The Hob women were seven that year. Mary was the oldest. She was in Hob because she was prone to fits. Foaming at the mouth like a mad dog, writhing in the dirt with wild eyes. She had feuded for years with another picker named Bertha, who finally put a curse on her. Old Abraham complained that Mary’s affliction dated back to when she was a pickaninny, but no one listened to him. By any reckoning these fits were nothing like those she had suffered in her youth. She woke from them battered and confused and listless, which led to punishments for lost work, and recuperation from punishments led to more lost work. Once the bosses’ mood turned against you, anyone might be swept up in it. Mary moved her things to Hob to avoid the scorn of her cabin mates. She dragged her feet all the way as if someone might intervene.
Mary worked in the milk house with Margaret and Rida. Before their purchase by James Randall these two had been so tangled by sufferings that they could not weave themselves into the fabric of the plantation. Margaret produced awful sounds from her throat at inopportune moments, animal sounds, the most miserable keenings and vulgar oaths. When the master made his rounds, she kept her hand over her mouth, lest she call attention to her affliction. Rida was indifferent to hygiene and no inducement or threat could sway her. She stank.
Lucy and Titania never spoke, the former because she chose not to and the latter because her tongue had been hacked out by a previous owner. They worked in the kitchen under Alice, who preferred assistants who were disinclined to natter all day, to better hear her own voice.
Two other women took their own lives that spring, more than usual but nothing remarkable. No one with a name that would be remembered come winter, so shallow was their mark. That left Nag and Cora. They tended to the cotton in all of its phases.
At the end of the workday Cora staggered and Nag rushed to steady her. She led Cora back to Hob. The boss glared at their slow progress out of the rows but said nothing. Cora’s obvious madness had removed her from casual rebuke. They passed Caesar, who loitered by one of the work sheds with a group of young hands, carving a piece of wood with his knife. Cora averted her eyes and made her face into slate for him, as she had ever since his proposal.
It was two weeks after Jockey’s birthday and Cora was still on the mend. The blows to her face had left one eye swollen shut and performed a gross injury to her temple. The swelling disappeared but where the silver wolf had kissed was now a rueful scar shaped like an X. It seeped for days. That was her tally for the night of feast. Far worse was the lashing Connelly gave her the next morning under the pitiless boughs of the whipping tree.
Connelly was one of Old Randall’s first hires. James preserved the man’s appointment under his stewardship. When Cora was young, the overseer’s hair was a livid Irish red that curled from his straw hat like the wings of a cardinal. In those days he patrolled with a black umbrella but eventually surrendered and now his white blouses were stark against his tanned flesh. His hair had gone white and his belly overflowed his belt, but apart from that he was the same man who had whipped her grandmother and mother, stalking the village with a lopsided gait that reminded her of an old ox. There was no rushing him if he chose not to be rushed. The only time he exhibited speed was when he reached for his cat-o’-nine-tails. Then he demonstrated the energy and rambunctiousness of a child at a new pastime.
The overseer was not pleased by what had transpired during the Randall brothers’ surprise visit. First, Connelly had been interrupted while taking his pleasure with Gloria, his current wench. He flogged the messenger and roused himself from bed. Second, there was the matter of Michael. Connelly hadn’t informed James about Michael’s loss as his employer never bothered over routine fluctuations in the hands, but Terrance’s curiosity had made it a problem.
Then there was the matter of Chester’s clumsiness and Cora’s incomprehensible action. Connelly peeled them open the following sunrise. He started with Chester, to follow the order in which the transgressions had occurred, and called for their bloody backs to be scrubbed out with pepper water afterward. It was Chester’s first proper licking, and Cora’s first in half a year. Connelly repeated the whippings the next two mornings. According to the house slaves, Master James was more upset that his brother had touched his property, and before so many witnesses, than with Chester and Cora. Thus was the brunt of one brother’s ire toward another borne by property. Chester never said a word to Cora again.
Nag helped Cora up the steps to Hob. Cora collapsed once they entered the cabin and were out of sight of the rest of the village. “Let me get you some supper,” Nag said.
