Free The Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead

running when they realized they had no inkling of where they were headed. Cora saw nothing for the darkness and her tears. Caesar had rescued his waterskin but they had lost the rest of their provisions. They had lost Lovey.He oriented himself with the constellations and the runaways stumbled on, impelled into the night. They didn’t speak for hours. From the trunk of their scheme, choices and decisions sprouted like branches and shoots. If they had turned the girl back at the swamp. If they had taken a deeper route around the farms. If Cora had taken the rear and been the one grabbed by the two men. If they hadnever left at all.

Caesar scouted a promising spot and they climbed trees, sleeping like raccoons.
    When she stirred, the sun was up and Caesar paced between two pines, talking to himself. She descended from her roost, numb in her arms and legs from her entanglement in the rough limbs. Caesar’s face was serious. By now the word had spread about last night’s altercation. The patrollers knew the direction they traveled.“Did you tell her about the railroad?”
    “I don’t think so.”
    “I don’t think I did. We were foolish not to think on this.”
    The creek they waded at noon was a landmark. They were close, Caesar said. After a mile, he left her to scout. On his return they adopted a more shallow track in the woods that permitted them to barely see houses through the brush.
    “That’s it,” Caesar said. It was a tidyone-story cottage that looked out on a pasture. The land had been cleared but lay fallow. The red weathervane was Caesar’s sign that this was the house, the yellow curtains pulled shut in the back window the signal that Fletcher was home but his wife was not.
    “If Lovey told them,” Cora said.
    They saw no other houses from their vantage, and no people. Cora and Caesar sprinted through the wildgrass, exposed for the first time since the swamp. It was unnerving out in the open. She felt like she had been thrown into one of Alice’s big black skillets, fires licking below. They waited at the back door for Fletcher to answer their knock. Cora imagined the posses massing in the woods, girding themselves for a dash into the field. Or perhaps they lay wait inside. If Lovey told them. Fletcherfinally ushered them into the kitchen.
    The kitchen was small but comfortable. Favorite pots showed their dark bottoms from hooks and gaily colored flowers from the pasture leaned out of thin glassware. An old red-eyed hound didn’t stir from his corner, indifferent to the visitors. Cora and Caesar drank greedily from the pitcher Fletcher offered them. The host was unhappy to see the extra passenger,but so many things had gone wrong from the very start.
    The shopkeeper caught them up. First, Lovey’s mother, Jeer, noticed her daughter’s absence and left their cabin to make a quiet search. The boys liked Lovey, and Lovey liked the boys. One of the bosses stopped Jeer and got the story out of her.
    Cora and Caesar looked at each other. Their six-hour head start had been a fantasy. The patrollershad been deep in the hunt the whole time.
    By midmorning, Fletcher said, every spare hand in the county and from all around enlisted in the search. Terrance’s reward was unprecedented. Advertisements were posted at every public place. The worst sort of scoundrels took up the chase. Drunkards, incorrigibles, poor whites who didn’t even own shoes delighted in this opportunity to scourge the coloredpopulation. Patrol bands marauded through the slave villages and ransacked the homes of freemen, stealing and committing assaults.
    Providence smiled on the fugitives: The hunters believed they hid in the swamp—with two young females in tow, any other ambitions must have been curtailed. Most slaves made tracks for the black water, as there were no helpful whites this far south, no undergroundrailroad waiting to rescue a wayward nigger. This misstep allowed the trio to get as far northeast as they did.
    Until the hog