the meal.
After the meal, Mary helped us clean up. Then we repaired to the living room for the interview. I watched as Mary’s son took a wooden soldier in each hand, made a threatening face, and then crashed the two horses into each other with a loud “Pssshhh!”
“What is his name?” I asked.
“Octavius,” she said. “Don’t ask me why, I ain’t name him. Ol massa decided that like he decided everything else.”
Otha offered Mary a seat on the sofa. I went up to my room and retrieved paper and two pencils. Then I sat down at the table. Otha was to ask the questions. I would record.
“My name is Mary Bronson,” she told Otha. “And I was born a slave.”
“No more, though,” Otha said.
“No more,” Mary repeated. “And I want to thank y’all for that. You got no idea what I been through down there, what we all been through. I’d have done anything to get out from under that man, I just wasn’t sure how. You know this ain’t even the first time I been to the city, and it ain’t even the first time I had the notion to run. I don’t know why I ain’t done it before.”
“Where you from, Mary?” Otha asked.
“Hell,” she said. “I am straight out of hell, Mr. Otha.”
“And why you say that?” Otha asked.
“I had two other boys, beside Octavius here, two other boys and a husband. He was a cook just like me. Everybody around the house loved the work I did.”
“Did you love your own work?”
“Was never my work to love. But I was different, you see. Fact of it is, I had an understanding with my old master. I did the cooking, but I wasn’t the only one in the kitchen. So time to time, my old master would hire me out and split whatever I made with me. Plan was to gather up enough to buy me and mine out. I would go first, so as not to have to split nothing no longer, and then I’d get my man, Fred, that was my husband’s name, I’d get him so as to have another hand to work. And then we’d, all together, get the young’uns.”
“And what happened?”
“Old master died. Place was carved up and one of them low whites—man you just seen—took over. Then I ain’t like my work so much. He took all the money for himself, said he had no notion for any agreement with my old master, nor any banking. So I got crafty. Started working slow and sloppy. But he caught on.”
Mary Bronson paused here. She drew herself in, composed herself to continue.
“That’s when the beating start. He set a figure for every week. Said if I ain’t make that figure he’d take it out on my hide. He threatened to sell my husband, my sons—all my boys. I worked hard as I could, Mr. Otha. He sold them anyway. He spared me my youngest”—she nodded to the little boy, still on the floor playing with the wooden animals—“but that wasn’t no sympathy or concern. It was weight. He held that boy over me, so I always had something else to lose.”
“Why’d he bring you to the city?” Otha asked.
“He got family up here,” she said. “He was bragging to them about my work. Had me working for his sister. In his sister kitchen.”
“Up here?”
“Yes, he did. But I done showed him, have I not?”
“Surely, you have.”
“Chain is a powerful thing, Mr. Otha, a powerful, powerful thing. I was thinking bout all the times I come north and ain’t run. And I was thinking about the grip they got on me. And I knew that boy would be off to the fields in a year or so, and I knew that then they’d have him too.”
She sobbed softly into her hands. Otha went over and sat next to Mary Bronson. Then he drew her close, held her, gently patting her back. As he held her, Mary Bronson wailed and I heard in the wailing a song for her husband, her boys, and all her lost.
I had never seen an agent do what Otha was now doing—comforting her, treating her with the dignity of a free woman, not an escaped slave. He rocked her in his arms until she was settled and then he stood and said, “We shall have a place for you and your boy in the next few days. Raymond gone to get all that started. You and your son welcome to stay here until it’s all arranged.”
Mary Bronson nodded.
“It’s a good city, ma’am,” said Otha. “And we are strong here. But I understand if you don’t want to stay. Either way, we gon help how we can. As you will soon see, finding freedom is only the first part. Living free is a whole other.”
There was a moment of silence. I had stopped writing, thinking the interview terminated. Mary Bronson had stopped crying now. She wiped her face with Otha’s handkerchief. And then she looked up and said, “Ain’t no living free, less I’m living with my boys.”
She had composed herself now. I could see that her pain and fear were shifting into something else. “I don’t wanna hear about your church. Don’t wanna hear bout your city. My boys—they the only city I need. Now you done found a way to get me and Octavius out, and by God, I am thankful for it. I was raised correct—I am thankful. But my other boys, all my lost boys, that is my highest concern.”
