The night before Ridgeway put an end to South Carolina, Cora lingered on the roof of the Griffin Building, trying to see where she had come from. There was an hour until her meeting with Caesar and Sam and she didn’t relish the idea of fretting on her bed, listening to the chirping of the other girls. Last Saturday after school, one of the men who worked in the Griffin, a former tobacco hand named Martin, told her that the door to the roof was unlocked. Access was easy. If Cora worried about one of the white people who worked on the twelfth floor questioning her when she got off the elevator, Martin told her, she could take the stairs for the final flights.

This was her second twilight visit. The height made her giddy. She wanted to jump up and snatch the gray clouds roiling overhead. Miss Handler had taught the class about the Great Pyramids in Egypt and the marvels the slaves made with their hands and sweat. Were the pyramids as tall as this building, did the pharaohs sit on top and take the measure of their kingdoms, to see how diminished the world became when you gained the proper distance? On Main Street below workmen erected three- and four-story buildings, taller than the old line of two-floor establishments. Cora walked by the construction every day. Nothing as big as the Griffin yet, but one day the building would have brothers and sisters, striding over the land. Whenever she let her dreams take her down hopeful avenues, this notion stirred her, that of the town coming into its own.

To the east side of the Griffin were the white people’s houses and their new projects—the expanded town square, the hospital, and the museum. Cora crossed to the west, where the colored dormitories lay. From this height, the red boxes crept up on the uncleared woods in impressive rows. Is that where she would live one day? A small cottage on a street they hadn’t laid yet? Putting the boy and the girl to sleep upstairs. Cora tried to see the face of the man, conjure the names of the children. Her imagination failed her. She squinted south toward Randall. What did she expect to see? The night took the south into darkness.

And north? Perhaps she would visit one day.

The breeze made her shiver and she headed for the street. It was safe to go to Sam’s now.

Caesar didn’t know why the station agent wanted to see them. Sam had signaled as he passed the saloon and told him, “Tonight.” Cora had not returned to the railroad station since her arrival, but the day of her deliverance was so vivid she had no trouble finding the road. The animal noises in the dark forest, the branches snapping and singing, reminded her of their flight, and then of Lovey disappearing into the night.

She walked faster when the light from Sam’s windows fluttered through the branches. Sam embraced her with his usual enthusiasm, his shirt damp and reeking with spirits. She had been too distracted to notice the house’s disarray on her previous visit, the grimed plates, sawdust, and piles of clothes. To get to the kitchen she had to step over an upturned toolbox, its contents jumbled on the floor, nails fanned like pick-up-sticks. Before she left, she would recommend he contact the Placement Office for a girl.

Caesar had already arrived and sipped a bottle of ale at the kitchen table. He’d brought one of his bowls for Sam and ran his fingers over its bottom as if testing an imperceptible fissure. Cora had almost forgotten he liked to work with wood. She had not seen much of him lately. He had bought more fancy clothes from the colored emporium, she noted with pleasure, a dark suit that fit him well. Someone had taught him how to tie a tie, or perhaps that was a token of his time in Virginia, when he had believed the old white woman would free him and he had worked on his appearance.

“Is there a train coming in?” Cora asked.

“In a few days,” Sam said.

Caesar and Cora shifted in their seats.

“I know you don’t want to take it,” Sam said. “It’s no matter.”

“We decided to stay,” Caesar said.

“We wanted to make sure before we told you,” Cora added.

Sam huffed and leaned back in the creaky chair. “It made me happy to see you skipping the trains and making a go of things here,” the station agent said. “But you may reconsider after my story.”

Sam offered them some sweetmeats—he was a faithful customer of Ideal Bakery off Main Street—and revealed his purpose. “I want to warn you away from Red’s,” Sam said.

“You scared of the competition?” Caesar joked. There was no question on that front. Sam’s saloon did not serve colored patrons. No, Red’s had exclusive claim to the residents of the dormitories with a hankering for drink and dance. It didn’t hurt that they took scrip.

