23
" I'd been here before. Not to this Freedman Town, but to plenty of others. I've been all over the North, and every northern city has a Freedman Town. New York City's got a few, and Chicago's got more than a few. Baltimore, Washington. The manumitted have got to go somewhere, and the world doesn't give them a lot of options. The details are different - some of 'em are built on a high-rise model, bent towers clustered around courtyards, crammed to the gills with the poorest of the poor, living hard, the forgotten children of forgotten children. Some are like this one, blocks and blocks of small ramshackle homes, no sidewalks along narrow roads with the concrete worn and blasted through, the yards between the houses as weed-choked as vacant lots. Ivy growing in wild overlapping networks, engulfing the lower stories and sending menacing tendrils into upstairs windows. Gutters dangling or cracked, porches falling. "
― Ben H. Winters , Underground Airlines
27
" And I could not see them, not from this height, but I knew they were out there, hundreds of Persons Bound to Labor too small to be seen, lost in among the long white lines of cotton. For a second or two I stared out into those distant fields, stared at the fact that when this was over, once I talked to that driver and he pointed me to the next place I had to go, I would walk out of here, and those people I could not seen but knew to be suffering, they all would be here forever. "
― Ben H. Winters , Underground Airlines
28
" And I could not see them, not from this height, but I knew they were out there, hundreds of Persons Bound to Labor too small to be seen, lost in among the long white lines of cotton. For a second or two I stared out into those distant fields, stared at the fact that when this was over, once I talked to that driver and he pointed me to the next place I had to go, I would walk out of here, and those people I could not seen but knew to be suffering, they all would be here forever. What do you do with that fact? Do you hold it like a stone in your hand? Pitch it away from this great height and watch it fall? Do you swallow it and feel it in your throat till the day you die? "
― Ben H. Winters , Underground Airlines
30
" The song just started again, and now I sang it, too. "These strong hands belong to you..."
I found a place between two men. The first was about my age, maybe a little younger, with high cheekbones and small eyes. The other was middle-aged, with a wide forehead and bulb nose, and beside him was a man with a striking face, a square, dimpled chin and high cheekbones... and then there was another, and another--all the kinds of faces in all the colors the world calls black: brown and tan and yellow and orange, copper and bronze and gold.
"These strong hands belong to you..."
They sang--we sang--with no enthusiasm or joy. We used to sing at Bell's, crossing the yard or working on the pile, just like slaves used to sing in Old Slavery, spirituals and work songs, sly lyrics, silly lyrics, yearning for freedom or roasting Massa in nonsense words he couldn't understand. This, though--this was a different kind of singing. I looked from man to man, and they were singing mechanically, eyes front, mouths moving like puppets. Singing this dumb refrain about how much they loved their bosses and loved their work.
Nothing spiritual about this. This was something else altogether. "
― Ben H. Winters , Underground Airlines