Like Cora, Nag had been relocated to Hob over politics. For years she had been Connelly’s preferred, spending most nights in his bed. Nag was haughty for a nigger gal even before the overseer bestowed his slim favors upon her, with her pale gray eyes and roiling hips. She became insufferable. Preening, gloating over the ill treatment that she alone escaped. Her mother had consorted frequently with white men and tutored Nag in licentious practices. She bent in dedication to the task even as he swapped their offspring. The northern and southern halves of the great Randall plantation exchanged slaves all the time, unloading beat niggers, skulky workers, and rascals on each other in a desultory game. Nag’s children were tokens. Connelly could not countenance his mulatto bastards when their curls glowed his Irish red in the sunlight.
One morning Connelly made it clear that he no longer required Nag in his bed. It was the day her enemies had waited for. Everyone saw it coming except for her. She returned from the fields to find her possessions had been moved to Hob, announcing her loss in status to the village. Her shame nourished them as no food could. Hob hardened her, as was its way. The cabin tended to set one’s personality.
Nag had never been close to Cora’s mother but that didn’t stop her from befriending the girl when she became a stray. After the night of the feast and in the following bloody days she and Mary ministered to Cora, applying brine and poultices to her ravaged skin and making sure she ate. They cradled her head and sang lullabies to their lost children through her. Lovey visited her friend as well, but the young girl was not immune to Hob’s reputation and got skittish in the presence of Nag and Mary and the others. She stayed until her nerves gave out.
Cora lay on the floor and moaned. Two weeks after her beating, she endured dizzy spells and a pounding in her skull. For the most part she was able to keep it at bay and work the row, but sometimes it was all she could do to stay upright until the sun sank. Every hour when the water girl brought the ladle she licked it clean and felt the metal on her teeth. Now she had nothing left.
Mary appeared. “Sick again,” she said. She had a wet cloth ready and placed it on Cora’s brow. She still maintained a reservoir of maternal feeling after the loss of her five children—three dead before they could walk and the others sold off when they were old enough to carry water and grab weeds around the great house. Mary descended from pure Ashanti stock, as did her two husbands. Pups like that, it didn’t take much salesmanship. Cora moved her mouth in silent thanks. The cabin walls pressed on her. Up in the loft one of the other women—Rida by the stench—rummaged and banged. Nag rubbed out the knots in Cora’s hands. “I don’t know what’s worse,” she said. “You sick and out of sight or you up and outside when Master Terrance come tomorrow.”
The prospect of his visit depleted Cora. James Randall was bedridden. He’d fallen ill after a trip to New Orleans to negotiate with a delegation of trading agents from Liverpool and to visit his disgraceful haven. He fainted in his buggy on his return and had been out of sight since. Now whispers came from the house staff that Terrance was going to take over while his brother was on the mend. In the morning he would inspect the northern half to bring the operation in harmony with how things were done in the southern half.
No one doubted that it would be a bloody sort of harmony.
Her friends’ hands slipped away and the walls relinquished their pressure and she passed out. Cora woke in the pit of the night, her head resting on a rolled-up linsey blanket. Everyone asleep above. She rubbed the scar on her temple. It felt like it was seeping. She knew why she had rushed to protect Chester. But she was stymied when she tried to recall the urgency of that moment, the grain of the feeling that possessed her. It had retreated to that obscure corner in herself from where it came and couldn’t be coaxed. To ease her restlessness she crept out to her plot and sat on her maple and smelled the air and listened. Things in the swamp whistled and splashed, hunting in the living darkness. To walk in there at night, heading north to the Free States. Have to take leave of your senses to do that.
But her mother had.
AS if to reflect Ajarry, who did not step off Randall land once she arrived on it, Mabel never left the plantation until the day of her escape. She gave no indication of her intentions, at least to no one who admitted to that knowledge under subsequent interrogations. No mean feat in a village teeming with treacherous natures and informers who would sell out their dearest to escape the bite of the cat-o’-nine-tails.