“Mrs. Bronson,” said Otha. “We just ain’t set up like that. That just ain’t in our power.”
“Then you ain’t got the power of freedom,” she said. “If you can’t keep them from parting a mother from her son, a husband from his natural wife, then you got nothing. That boy over there is my everything. I run for him, so he might know some other world. Left on my own, I would have died as I was born—a slave. That boy freed me, you see. And I owe him so much. Mostly I owe him his pappy and his brothers. If you can’t stop them from breaking us up, as they do, if you can’t put us back together, then your freedom is thin and your church and your city hold nothing for me.”
That following Monday I began my employment in a woodworking shop, just off the Schuylkill docks, at the corner of Twenty-third and Locust. The owner was an associate of Raymond White’s, and a large number of those who labored there were fugitives. I worked there three days a week and three for the Underground.
After work I would usually walk alone through the city, taking in the incredible alchemy of sounds, odors, and sensations, all of which proceeded late into the night. But still and all, among that incredible amalgam of people, I somehow felt alone. It was Mary Bronson who’d done it, her longing, her hunger for a freedom that extended to all of her blood. For what did it mean to be free, in a city such as this, when those you hold to most are still Tasked? What was I without Sophia, without my mother, without Thena? Thena. Boy like you should be more careful with his words, she said. Never know when they the last ones he might put upon a person. And I should have been, I knew that even then. But I was now aging faster than my years, so that Thena’s words redounded with the lamenting of a man much older than my twenty years. My treatment of her was the worst thing I’d done in my short life. I saw now that I had been little more than a boy lusting after a dream. And now the dream was gone, like Mary Bronson’s boys were gone, carried off into the deep, far from any means the Underground might muster to recover it.
One Friday morning, as I was leaving for work, Otha approached me and said, “A man can’t be too long without family.”
I stared back and said nothing.
He smiled. “Still, it might be nice to be with some folks who care, Hiram. Supper? Tonight? At my momma’s. What do you say? Whole family’ll be there. We good folks, I tell you, and would very much welcome you as our own.”
“All right, Otha,” I said.
“Lovely. Just lovely,” he said. Then he tendered directions and said, “See you tonight.”
The White family home was across the Delaware River. I caught the ferry that evening, then walked along a cobbled road until it turned to clay and then to dust. The heat of the city, the air damp and thick, faded behind me, and a refreshing breeze swirled up the road. It was good to be out. It was my first time in anything like the country since my arrival, and I now realized everything that I missed about my old Southern home—the wind in the fields, the sun pushing through the trees, the drawn-out afternoons. Everything happened at once in Philadelphia, all of life one ridiculous crush of feeling.
The parents of Raymond and Otha lived in a large house with a porch wrapping around and a pond out front. I stood for some time on that porch, staring at the front door. Inside, I could hear children and mothers, fathers and brothers, their words and laughter mixing into a happiness that took me back to Holiday down at the Street. Even before I stepped inside the house, all their accumulated affection radiated out. I had felt something like it before. Under the Goose. Where I was in reunion with a mother whom I could not remember. Where I saw my cousins, and Honas and Young P. And no sooner did I recall this feeling than it all came upon me again. The summer breeze grew chill. I shivered. And everything before me went blue. The door to the Still home expanded into many doors all in a row, and these doors pulled away from each other like bellows. I felt myself falling away. A door opened. I looked in. I saw my mother’s hand reaching out from the smoke. She walked toward me, her hand reaching for mine, and when she grabbed it, the blue faded, and the yellow heat of that summer afternoon returned. And in the doorway I saw a woman, who was not my mother, but about the age she would have been. And just behind her I saw Otha, who, seeing me, stopped, waved, and smiled.
“Hiram?” the woman asked. And before I could respond, she said, “That must be you. You look like you seen the devil himself.”
She gripped my hand tight and then looked into my eyes. “Uh-huh. Hunger’ll do that to a man. What Raymond and Otha got you eating down there? Why, don’t just stand there—come on in!”