“More sinister,” Sam said. “I’m not sure what to make of it, to be honest.” It was a strange story. Caleb, the owner of the Drift, possessed a notoriously sour disposition; Sam had a reputation as the barkeep who enjoyed conversation. “You get to know the real life of a place, working there,” Sam liked to say. One of Sam’s regulars was a doctor by the name of Bertram, a recent hospital hire. He didn’t mix socially with the other northerners, preferring the atmosphere and salty company at the Drift. He had a thirst for whiskey. “To drown out his sins,” Sam said.

On a typical night, Bertram kept his thoughts close until his third drink, when the whiskey unstoppered him and he rambled animatedly about Massachusetts blizzards, medical-school hazing rituals, or the relative intelligence of Virginia opossum. His discourse the previous evening had turned to female companionship, Sam said. The doctor was a frequent visitor at Miss Trumball’s establishment, preferring it to the Lanchester House, whose girls had a saturnine disposition in his opinion, as if imported from Maine or other gloom-loving provinces.

“Sam?” Cora said.

“I’m sorry, Cora.” He abridged. Dr. Bertram enumerated some of the virtues of Miss Trumball’s, and then added, “Whatever you do, man, keep out of Red’s Café, if you have a taste for nigger gals.” Several of his male patients frequented the saloon, carrying on with the female patrons. His patients believed they were being treated for blood ailments. The tonics the hospital administered, however, were merely sugar water. In fact, the niggers were participants in a study of the latent and tertiary stages of syphilis.

“They think you’re helping them?” Sam asked the doctor. He kept his voice neutral, even as his face got hot.

“It’s important research,” Bertram informed him. “Discover how a disease spreads, the trajectory of infection, and we approach a cure.” Red’s was the only colored saloon in the town proper; the proprietor got a break on the rent for a watchful eye. The syphilis program was one of many studies and experiments under way at the colored wing of the hospital. Did Sam know that the Igbo tribe of the African continent is predisposed to nervous disorders? Suicide and black moods? The doctor recounted the story of forty slaves, shackled together on a ship, who jumped overboard en masse rather than live in bondage. The kind of mind that could conceive of and execute such a fantastic course! What if we performed adjustments to the niggers’ breeding patterns and removed those of melancholic tendency? Managed other attitudes, such as sexual aggression and violent natures? We could protect our women and daughters from their jungle urges, which Dr. Bertram understood to be a particular fear of southern white men.

The doctor leaned in. Had Sam read the newspaper today?

Sam shook his head and topped off the man’s drink.

Still, the barkeep must have seen the editorials over the years, the doctor insisted, expressing anxiety over this very topic. America has imported and bred so many Africans that in many states the whites are outnumbered. For that reason alone, emancipation is impossible. With strategic sterilization—first the women but both sexes in time—we could free them from bondage without fear that they’d butcher us in our sleep. The architects of the Jamaica uprisings had been of Beninese and Congolese extraction, willful and cunning. What if we tempered those bloodlines carefully over time? The data collected on the colored pilgrims and their descendants over years and decades, the doctor said, will prove one of the boldest scientific enterprises in history. Controlled sterilization, research into communicable diseases, the perfection of new surgical techniques on the socially unfit—was it any wonder the best medical talents in the country were flocking to South Carolina?

A group of rowdies stumbled in and crowded Bertram to the end of the bar. Sam was occupied. The doctor drank quietly for a time and then slipped out. “You two are not the sort that goes to Red’s,” Sam said, “but I wanted you to know.”

“Red’s,” Cora said. “This is more than the saloon, Sam. We have to tell them they’re being lied to. They’re sick.”

Caesar was in agreement.

“Will they believe you over their white doctors?” Sam asked. “With what proof? There is no authority to turn to for redress—the town is paying for it all. And then there are all the other towns where colored pilgrims have been installed in the same system. This is not the only place with a new hospital.”

They worked it out over the kitchen table. Was it possible that not only the doctors but everyone who ministered to the colored population was involved in this incredible scheme? Steering the colored pilgrims down this or that path, buying them from estates and the block in order to conduct this experiment? All those white hands working in concert, committing their facts and figures down on blue paper. After Cora’s discussion with Dr. Stevens, Miss Lucy had stopped her one morning on her way to the museum. Had Cora given any thought to the hospital’s birth control program? Perhaps Cora could talk to some of the other girls about it, in words they could understand. It would be very appreciated, the white woman said. There were all sorts of new positions opening up in town, opportunities for people who had proven their worth.

