Rhoda of the Underground

by Florence Finch Kelly

If a wayfarer gave the four signal knocks on a night too bitterly cold for him to be housed in the woodpile shelter Rhoda, into whose charge her father had given most of the work of conducting their “station,” risked discovery by making some arrangement for him within the house. Once, when the traveler was a man alone, she bedded him for the rest of the night on the lounge in the office, until early morning, when Jim hurried him to the woodshed. Another time, when the suppliants were a husband and wife and little child, a bed was improvised for them in Jim and Lizzie’s room.

But, zealously absorbed though she was in this work and convinced that it was righteous and would have a good result, Rhoda was never free from twinges of conscience because it was being carried on without her mother’s knowledge. “It is her home and it isn’t fair for her not to know about it,” she thought, time after time, as the winter went by. “Of course, she wouldn’t like it and it would make her most unhappy to know about it, and it is very dear in father to want to save her the pain of knowing. I know it’s right for us to do it—we must— Oh, dear! It’s just another of these dreadful knots of right and wrong all mixed up that the North and South have tangled themselves into! And slavery is at the bottom of it all,—and slavery is the thing we must get rid of—tear it all out—no matter—no matter who is hurt!”

The winter months, with their likelihood of cold and storms, greatly lessened the Underground traffic. But even so, rarely a week went by without the coming of at least one dark-faced runaway from the South, trusting to find, at “the white house on the top of the hill with a lantern at the gate,” shelter, food, and help for the next stage of his journey.

For Rhoda it was a busy winter and its weeks sped by rapidly until the warming sun brought promise that the spring was already on her way. Then there came a night of cold and blustering wind with dashes of rain. It was near daylight when Rhoda was roused from sound sleep by Lizzie, who was bending over her bed and softly calling her name. A fugitive was downstairs, tired out and wet to the skin.

The runaway was a young mulatto, scarcely more than a lad, who had absconded from his owner, a horse dealer in a Kentucky town, because he had learned that he was about to be sold to a trader who was collecting a party of negroes for the owner of a Louisiana cotton plantation. He was already planning to earn enough money in Canada to buy “free papers” for his mother, who was owned by a merchant in the same town. But he was oppressed by the fear that she might be sold “down south” before he would be able to rescue her. From her box of clothing, kept on hand for such emergencies, Rhoda gave him new, dry garments, he was fed and warmed, and then taken to the woodshed shelter where, since he was so wearied, he was left to rest and sleep through all the next day.

Notwithstanding her many activities and her zeal for the anti-slavery cause, Jeff Delavan was never absent long from Rhoda’s mind, nor did she even try to banish him from her thoughts. Every now and then came a long letter from him which she read and re-read and pondered over, and finally answered at equal length. These letters she frankly read, with now and then a reservation, to her mother, who, as the months went by, began to hope that finally she and Jeff together would overcome the girl’s resolution. Rhoda entered into the social gaieties of the town much less that winter than had formerly been her custom. Her days were so fully occupied and the nights were so likely to bring responsibility that she was reluctant to leave her post. Moreover, since she had become so much absorbed in anti-slavery work, social pleasures had for her less attraction. Charlotte gibed at her frequently on this account.

“You’re no better than an old maid already, Rhoda,” she complained that same morning when the mulatto boy was sleeping in the woodshed. They were working together, dusting and tidying the big, bright living-room. Charlotte had been to a party the night before with Billy Saunders and his sister Susie, who was her particular friend. But it had taken much coaxing of her mother, with a final appeal to her father’s indulgence, to win a reluctant consent for her to go without the watchful care of her elder sister.

“Really, I think it’s unkind of you to stay at home so much when you know mother doesn’t like me to go without you.”

“But she let you go last night.”

“Yes, because father asked her to. But she didn’t want to do it.” Charlotte paused in her work and regarded her sister with brown eyes sparkling. “Say, Rhoda,” she giggled, “do you suppose father would have sided with me if he’d known about—Horace, last fall?”