Lie of the Needle(74)
“Really?”
Liz chuckled. “You should have seen the scene in the gym one day. Her husband was convinced she was screwing one of his clients and screaming that he wouldn’t be made a laughingstock in this town. Ha! We didn’t want to tell him it was too late.”
“Apparently he was going crazy looking for her on the night of Roos’s murder,” I said. I could see why stodgy Jim McIntire could feel insecure, wondering if he was man enough to satisfy his hyper bombshell of a wife.
I finished my coffee, said good-bye to Liz, and walked back to the town hall.
I found Constance Banks in the Parks and Recreation department on the fourth floor. Constance had been a big help to me with my research. I’d gone through the census records, church and cemetery records, and local archives, but she had an ancestor, Rufus Banks, who’d actually traveled the thoroughfare.
It was so hard to uncover information, as not much was written down for safety reasons. Constance had promised to show me some family records today—photo albums, diaries, and the like. She didn’t want to lend them out, but said she was willing to let me take a look in person.
I sat in the file room and pored through the gold mine of information, especially Rufus Banks’s diary. There were some references to places in the area that were known “safe houses,” and I drew a little map for myself.
It must have taken incredible courage to be an abolitionist in those days, let alone a railroad conductor. Some slaves came directly from the slave states of Delaware and Maryland, across the Mason-Dixon line, and into Chester and Lancaster counties.
It was something of a myth that the railroad was a highly organized operation, at least not when the runaways first made their bid for freedom. They would receive help when they crossed the border into Pennsylvania, and be given food and clothing and sheltered in barns, spring houses and attics. Even sometimes in warehouse bins along the Delaware Canal. It was also a myth that many escaped. It was really only a handful compared to the millions in captivity.
I could almost hear the voice of Rufus Banks as he talked about how slaves had to go everywhere with a pass, that slave marriages had no legal standing and could be broken up at the owner’s will, and how, after working on the plantation all day, he’d worked on his own meager garden patch by the light of the moon. I felt the familiar anger burn through me at how inhumanely these people had been treated. Stories of overseers who would whip a slave’s back in one direction and then turn the lash so the skin fell apart like a ripped checkerboard. And, as if that weren’t enough, they finished by putting salt in the wounds.
The spirits of those who had gone before me seemed to be with me in that room.
Parents separated from children, husbands from wives, complete families destroyed. The few who did manage to escape were hounded by slave catchers, who stopped at nothing to take them back, dead or alive. The terror of being recaptured and ‘sold to go far south’ was palpable in the memoir. How much interminable heartache and suffering had these people endured?
I sighed and tucked the map into my pocket. I went back to the front desk and handed the papers back to Constance, too overwhelmed to say much.
“Thank you very much, Constance. See you soon?”
She looked up at me with her world-weary but kind brown eyes. “If God is willing and the creek don’t rise.”
* * *
The elevator in the Sheepville Town Hall was small and badly in need of renovation. It shook alarmingly as it started, and I gripped the rail on the wall, staring at my blurred reflection in the dented metal sides.
I was toying with the idea of getting out on the next floor when it stopped and Beau Cassell’s new foreman got in, wearing a crumpled raincoat. He bashed the buttons for the lobby and the door closure repeatedly, and the doors finally creaked shut.