THE CONDUCTIONS WERE MORE frequent now. The world would suddenly and randomly fall away and moments later I would return, dumped into back-alleys, basements, open fields, stock rooms. Every Conduction seemed activated by a memory, some whole, some mere shards, like the vision of a woman who snuck me ginger snaps. But with the glue of tales swapped down in the Street, I assembled a rough picture: The woman who’d slipped me ginger snaps was my aunt Emma. I remembered the stories of her prowess in the Lockless kitchen. And I also thought it was no mistake that this Aunt Emma was the same aunt who would water dance out in the woods with her sister, my mother.
I began to feel that something was trying to reveal itself to me, that some part of my mind, long ago locked away, was now seeking its liberation. Perhaps I should have greeted the unraveling of a mystery and new knowledge with relief. But Conduction felt like the breaking and resetting of a bone. Each bout left me fatigued and with a somehow deeper sense of loss than the one I’d carried into it, so that I was in a constant low thrum of agony, a melancholy so deep it would take every ounce of my strength to rise out of bed the next morning. For days after each Conduction, I would still be working my way through the most sullen of moods. This no longer felt like freedom, not anymore.
And so one day I walked out of the Ninth Street office set upon the intention to leave Philadelphia and the Underground, leave the triggers for these memories that threw me into depression. I did not meditate on this decision. I did not gather any effects. I simply walked out the door with no view of ever coming back. I reasoned that my initial exit would alarm no one, since it was known that I enjoyed walking through the city. But then I would just keep walking.
I turned away from the office and made my way over toward the Schuylkill docks. Of all the people I saw in the city, the sailors seemed the most free, tied to nothing save each other, bound by boyish jabs and indecent mockery that always elicited a host of laughter. Sometimes they fought. But whatever their quarrels, these men seemed a brotherhood to me. Even in their freedom they still somehow reminded me of home. Maybe it was their hard black faces, their rough hands, bent fingers, bruised and worn-down nails. Maybe it was how they sang, because they sang as the Tasked did.
I stood at the dock watching them work, hoping one might call out to me, perhaps asking for a hand, and when no one did, I left, and that whole day I just wandered. I crossed the river, passed a cemetery and some railroad tracks, and stopped before an alms-house to watch the indigent of the city gather. I walked more until I stood before Cobbs Creek and a forest at the south-westerly recesses of the city. By now it was late. I had no plan and it was getting dark. I really had no way out, no way to escape the Underground nor the binds of memory. So I turned around, and these were the thoughts that clouded me on my way back to Ninth Street, back to my fate, the notions that kept me from watching as I had been trained to do. Suddenly I was face to face with a white man who seemed to materialize out of the night itself. He asked me something, but I could not hear. I leaned closer, asking him to repeat himself. And then I felt a sharp blow fall across the back of my head. There was a bright flash. Another blow. And then nothing.
When I awoke I was, once again, chained, blinded, and gagged. I was in the back of a drawn cart and could feel ground moving beneath me. I cleared my head and knew exactly what had befallen me, for I had heard all the stories. It was the man-catchers—Ryland’s Hounds of the North—who’d gotten me. They were known to simply grab colored people off the street and ship them south for a price, with no regard to their status as free or in flight from the Task.
I could hear them laughing with each other, doubtlessly counting up their haul. I was not alone in the cart. Someone near me was weeping, quietly—a girl. But I was silent. I had wanted out of the Underground and now I had it. There was some small part of me that felt relief, for I was, at least, returning to the Task I knew.
We rode for several hours, across the back-country roads. Ryland, I reasoned, would like to avoid towns, toll-roads, and ferries, for as sure as we feared Ryland, Ryland feared the vigilance committees, allies of the Underground, which stood watch for man-catchers who sought to drag freedmen down. We stopped to make camp and I felt rough hands around my arms—I was pulled along for a moment and then tossed to the ground. “Take care, Deakins,” I heard one of them say. “Damage that boy and I’ll damage you.” This man, Deakins, propped me up against a tree. I could move my fingers but nothing else. I was listening to their voices, attempting to calculate their number, when I saw a brightness through my blindfold. A campfire. The men gathered around and traded their small talk. I now counted four voices, and from their words and general commotion, it became clear that they were eating. Their last meal.
I never heard him approach and doubtless neither did Ryland. There was the crack of a pistol shot—twice—a scream, a struggle and then two more cracks, then a bit of whining, like a child’s but not the child I’d heard in the wagon, another crack and then nothing for a moment. And then I heard someone rummaging for something, and again I felt hands upon me. The click of a lock and the chains loosened. With a furor that shocked me, I pushed the hands away as well as their possessor and pulled off my blindfold and gag, and by the fire-light I saw him—Mr. Fields, Micajah Bland, regarding me with the most stolid and unmoved face.
