The Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead Page B

commerce alike, provided no inspiration. He acknowledged their place in the system, erecting their big houses on a foundation of numbers, but he didn’t respectthem. If you weren’t a little dirty at the end of the day, you weren’t much of a man.
    Every morning, the sounds of his father pounding metal were the footsteps of a destiny that never drew closer.
    Ridgeway was fourteen when he took up with the patrollers. He was a hulking fourteen, six and a half feet tall, burly and resolute. His body gave no indication of the confusion within. He beat hisfellows when he spied his weaknesses in them. Ridgeway was young for patrol but the business was changing. King Cotton crowded the countryside with slaves. The revolts in the West Indies and disquieting incidents closer to home worried the local planters. What clear-thinking white man wouldn’t be worried, slaver or otherwise. The patrols increased in size, as did their mandate. A boy might find aplace.
    The head patroller in the county was the fiercest specimen Ridgeway had ever laid eyes on. Chandler was a brawler and bully, the local terror decent people crossed the street to avoid even when the rain made it a stew of mud. He spent more days in jail than the runaways he brought in, snoring in a cell next to the miscreant he had stopped hours earlier. An imperfect model, but close tothe shape Ridgeway sought. Inside the rules, enforcing them, but also outside. It helped that his father hated Chandler, still smarting from a row years before. Ridgeway loved his father, but the man’s constant talk of spirits reminded him of his own lack of purpose.
    Patrol was not difficult work. They stopped any niggers they saw and demanded their passes. They stopped niggers they knew to befree, for their amusement but also to remind the Africans of the forces arrayed against them, whether they were owned by a white man or not. Made the rounds of the slave villages in search of anything amiss, a smile or a book. They flogged the wayward niggers before bringing them to the jail, or directly to their owner if they were in the mood and it was not too close to quitting time.
    News ofa runaway sent them into cheerful activity. They raided the plantations after their quarry, interrogating a host of quivering darkies. Freemen knew what was coming and hid their valuables and moaned when the white men smashed their furniture and glass. Praying that they confined their damage to objects. There were perquisites, apart from the thrill of shaming a man in front of his family or roughingup an unseasoned buck who squinted at you the wrong way. The old Mutter farm had the comeliest colored wenches—Mr. Mutter had a taste—and the excitement of the hunt put a young patroller in a lusty mood. According to some, the backwoods stills of the old men on the Stone plantation produced the best corn whiskey in the county. A roust allowed Chandler to replenish his jars.
    Ridgeway commandedhis appetites in those days, withdrawing before his confederates’ more egregious displays. The other patrollers were boys and men of bad character; the work attracted a type. In another country they would have been criminals, but this was America. He liked the night work best, when they lay in wait for a buck who sneaked through the woods to visit his wife on a plantation up the road, or a squirrelhunter looking to supplement his daily meal of slop. Other patrollers carried guns and eagerly cut down any rascal dumb enough to flee, but Ridgeway copied Chandler. Nature had equipped him with weapons enough. Ridgeway ran them down as if they were rabbits and then his fists subdued them. Beat them for being out, beat them for running, even though the chase was the only remedy for his restlessness.Charging through the dark, branches lashing his face, stumps sending him ass over elbow before he got up again. In the chase his blood sang and glowed.
    When his father finished his workday, the fruit of his labor lay before him: a musket,