I followed for a couple of steps until the woman stopped and said, “Viola White. I’m Raymond and Otha’s mother. But you just call me Aunt Viola, because that is who I am to you. Any man working with Otha and Raymond is family to me.”
I followed Viola White—“Aunt Viola” would take some time with me—into the front parlor and found a crush of cousins and aunts. Raymond stood at the mantel talking with an older man. Mars, the proprietor of the bakery, rushed over and pulled me into a big scrum of family, rendering introductions and discoursing on the effects of that gingerbread.
“That boy try make like he cool, like he wasn’t caught,” Mars told his wife, Hannah. “But soon as he stick his face in the paper, I knew I had him.”
Hannah laughed and I, surprising myself, laughed too. Something was happening here. Walls were falling down, walls I had erected down on the Street. My silence, my watching, was a wall. There was love even on the Street, I tell you, some of the deepest and hardest I’d ever seen. But the Street was brutal and erratic. Passions transfigured into outrages and violence, even among us. But the demeanor that served me at Lockless seemed cruel and unnecessary among the Whites, so I found myself, awkwardly and haltingly, smiling, laughing, and, above all, talking.
After supper, we took coffee and tea in the back salon. There was a piano there, and one of the younger girls seated herself and began to play. What I remember more than any virtuosity was the gleaming pride in all the eyes of the White family at the talents of this child. And I remembered how I had talents, too, as a child, but that my own father wished them to be in Little May. I was an amusement, a source of laughter. Watching that little girl encouraged in her pursuits, rewarded in whatever genius she had—and we all had some—I saw all that had been taken from me, and all that was so regularly taken from the millions of colored children bred to the Task. But more than this I saw, for the first time, colored people in that true freedom that Mary Bronson longed for, that I hungered for walking through the city, that I had glimpsed under the Goose.
I had noticed, throughout conversation, the names “Lydia” and “Lambert,” and I knew from how they were spoken that these two were family still held down by the Task. After the young girl’s recital, I found Otha seated on the large porch, looking out past the road and into the lush green woods in the light of a summer’s twilight. I took a seat and said, “I want to thank you for having me here, Otha. It means a lot.”
Otha looked to me and smiled. “It’s nothing, Hiram. I’m glad you came. The work can be such a weight.”
“Your mother,” I said, looking back inside. “I gather she knows.”
“They all do. The babies only a little, of course. But how could they not know? They the reason we in the work to begin with.”
“Well, you’ve got a beautiful family,” I said.
At that he went quiet for a moment, and his gaze returned to those woods.
“Otha,” I asked, “Lambert and Lydia?”
“Lambert was my brother,” said Otha. “And Lydia is my wife. Lambert died while I was still down. And Lydia is still there, though I have not seen her in some years.”
“Children?”
“Yup. Two girls. One boy. You?”
I paused for a moment.
“Naw, just me.”
“Huh. Don’t know what I’d do without my young ones. Don’t know who I’d be. This whole thing, this Underground, starts with my babies.”
Otha stood and looked through the door inside. We could hear the gentle clanging of dishes, rumbling and somber talk broken by the occasional giggling of children. Then he walked to the side of the porch and seated himself there against the wooden railing.
“I’m not like them. Wasn’t raised up here,” he said. “My daddy is old and stooped now but he was something in his day. Born to the Task. But in his twenty-first year he walked up to his old master and told him straight—‘I’m grown now. And I shall sooner die as have the yoke.’ And the old master thought on it for a day, and when he next saw my pappy he had a rifle in one hand and Pappy’s papers in the other. And he told my pappy, just as straight as my pappy had told him, ‘Freedom is a yoke, boy. You’ll soon see.’ Then he handed Pappy the papers and said, ‘Now get off my land, for the next time you and I meet, only one of us shall walk away.’ ”
Otha laughed at that. “But there was this girl Viola—Momma—who was tasking there too. There was two of us by then—myself and my brother Lambert. Daddy had it figured that he would get up North, get some work, and then buy us our freedom. He started out at the docks, saving for the day he could get us all out. But Momma had her own notions. She ran with me and Lambert, took the Underground as it was back then. Shocked the life out of Daddy when she showed herself down at the city docks.