Cora fell asleep nestled against her mother’s stomach and never saw her again. Old Randall raised the alarm and summoned the patrollers. Within an hour the hunting party tromped into the swamp, chasing after Nate Ketchum’s dogs. The latest in a long line of specializers, Ketchum had slave-catching in his blood. The hounds had been bred for generations to detect nigger scent across whole counties, chewing and mangling many a wayward hand. When the creatures strained against their leather straps and pawed at the air, their barking made every soul in the quarters want to run to their cabins. But the day’s picking lay before the slaves foremost and they stooped to their orders, enduring the dogs’ terrible noise and the visions of blood to come.
The bills and fliers circulated for hundreds of miles. Free negroes who supplemented their living catching runaways combed through the woods and wormed information from likely accomplices. Patrollers and posses of low whites harassed and bullied. The quarters of all the nearby plantations were thoroughly searched and no small number of slaves beaten on principle. But the hounds came up empty, as did their masters.
Randall retained the services of a witch to goofer his property so that no one with African blood could escape without being stricken with hideous palsy. The witch woman buried fetishes in secret places, took her payment, and departed in her mule cart. There was a hearty debate in the village over the spirit of the goofer. Did the conjure apply only to those who had an intention to run or to all colored persons who stepped over the line? A week passed before the slaves hunted and scavenged in the swamp again. That’s where the food was.
Of Mabel there was no sign. No one had escaped the Randall plantation before. The fugitives were always clawed back, betrayed by friends, they misinterpreted the stars and ran deeper into the labyrinth of bondage. On their return they were abused mightily before being permitted to die and those they left behind were forced to observe the grisly increments of their demise.
The infamous slave catcher Ridgeway paid a call on the plantation one week later. He rode up on his horses with his associates, five men of disreputable mien, led by a fearsome Indian scout who wore a necklace of shriveled ears. Ridgeway was six and a half feet tall, with the square face and thick neck of a hammer. He maintained a serene comportment at all times but generated a threatening atmosphere, like a thunderhead that seems far away but then is suddenly overhead with loud violence.
Ridgeway’s audience lasted half an hour. He took notes in a small diary and to hear the house speak of it was a man of intense concentration and flowery manner of speech. He did not return for two years, not long before Old Randall’s death, to apologize in person for his failure. The Indian was gone, but there was a young rider with long black hair who wore a similar ring of trophies over his hide vest. Ridgeway was in the vicinity to visit a neighboring planter, offering as proof of capture the heads of two runaways in a leather sack. Crossing the state line was a capital offense in Georgia; sometimes a master preferred an example over the return of his property.
The slave catcher shared rumors of a new branch of the underground railroad said to be operating in the southern part of the state, as impossible as it sounded. Old Randall scoffed. The sympathizers would be rooted out and tarred and feathered, Ridgeway assured his host. Or whatever satisfied local custom. Ridgeway apologized once again and took his leave and soon his gang crashed to the county road toward their next mission. There was no end to their work, the river of slaves that needed to be driven from their hidey-holes and brought to the white man’s proper accounting.
Mabel had packed for her adventure. A machete. Flint and tinder. She stole a cabin mate’s shoes, which were in better shape. For weeks, her empty garden testified to her miracle. Before she lit out she dug up every turnip and yam from their plot, a cumbersome load and ill-advised for a journey that required a fleet foot. The lumps and burrows in the dirt were a reminder to all who walked by. Then one morning they were smoothed over. Cora got on her knees and planted anew. It was her inheritance.
NOW in the thin moonlight, her head throbbing, Cora appraised her tiny garden. Weeds, weevils, the ragged footprints of critters. She had neglected her land since the feast. Time to return to it.
Terrance’s visit the next day was uneventful save for one disturbing moment. Connelly took him through his brother’s operation, as it had been some years since Terrance had made a proper tour. His manner was unexpectedly civil from all accounts, absent his standard sardonic remarks. They discussed the numbers from last year’s haul and examined the ledgers that contained the weigh-ins from the previous September. Terrance expressed annoyance at the overseer’s lamentable handwriting but apart from that the men got along amiably. They did not inspect the slaves or the village.
