The Underground Railroad

Chapter 20 Summary

This vignette depicts Caesar at Randall, during Jockey’s party. Caesar has taken refuge in the old, run-down schoolhouse near the stables. This is where he goes when he’s feeling down. From its window, he can pretend that he is a mere witness to the cruelties of the plantation, instead of one caught in its web—enslaved and certain to meet with a painful death. He knows that, if his plans work out, this will be the last time he sees one of Jockey’s birthday celebrations. He also feels that these plantation celebrations (a made-up birthday celebrated with dancing after hard labor) are nothing compared to the festivities that he used to enjoy in Virginia, where he was free to visit the farms of freemen and see relatives on estates for holidays and grand feasts. The enslavers in Virginia stayed away from these feasts, whereas the enslavers at Randall were always lying in wait. He reminds himself: “I was born on August 14. My mother’s name is Lily Jane. My father is Jerome. I don’t know where they are” (236).

Through the schoolhouse window, he watches Cora tend to Chester, her favorite, at the race’s starting line. Chester, having never been beaten, possesses an enviable joy. Caesar observes the way that Cora smiles at the boy with the same brief and efficient smile that she uses with Lovey and the women of Hob. He recalls a conversation that he had with a cotton picker, about the women of the plantation. When the cotton picker recounted the rumor that Cora fornicates with swamp animals, Caesar figured that the man was more foolish than he originally thought. Randall has robbed the enslaved men of their wits. They each perform their work and display a certain bravado while in the field, but at night, their cries betray their true desolation and loneliness.

Caesar watches as the race is completed and puzzles over how to capture Cora’s exquisite strength and grace in wood. Cotton picking has deprived his hands of delicacy. He laments the way his former enslaver deceived him and bitterly recounts his father’s promises that he could make anything of himself that he wished. He thinks of his thin mother, who is too small for field labor and too kind to bear the brutality of the plantation. He knows that his stubborn father would hold out longer, but not by much. He pictures them crumbling under an enslaver’s whip, his father scarred by sugar cane labor. He concludes that his former enslaver must have been lying the whole time, enacting a long con to destroy his family. The battered elderly of Randall spell out his future to him.

He approaches Cora after the races, expecting to be dismissed by her shrewd and intelligent mind. Although he told her that he needed her as a good luck charm, he knows that she is not “a rabbit’s foot to carry with [him] on the voyage but the locomotive itself” (238). He can’t do it without her. The horrible incident regarding Chester’s beating proved this belief. No one except Cora intervened for the boy—“She was a stray through and through, so far off the path it was like she’d already run from the place long ago” (239).

Caesar clutches a book, Travels into Several Remote Nations, which Fletcher warned could get him killed. He hides it in the dirt beneath the schoolhouse. Although Fletcher has counseled him to wait until he’s free to read any book of his choosing, he holds onto the volume as a way of assuring himself that he is not merely an enslaved man. Reading a page here and there—rather than only reading the accouterments of his enslavement (bags of grain, the name of a chain manufacturer emblazoned on a set of shackles) fortifies him. He feels that he is doomed to wander from one troublesome place to another, like Gulliver, unless Cora comes with him. With her, he feels certain that he will find his way home.