“They married proper and two more was born—Raymond and Patsy. That’s Patsy’s daughter who was at the piano. Girl can sing like a bird. The old master let my daddy walk—don’t ask me why—who can figure white folks? But for my mother—a girl—to take mastery of her life, as she did, well, it was too much. Maybe it was how she did it—just up and leaving. Or maybe it was us. Momma was the goose. But we was the golden eggs.
“That man sent the hounds up to the city. They bagged me, my brother Lambert, my momma, Raymond, and Patsy—the whole family save my daddy. We was carried back. When we got there Momma made it out as though the escape was all Daddy’s idea. Told the old master she never wanted no part in running anyway. Flattered him into believing he was good white folks. And I guess the old master believed her. Maybe he needed to believe her, needed to think that he was doing some kind of good, dividing a family and holding ’em down.
“Anyway, wasn’t long after that Momma ran again. Went different this time, though. She woke me up in the dead of night. I must have been about six, Lambert about eight, but I can still see it, like it’s all right in front of me—the memory is sharp as an axe. She was at our bedside when she told us. ‘Baby, I got to go. I gotta go for Raymond and I gotta go for Patsy. They gon die down here. I am so sorry, baby, but I gotta go.’
“I know why she done it, now. I knew why she done it, even back then. But it burned in me, a low heavy hatred. Can you imagine hating your own mother, Hiram? After that, the old master sold us south—two lost boys sent down into the deep. They did it to punish my momma, to show her that whatever plans she had of coming back for me and Lambert was done. I had a whole other life down there. I met a girl—my Lydia—and we made a family. I tasked hard. I was a man well regarded in slavery, which is to say I was never regarded as a man at all.
“Lambert knew. Maybe ’cause he was older, he knew all that was taken from us. And the hate in him was so strong, it just ate him. So Lambert…Lambert died down there, far from home, far from the mother that birthed him and the father that reared him.”
And here Otha caught up. I could not see his face, but I heard the halting in his voice, and I felt a halo of agony burning all around him.
“There are so many holes in me, so many pieces cut away. All those lost years, my mother, my father, Raymond and Patsy, my wife and my kids. All my losses.
“Well, I got out. My master needed the money more than he needed to hold me, and through the kindness of others, I got out. I came up to this city searching for my family, for I was left with rumors of where we had been. And soon I heard from the coloreds that this man Raymond White was a good one to know, should you be searching for family. I sought him out.”
“Y’all recognize each other?” I asked.
“Not even a little bit. And I had no surname. He sat with me, just like we sat with Mary Bronson a few weeks back, and I gave him my whole story. Later, Raymond told me that he trembled with every detail. But you know Raymond, he is a rock. So I’m sitting there telling him all that I know. And I’m wondering how he’s taking it, because the whole time, he just real quiet. Then he tell me come see him again tomorrow. Same time.
“Next day I come back and there she was, Hiram. I knew her right away. I didn’t even need to search myself or think no time on it. It was my momma. And then Momma tell me that this man, this rock, was my brother. It’s the only time I seen tears in Raymond’s eyes.
“When we was young Lambert and me had all kinds of schemes for seeing our way out. We knew our people were somewhere free. But when all of our plans fell to pieces, despair fell over us like a shadow. You see, we was different than men such as you, Hiram. We had known, since the day our mother vanished, that we were born to the title of freedom. And if freedom was my momma’s right, and freedom was my daddy’s right too, then somehow it must be ours.”
“I think we all got it fixed that way,” I said. “For some it’s just buried far deep.”
“But it was never buried for us. Lambert remembered everything from that last night. He remembered Momma’s caress upon his forehead, the last stroke of her hand. When Lambert died, Hiram, I knew that I could not. I knew that I must, somehow, live and then get back out. And I knew that any anger in that venture was a waste. I think back to my momma’s words the night she left. I think about them all the time in this work, in my time on the Underground. ‘I gotta go for Raymond and I gotta go for Patsy,’ she said. ‘I am so sorry, baby, but I gotta go.’ And I, being young and loving my momma, I said, ‘Momma, why can’t we go with you?’ And my momma she said…she said, ‘ ’Cause I can only carry so many, and them only so far.’ ”