On horses they circumnavigated the fields, comparing the progress of the harvest on the two halves. Where Terrance and Connelly made their crossings through the cotton, the nearby slaves redoubled their efforts in a furious wave. The hands had been chopping the weeds for weeks, slashing hoes into the furrows. The stalks were up to Cora’s shoulders now, bending and tottering, sprouting leaves and squares that were bigger every morning. Next month the bolls would explode into whiteness. She prayed the plants were tall enough to hide her when the white men passed. She saw their backs as they proceeded from her. Then Terrance turned. He nodded, tipped his cane at her, and continued on.
James died two days later. His kidneys, the doctor said.
Longtime residents of the Randall plantation couldn’t help but compare the funerals of the father and the son. The elder Randall had been a revered member of planter society. The western riders commanded all the attention now but it was Randall and his brethren who were the true pioneers, carving out a life in this humid Georgia hell all those years ago. His fellow planters cherished him as a visionary for being the first in the region to switch to cotton, leading the profitable charge. Many was the young farmer suffocating in credit who came to Randall for advice—advice freely and generously given—and in his time came to master an enviable spread.
The slaves got time off to attend Old Randall’s funeral. They stood in a quiet huddle while all the fine white men and women paid their respects to the beloved father. The house niggers acted as pallbearers, which everyone thought scandalous at first but on further consideration took as an indicator of genuine affection, one they had indeed enjoyed with their own slaves, with the mammy whose titties they suckled in more innocent times and the attendant who slipped a hand under soapy water at bath time. At the end of the service it began to rain. It put an end to the memorial but everyone was relieved because the drought had gone on too long. The cotton was thirsty.
By the time of James’s passing, the Randall sons had cut off social ties with their father’s peers and protégés. James had many business partners on paper, some of whom he had met in person, but he had few friends. To the point, Terrance’s brother had never received his human portion of sentimentality. His funeral was sparsely attended. The slaves worked the rows—with the harvest approaching there was no question. It was all spelled out in his will, Terrance said. James was buried near his parents in a quiet corner of their abundant acreage, next to his father’s mastiffs Plato and Demosthenes, who had been beloved by all, man and nigger alike, even if they couldn’t keep away from the chickens.
Terrance traveled to New Orleans to straighten his brother’s affairs with the cotton trade. Although there was never a good time to run, Terrance’s stewardship of both halves provided a good argument. The northern half had always relished their easier climate. James was as ruthless and brutal as any white man but he was the portrait of moderation compared to his younger brother. The stories from the southern half were chilling, in magnitude if not in particulars.
Big Anthony took his opportunity. Big Anthony was not the most clever buck in the village, but no one could say he lacked a sense for opportunity. It was the first escape attempt since Blake. He braved the witch woman’s goofer without incident and made it twenty-six miles before he was discovered snoozing in a hayloft. The constables returned him in an iron cage made by one of their cousins. “Take flight like a bird, you deserve a birdcage.” The front of the cage had a slot for the name of the inhabitant, but no one had bothered to use it. They took the cage with them when they left.
On the eve of Big Anthony’s punishment—whenever white men put off punishment some theater was bound to be involved—Caesar visited Hob. Mary let him in. She was puzzled. Few visitors ever came to call, and men only when it was a boss with bad news. Cora hadn’t told anyone of the young man’s proposition.
The loft was full of women either sleeping or listening. Cora put her mending to the floor and took him outside.
OLD Randall built the schoolhouse for his sons and the grandchildren he had hoped to have one day. The lonesome hulk was unlikely to fulfill its purpose anytime soon. Since Randall’s sons had finished their education it was used only for assignations and all those different lessons. Lovey saw Caesar and Cora walk to it, and Cora shook her head at her friend’s amusement.
The rotting schoolhouse smelled rank. Small animals made regular habitation. The chairs and tables had been removed a long time before, making room for dead leaves and spiderwebs. She wondered if he had brought Frances here when they were together, and what they did. Caesar had seen Cora stripped naked for her whippings, the blood pouring over her skin.
Caesar checked the window and said, “I’m sorry that happened to you.”
“That’s what they do,” Cora said.
Two weeks ago she had judged him a fool. This night he carried himself as one beyond his years, like one of those wise old hands who tell you a story whose true message you only understand days or weeks later, when their facts are impossible to avoid.