I stood and leaned against the tree to settle myself. There were two others, bound and manacled as I was. Bland worked quickly, moving among them. I looked away and saw four bodies on the ground. How do I explain what happened in that moment, the blinding, unconscious rage I felt? It was as if I had been lifted out of myself to behold the scene. And what I saw was me kicking one of the corpses with all the power I could muster. Bland came over to stop me, and I pushed him away again and kicked the dead man—Deakins perhaps—even more. Bland did not try to stop me this time. In that moment all the rage of everything from my mother to Maynard to Sophia to Thena to Corrine, all the lies, all the losses, all that they had done to me in the jail parlor, all the violation, all my impotence for the little boy in my cell, for the old man who loved the wife of his son, for the days they’d chased me into the woods—all of it came up there and vented itself on a dead man.
Finally tired, I doubled over on my knees. The fire was now burning low. But I could see Bland standing there with a girl and a man, and the man stood in front of the girl to shield her from my anger, and it occurred to me then that the man was the girl’s father.
“Are you finished?” Micajah Bland asked.
“No,” I said. “Not ever.”
We are all divided against ourselves. Sometimes part of us begins to speak for reasons we don’t even understand until years later. The voice that took me away from the Underground was familiar and old in me. This was the voice that conspired to come up off the Street. This was the voice that consigned my mother to the “down there.” It was the voice that had spoken to Thena, and so callously left her behind. It was the voice of freedom, a cold Virginia freedom—freedom for me and those I chose. But now a new voice was rising, one enriched by the warmth of the house of Viola White, and the ghost of my aunt Emma who from somewhere deep within admonished me, Don’t forget, family.
We walked through the woods until we reached a town where Bland had left his horses, carriage, and a cart. I was aware now of the blow I’d taken earlier, as my head was pounding steadily, seemingly in rhythm with every step we took. I sat in the cart with the girl and her father. Morning was just beginning to break over the horizon in a fan of orange and blue. We had gone a few miles when we stopped. I turned and saw Bland talking to a small woman standing in the road, her whole body wrapped and covered in a shawl. Then she turned and began walking to the back of the cart. When she was close enough, she put a hand on my cheek, and then my forehead and then the back of my head, which was sore to the touch. I could now see that she was, judging by her countenance, only slightly older than me, and yet in her approach, in her confidence and command, I sensed someone much senior.
“Got ’em, did you?” she said, calling back to Bland, even as her hand was still on my face.
“Yes,” Bland said. “They had not even made it that far out and the fools decided to stop and have a banquet.”
She turned to Bland and said, “Glad they did.” The she turned back to me and said in a soft voice, “But you, boy, what were you doing? And what kind of agent let them hounds get under him like that? Mmmm-hmmm. Almost carried you off.”
I said nothing but felt my face burn. She laughed and pulled back her hand.
“All right,” she said to Bland. “Y’all get gone.”
The cart began to creak as the horses moved. The woman waved to us and then walked off into the woods to our rear. I could feel some excitement in the cart now. The man and the girl started chattering with each other. When I didn’t join in, the man leaned over to say, “Don’t you know who that was?”
“Not particularly,” I said.
“Moses,” he said. He waited for a moment as if to recover from the effect that speaking the fact of things had on him.
“My God…” And he paused again. “That was Moses.”
There seemed to be as many names for her as legends. The General. The Night. The Vanisher. Moses of the Shore, who summoned the fog, and parted the river. This was the one of whom Corrine and Hawkins had spoken, the living master of Conduction. I did not register all of this at that moment. Too much had happened, and I was mostly in shock at all that had befallen me.
An hour later, the girl was asleep in her father’s lap. Bland pulled over the cart and called for me to join him in the front. We rode for another few minutes in silence. I broke it with a question.
“How did you find me?”
He snorted and laughed. “We are all watched, Hiram.”
“If you were watching,” I said, “why you ain’t stop them before they socked me and dragged me out the city?”
Bland shook his head. “The men, the ones who grabbed you, they’ve operated in Philadelphia for some time now. They prey off the free coloreds. Children are especially prized. We can’t really stop them. But sometimes we get a chance to send a message as to just how dangerous the man-catching business can truly be.”
“So you planned it all?” I asked.
“No. But you asked why we didn’t stop them. And this is why—to send a message, a warning. To make their cohort understand the perils of their trade. We could not send such a message in the confines of the city. But out here in the open country, with no one to tell…”
“Murder,” I said.
“Murder? Do you know what they were going to do to you?”
“Yeah, I do know,” I said. And at that moment I was back at that terrible night, chained to the fence, with Sophia at my side. And I was recalling how badly I wanted to give in to it all, to die right there, and how she held me up, and spoke to me without speaking, how strong she was when I needed her most, and how foolish I had been when she needed me. And now she was gone, and they, Ryland, the hounds, had done God knows what with her.
