Excerpt from Underground Airlines by Ben H. Winters, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

I got through our brief supper as best I could, keeping my eyes on my plate, on my fish sandwich and coleslaw and iced tea. God only knows what I'd been expecting. Surely I had not imagined that this man, this child, would be so moved by the plight of my suffering Gentle that he would leap to his feet and charge southward with pistols bared; that he would muster up a posse to kick in the doors of a Carolina bauxite mine; that he would take out his cell phone and summon up the army of abolition.

For one thing, there is no such army. Everybody knows that. Everybody with sense, anyway. No such thing as the Underground Airlines, not really, not in any grand, organized sense. No command center in the deserts of New Mexico, like there was in that movie they did a few years ago; no paramilitary force with helicopters and flash bombs, waiting on the orders of a mighty antislavery general to rush into motion.

There are rescues, though. There are saviors. It's piecemeal; it's small-group action, teams of northerners, daring or crazy, making pinprick raids into the Hard Four, grabbing people up and hustling them to freedom. There are ad hoc efforts, small organizations, cells, each running its own route of the Airlines. You just gotta know the right people. And this man, this Father Barton here, he was supposed to be the right people. The man to get with. Everything I had heard, all the information I had collected, it all said that here in Indianapolis, in central Indiana, Father Barton up at Saint Cat's—this was supposed to be the man.

And now here I was, helpless, watching him eat a hamburger with a paper napkin tucked into his clerical collar, fussily dabbing ketchup from the corners of his mouth. Listening to him assuring me in his soft voice—"to allay any concerns"—that everything on the menu had been certified by the North American Human Rights Association, a Montreal-based outfit that inspects supply lines. I nodded blankly. I murmured "Oh" into my coffee. "Oh, good." Like it mattered. Indiana was, like most states, a Clean Hands state, having a law on the books barring places of public accommodation from serving anything out of the Four. All the rest of it, all the Canadian supply-chain auditors, all the independent inspectorates and "cruelty-free" certification programs—well, that's all marketing. Fancy-sounding words to gin up donations for the antislavery nonprofits. But Father Barton, he pointed his skinny finger at the little gold seal on my menu like it was some kind of consolation prize. I can't get your beloved out of shackles, you poor bastard, but I can assure you that your tomatoes weren't harvested by a shackled line.

When dinner was done, Barton took out his wallet, and I put out my hand and laid it over his.

"Hold on, now." A little tremor rolled through my voice. "I'm gonna get this."


"Oh, no." Father Barton shook his head and didn't pull away his hand, and we held that pose like an artwork: white hand on a brown wallet, black hand on the white hand. "I can't let you do that."

"Come on, now." I peered at him through my spectacles. "I wanna thank you for taking the time, that's all. It was good of you to take the time."

The priest exhaled, nodded slightly, slowly removing his hand from our little pileup. Here's what he was thinking right then: he was thinking, Go on and let the man pick up the check—it's a gift to him, to let him feel he's done something. I do not want to sound crazy or something, but I do believe that I have this strange power in certain situations. To read minds, I mean. Not to read thoughts, not exactly, but to read feelings. To read people. To know how people feel.

Excerpted from Underground Airlines by Ben H Winters. Copyright © 2016 by Ben H Winters. Excerpted by permission of Mulholland. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.