“Will you come with me now?” Caesar said. “Been thinking it’s past time to go.”
She could not figure him. On the mornings of her three whippings, Caesar had stood in the front of the pack. It was customary for slaves to witness the abuse of their brethren as moral instruction. At some point during the show everyone had to turn away, if only for a moment, as they considered the slave’s pain and the day sooner or later when it would be their turn at the foul end of the lash. That was you up there even when it was not. But Caesar did not flinch. He didn’t seek her eyes but looked at something beyond her, something great and difficult to make out.
She said, “You think I’m a lucky charm because Mabel got away. But I ain’t. You saw me. You saw what happens when you get a thought in your head.”
Caesar was unmoved. “It’s going to be bad when he gets back.”
“It’s bad now,” Cora said. “Ever has been.” She left him there.
The new stocks Terrance ordered explained the delay in Big Anthony’s justice. The woodworkers toiled all through the night to complete the restraints, furnishing them with ambitious if crude engravings. Minotaurs, busty mermaids, and other fantastic creatures frolicked in the wood. The stocks were installed on the front lawn in the lush grass. Two bosses secured Big Anthony and there he dangled the first day.
On the second day a band of visitors arrived in a carriage, august souls from Atlanta and Savannah. Swell ladies and gentlemen that Terrance had met on his travels, as well as a newspaperman from London come to report on the American scene. They ate at a table set up on the lawn, savoring Alice’s turtle soup and mutton and devising compliments for the cook, who would never receive them. Big Anthony was whipped for the duration of their meal, and they ate slow. The newspaperman scribbled on paper between bites. Dessert came and the revelers moved inside to be free of the mosquitoes while Big Anthony’s punishment continued.
On the third day, just after lunch, the hands were recalled from the fields, the washwomen and cooks and stable hands interrupted from their tasks, the house staff diverted from its maintenance. They gathered on the front lawn. Randall’s visitors sipped spiced rum as Big Anthony was doused with oil and roasted. The witnesses were spared his screams, as his manhood had been cut off on the first day, stuffed in his mouth, and sewn in. The stocks smoked, charred, and burned, the figures in the wood twisting in the flames as if alive.
Terrance addressed the slaves of the northern and southern halves. There is one plantation now, united in purpose and method, he said. He expressed his grief over his brother’s death and his consolation in the knowledge that James was in heaven united with their mother and father. He walked among his slaves as he talked, tapping his cane, rubbing the heads of pickaninnies and petting some of the older worthies from the southern half. He checked the teeth of a young buck he had never seen before, wrenching the boy’s jaw to get a good look, and nodded in approval. In order to feed the world’s insatiable demand for cotton goods, he said, every picker’s daily quota will be increased by a percentage determined by their numbers from the previous harvest. The fields will be reorganized to accommodate a more efficient number of rows. He walked. He slapped a man across the face for weeping at the sight of his friend thrashing against the stocks.
When Terrance got to Cora, he slipped his hand into her shift and cupped her breast. He squeezed. She did not move. No one had moved since the beginning of his address, not even to pinch their noses to keep out the smell of Big Anthony’s roasting flesh. No more feasts outside of Christmas and Easter, he said. He will arrange and approve all marriages personally to ensure the appropriateness of the match and the promise of the offspring. A new tax on Sunday labor off the plantation. He nodded at Cora and continued his stroll among his Africans as he shared his improvements.
Terrance concluded his address. It was understood that the slaves were to remain there until Connelly dismissed them. The Savannah ladies refreshed their drinks from the pitcher. The newspaperman opened a fresh diary and resumed his note-taking. Master Terrance joined his guests and they departed for a tour of the cotton.
She had not been his and now she was his. Or she had always been his and just now knew it. Cora’s attention detached itself. It floated someplace past the burning slave and the great house and the lines that defined the Randall domain. She tried to fill in its details from stories, sifting through the accounts of slaves who had seen it. Each time she caught hold of something—buildings of polished white stone, an ocean so vast there wasn’t a tree in sight, the shop of a colored blacksmith who served no master but himself—it wriggled free like a fish and raced away. She would have to see it for herself if she were to keep it.
