The Underground Railroad

Chapter 17 Summary

During her childhood, a woodcut image of “a missionary surrounded by jungle natives” convinced Ethel that her spiritual fulfillment lay with serving “the Lord in dark Africa, delivering savages to the light” (195). She fantasized about the ship that would bear her to the distant land, and about the Black people that would praise her name.

At 8 years old, Ethel soaked up the accounts of undiscovered lands and pygmy peoples that festooned the newspapers. But the nearest she could get to fulfilling her fantasies was playing with Jasmine, the daughter of the family's enslaved woman, Felice. When Edgar Delany, Ethel’s father, turned 10, Felice was given to him as a present. As Edgar grew into a man, he came to regard Felice, with her immaculate ways in the house and wisdom, as a miracle. He gave her a pass to visit the Parker plantation every year, and she returned from one of those visits pregnant. She gave birth to a daughter, Jasmine, and the Delanys now had two enslaved people.

Initially, Ethel thought that they were people “who lived in your house like family” (196). Her father carefully rid her of this idea, telling her that enslaved people were the descendants of the “cursed, black Ham, who had survived the Flood by clinging to the peaks of a mountain in Africa” (196). Ethel used this story to add more fuel to her desire to minister to the accursed.

When Ethel turned 8, her father put an end to her friendship with Jasmine, which Ethel threw tantrums about before eventually accepting. By the time that Felice became paralyzed and mute due to a heart ailment, Ethel and Jasmine only spoke to each other about household issues. The sickened Felice was loaded into a cart and taken away.

Most nights thereafter, Ethel heard her father going up the stairs into Jasmine’s room at night. Ethel’s mother soon arranged for Jasmine to be sold to a coppersmith on the opposite side of town, but not before Jasmine became pregnant. In town, everyone gossiped about her child having his father’s eyes.

One day, Ethel proclaimed her desire to travel to Africa and spread the word of Christianity to its savages. Her parents dismissed her, saying that upstanding women from Virginia did no such things. Her father told her to teach school instead. Ethel relented, but did not find little white children to be fulfilling charges. She nursed her fantasies about having a coterie of dark-skinned admirers.

Resentment became the basis for Ethel’s personality. By the time Martin appeared, introduced to her by a cousin, she had long given up on finding happiness. The marriage was joyless, but their daughter Jane brought her some happiness. By then, Ethel had taken up pretending “not to see Jasmine when they passed on the street, especially when her former playmate was in the company of her son. His face was a dark mirror” (198).

Then, Martin was called to North Carolina for his father’s funeral. He promised Ethel that, once they found a buyer for the feed shop, they would leave. They both found the place distasteful, with its brutal heat and its vermin, and with its custom of lynching Black people on a schedule, as if it were church. However, those plans changed when George, an enslaved man Martin rescued via the mica mine railroad stop, arrived. George was kept in the attic hatch for a week before a different railroad agent came to collect him.

Ethel was unbothered by moral qualms about enslavement. She reasoned that, if God did not want Black people to be enslaved, he would simply not have allowed it. She did, however, resent her husband endangering her life through his Underground Railroad activities.

Ethel felt that, throughout her life, her desires—“[t]o mission, to help […] to give love in the way she wanted” (200)—were denied her. When Cora fell ill, Ethel felt that, finally, her desire was being fulfilled.