I said, “You only got half the story about me. You know about the girl—Sophia—the one I ran with. But you don’t really know the feeling I had for her, and how much it aches me that they have her now while I am up here, breathing the free air. All I can tell you is she was better than me. Fact is, sometimes I think you got the wrong one for an agent. Shoulda been her.”
I began to weep. Softly and quietly, but enough that I had to stop and collect myself.
“She saw so much in me,” I said. “But I fell. And Sophia fell with me. And here I am, up here, in the North, and she is…I don’t even know where she is. What I know is she deserved better than me. She deserved more than a man who would lead her right into the jaws of Ryland.”
And at this there was no control. I was weeping openly. It was all out there now. I had led a woman I loved right into the maw. And the weight that this put upon me was now open and known. Bland made no effort to conciliate. He kept his eyes on the road. And when I had stopped weeping, he spoke.
“You know that feeling you had for this woman Sophia?” he asked. “You know how it rips you to pieces wondering what became of her? You know all the moments you’ve lost wondering how you might have done things different? And you know all the nights you’ve sat up wondering if she were even alive? Hiram, that is the feeling that marks an entire nation held down. A whole country looking up wondering for their fathers and sons, for their mothers and daughters, cousins, nephews, friends, lovers.
“You say I murdered those men back there. But I say to you that I saved the lives of so many unknowable others. Those who would murder you—strip you away from all your family and friends—and remember nothing of it. They cannot live, not without some fear, some specter, and if murder is what you must name it, then I gladly accept the claim.”
We rode in silence for a moment.
“Thank you,” I said. “That should have been the first thing I said. Thank you.”
“No need to thank me, Hiram. This work, this war, it gives my own life meaning. I don’t know what I’d be without it. And I must say that I think if you gave it a chance, you might well find meaning…”
Bland was still talking, but the headache overpowered everything, and soon, to my great relief, the world faded away and I slipped out of consciousness.
Late that next day, I awoke with a dull ache all over my body. I dressed, walked downstairs, and found Raymond, Otha, and Bland all in conference. They summoned me over and I sat down before them. Scanning their faces, I had the sense that they were ashamed of something almost—my foolishness at being captured, perhaps. And I thought then that they had been called to do something awful yet necessary.
“Hiram,” Raymond said. “Bland is an old friend to me. I trust him as much as my own family, and to be truthful with you, more than certain members of that family. He is not, as you well know, an exclusive agent of this station. He has his acquaintances across the Underground and, in his dealings with those acquaintances, has, on occasion, taken up projects that would not have met my approval. I understand that you were among those projects.”
I began to feel a shift in the temperature of things.
“I know well the methods and reputation of Corrine Quinn. They are not my methods, Hiram, no matter their aim.”
Raymond shook his head now and looked to the ground. “This ritual burial, the hunting, the chasing, it is all abhorrent to me. In that spirit, I am compelled to say that you are owed an apology. I feel that what was done to you, no matter the aims, was wrong.”
“It was not you who did it,” I said.
“Yes, but it is my cause. It is my army. And while I cannot balance Corrine’s accounts, I can tend to my own. And it was wrong, not just on her behalf, but to our cause”—and here Raymond paused a moment before looking back at me—“no matter what power may beat in your breast.”
“I understand,” I said. “It is nothing. I understand.”
Now Raymond took in a deep breath. “No, Hiram,” he said. “I do not think you truly do.”
“I know more than you give me credit for, Hiram,” Bland said.
“What do you mean?” I asked.
“I mean, I knew it all. I knew about Sophia, all about your feelings. It is my business to know. And that is why I know not just how you felt then, nor just how you feel now. I also know exactly where Sophia is being held.”
“What?” I said. My head throbbed with almost the same force it had throbbed last night.
“We had to know,” Bland said. “What kind of agents would we be if we didn’t know exactly who you ran with and what became of them?”
“I asked Corrine,” I said. “She said it was out of her power.”
“I know, Hiram, I know. It was wrong. I can’t defend it. I can only tell you what you must already know—that when you are operating as Corrine Quinn does, on the other side of the line, the math is different. It has to be. You were part of that math.”
I screened out the headache and said, “Where?”
“Your father’s place. Lockless. Corrine prevailed on him to take Sophia back.”
“But you didn’t get her out? All the power held by your Underground and you…”
“Virginia has its rules. We took what we could from them. We could not take it all.”
“And so that’s it,” I said. “You’re going to leave her to it?”
“No,” Otha said. “We don’t never leave nobody to it. Ever. They have their rules. And by God, we got ours.”
“Hiram,” Raymond said. “We don’t mean to just offer you an apology. It is not just words we bring, but action to match them.”
“You see, we don’t just know where Sophia is,” Bland said. “We know precisely how to bring her out.”