Cora thought back to the night she and Caesar decided to stay, the screaming woman who wandered into the green when the social came to an end. “They’re taking away my babies.” The woman wasn’t lamenting an old plantation injustice but a crime perpetrated here in South Carolina. The doctors were stealing her babies from her, not her former masters.

“They wanted to know what part of Africa my parents hailed from,” Caesar said. “How was I to know? He said I had the nose of a Beninese.”

“Nothing like flattery before they geld a fellow,” Sam said.

“I have to tell Meg,” Caesar said. “Some of her friends spend evenings at Red’s. I know they have a few men they see there.”

“Who’s Meg?” Cora said.

“She’s a friend I’ve been spending time with.”

“I saw you walk down Main Street the other day,” Sam said. “She’s very striking.”

“It was a nice afternoon,” Caesar said. He took a sip of his beer, focusing on the black bottle and avoiding Cora’s eyes.

They made little progress on a course of action, struggling with the problem of whom to turn to and the possible reaction from the other colored residents. Perhaps they would prefer not to know, Caesar said. What were these rumors compared to what they had been freed from? What sort of calculation would their neighbors make, weighing all the promises of their new circumstances against the allegations and the truth of their own pasts? According to the law, most of them were still property, their names on pieces of paper in cabinets kept by the United States Government. For the moment, warning people was all they could do.

Cora and Caesar were almost to town when he said, “Meg works for one of those Washington Street families. One of those big houses you see?”

Cora said, “I’m glad you have friends.”

“You sure?”

“Were we wrong to stay?” Cora asked.

“Maybe this is where we were supposed to get off,” Caesar said. “Maybe not. What would Lovey say?”

Cora had no answer. They didn’t speak again.

—

SHE slept poorly. In the eighty bunks the women snored and shifted under their sheets. They had gone to bed believing themselves free from white people’s control and commands about what they should do and be. That they managed their own affairs. But the women were still being herded and domesticated. Not pure merchandise as formerly but livestock: bred, neutered. Penned in dormitories that were like coops or hutches.

In the morning, Cora went to her assigned work with the rest of the girls. As she and the other types were about to get dressed, Isis asked if she could switch rooms with Cora. She was feeling poorly and wanted to rest at the spinning wheel. “If I could just get off my feet for a bit.”

After six weeks at the museum, Cora hit upon a rotation that suited her personality. If she started in Typical Day on the Plantation, she could get her two plantation shifts finished just after the midday meal. Cora hated the ludicrous slave display and preferred to get it over as soon as possible. The progression from Plantation to Slave Ship to Darkest Africa generated a soothing logic. It was like going back in time, an unwinding of America. Ending her day in Scenes from Darkest Africa never failed to cast her into a river of calm, the simple theater becoming more than theater, a genuine refuge. But Cora agreed to Isis’s request. She would end the day a slave.

In the fields, she was ever under the merciless eye of the overseer or boss. “Bend your backs!” “Work that row!” At the Andersons’, when Maisie was at school or with her playmates and little Raymond was asleep, Cora worked unmolested and unwatched. It was a small treasure in the middle of the day. Her recent installation in the exhibition returned her to the furrows of Georgia, the dumb, open-jawed stares of the patrons stealing her back to a state of display.

One day she decided to retaliate against a red-haired white woman who scowled at the sight of Cora’s duties “at sea.” Perhaps the woman had wed a seaman of incorrigible appetites and hated the reminder—Cora didn’t know the source of her animus, or care. The woman irked her. Cora stared into her eyes, unwavering and fierce, until the woman broke, fairly running from the glass toward the agricultural section.

From then on Cora selected one patron per hour to evil-eye. A young clerk ducking out from his desk in the Griffin, a man of enterprise; a harried matron corralling an unruly clutch of children; one of the sour youths who liked to batter the glass and startle the types. Sometimes this one, sometimes that one. She picked the weak links out from the crowd, the ones who broke under her gaze. The weak link—she liked the ring of it. To seek the imperfection in the chain that keeps you in bondage. Taken individually, the link was not much. But in concert with its fellows, a mighty iron that subjugated millions despite its weakness. The people she chose, young and old, from the rich part of town or the more modest streets, did not individually persecute Cora. As a community, they were shackles. If she kept at it, chipping away at weak links wherever she found them, it might add up to something.

She got good at her evil eye. Looking up from the slave wheel or the hut’s glass fire to pin a person in place like one of the beetles or mites in the insect exhibits. They always broke, the people, not expecting this weird attack, staggering back or looking at the floor or forcing their companions to pull them away. It was a fine lesson, Cora thought, to learn that the slave, the African in your midst, is looking at you, too.

The day Isis felt under the weather, during Cora’s second rotation on the ship, she looked past the glass and saw pigtailed Maisie, wearing one of the dresses Cora used to wash and hang on the line. It was a school trip. Cora recognized the boys and girls who accompanied her, even if the children did not remember her as the Andersons’ old girl. Maisie didn’t place her at first. Then Cora fixed her with the evil eye and the girl knew. The teacher elaborated on the meaning of the display, the other children pointed and jeered at Skipper John’s garish smile—and Maisie’s face twitched in fear. From the outside, no one could tell what passed between them, just like when she and Blake faced each other the day of the doghouse. Cora thought, I’ll break you, too, Maisie, and she did, the little girl scampering out of the frame. She didn’t know why she did it, and was abashed until she took off her costume and returned to the dormitory.

—

SHE called upon Miss Lucy that evening. Cora had been figuring on Sam’s news all day, holding it up to the light like a hideous bauble, tilting it so. The proctor had aided Cora many times. Now her suggestions and advice resembled maneuvers, the way a farmer tricks a donkey into moving in line with his intentions.

The white woman was gathering a stack of her blue papers when Cora poked her head into the office. Was her name written down there, and what were the notes beside it? No, she corrected: Bessie’s name, not hers.

“I only have a moment,” the proctor said.

“I saw people moving back into number 40,” Cora said. “But no one who used to live there. Are they still in the hospital for their treatment?”

Miss Lucy looked at her papers and stiffened. “They were moved to another town,” she said. “We need room for all the new arrivals, so women like Gertrude, the ones who need help, are being sent to where they can get more suitable attention.”

“They’re not coming back?”

“They are not.” Miss Lucy appraised her visitor. “It troubles you, I know. You’re a smart girl, Bessie. I still hope you’ll take on the mantle of leadership with the other girls, even if you don’t think the operation is what you need right now. You could be a true credit to your race if you put your mind to it.”

“I can decide for myself,” Cora said. “Why can’t they? On the plantation, master decided everything for us. I thought we were done with that here.”

Miss Lucy recoiled from the comparison. “If you can’t see the difference between good, upstanding people and the mentally disturbed, with criminals and imbeciles, you’re not the person I thought you were.”

I’m not the person you thought I was.

One of the proctors interrupted them, an older woman named Roberta who often coordinated with the Placement Office. She had placed Cora with the Andersons, those months ago. “Lucy? They’re waiting on you.”

Miss Lucy grumbled. “I have them all right here,” Miss Lucy told her colleague. “But the records in the Griffin are the same. The Fugitive Slave Law says we have to hand over runaways and not impede their capture—not drop everything we’re doing just because some slave catcher thinks he’s onto his bounty. We don’t harbor murderers.” She rose, holding the stack of papers to her chest. “Bessie, we’ll take this up tomorrow. Please think about our discussion.”

Cora retreated to the bunkhouse stairs. She sat on the third step. They could be looking for anyone. The dormitories were full of runaways who’d taken refuge here, in the wake of a recent escape from their chains or after years of making a life for themselves elsewhere. They could be looking for anyone.

They hunted murderers.

Cora went to Caesar’s dormitory first. She knew his schedule but in her fright could not remember his shifts. Outside, she didn’t see any white men, the rough sort she imagined slave catchers to look like. She sprinted across the green. The older man at the dormitory leered at her—there was always a licentious implication when a girl visited the men’s housing—and informed her that Caesar was still at the factory. “You want to wait with me?” he asked.

It was getting dark. She debated whether or not to risk Main Street. The town records had her name as Bessie. The sketches on the fliers Terrance had printed after their escape were crudely drawn but resembled them enough that any savvy hunter would look at her twice. There was no way she would rest until she conferred with Caesar and Sam. She took Elm Street, parallel to Main, until she reached the Drift’s block. Each time she turned a corner, she expected a posse on horses, with torches and muskets and mean smiles. The Drift was full with early-evening carousers, men she recognized and those she did not. She had to pass by the saloon’s window twice before the station agent saw her and motioned for her to come around back.

The men in the saloon laughed. She slipped through the light cast in the alley from inside. The outhouse door was ajar: empty. Sam stood in the shadows, his foot on a crate as he laced his boots. “I was trying to figure out how to get word,” he said. “The slave catcher’s name is Ridgeway. He’s talking to the constable now, about you and Caesar. I’ve been serving two of his men whiskey.”

He handed her a flier. It was one of the bulletins Fletcher had described in his cottage, with one change. Now that she knew her letters, the word murder hooked her heart.

There was a ruckus from inside the bar and Cora stepped farther into the shadows. Sam couldn’t leave for another hour, he said. He’d gather as much information as he could and try to intercept Caesar at the factory. It was best if Cora went ahead to his house and waited.

She ran as she had not in a long time, sticking to the side of the road and darting into the woods at the sound of a traveler. She entered Sam’s cottage through the back door and lit a candle in the kitchen. After pacing, unable to sit, Cora did the only thing that calmed her. She had cleaned all the dishware when Sam returned home.

“It’s bad,” the station agent said. “One of the bounty hunters came in right after we spoke. Had a ring of ears around his neck like a red Indian, a real tough character. He told the others that they knew where you were. They left to meet their man in front, Ridgeway.” He panted from the run over. “I don’t know how, but they know who you are.”

Cora had grabbed Caesar’s bowl. She turned it over in her hands.

“They got a posse together,” Sam said. “I couldn’t get to Caesar. He knows to come here or the saloon—we had a plan. He may already be on his way.” Sam intended to return to the Drift to wait for him.

“Do you think anyone saw us talking?”

“Maybe you should go down to the platform.”

They dragged the kitchen table and the thick gray rug. Together they lifted the door in the floor—it was a tight fit—and the musty air flickered the candles. She took some food and a lantern and descended into the darkness. The door closed above her and the table rumbled back into place.

She had avoided the services at the colored churches in town. Randall forbade religion on his plantation to eliminate the distraction of deliverance, and churching never interested her once she came to South Carolina. It made her seem strange to the other colored residents, she knew, but seeming strange had not bothered her for a long time. Was she supposed to pray now? She sat at the table in the thin lamplight. It was too dark on the platform to make out where the tunnel began. How long would it take them to root out Caesar? How fast could he run? She was aware of the bargains people made in desperate situations. To reduce the fever in a sick baby, to halt the brutalities of an overseer, to deliver one from a host of slave hells. From what she saw, the bargains never bore fruit. Sometimes the fever subsided, but the plantation was always still there. Cora did not pray.

She fell asleep waiting. Later, Cora crawled back up the steps, perching just beneath the door, and listened. It might be day or night in the world. She was hungry and thirsty. She ate some of the bread and sausage. Moving up and down the steps, putting her ear to the door and then retreating after a time, she passed the hours. When she finished the food, her despair was complete. She listened by the door. There was not a sound.

The thundering above woke her, terminating the void. It was not one person, or two, but many men. They ransacked the house and shouted, knocking over cabinets and upending furniture. The noise was loud and violent and so near, she shrank down the steps. She could not make out their words. Then they were done.

The seams in the door permitted no light and no draft. She could not smell the smoke, but she heard the glass shatter and the pop and crackle of the wood.

The house was on fire.