“I can see blue veins in your wrist,” the bounty hunter said flatly.
“You’re crazy, Mr….” I scream-whispered, forgetting what was on the card.
“Major. Call me Major. And we’re not in New Orleans anymore, darlin’,” the bounty hunter muttered. “I’d have to step aside if I saw you on the street.”
Even Lessie nodded.
I closed my mouth, stunned.Thiswas the death of nuance. My whole identity as a gens de couleur—a complex, cultivated thing built on careful speech, finishing schools, and knowing which fork was for olives—reduced to the sudden fact that a few miles outside New Orleans, no one gave a fig about pedigree or politics.
Now they want me to pretend to be some… brunette from Lake Charles?
In the back of this train, I was either helpful or I wasn’t. Hungry or I wasn’t.
“Ms. Caroline,” Lessie said gently, “if you get the materials, I can make the sandwiches and a fine sun tea to boot. I’ll chargefive cents for my trouble. That could go a long way toward paying my room and board where I’m headed.”
So I was, against all odds and class expectations, an accomplice in the Great Sandwich Heist of 1893.
The first part of the ruse was almost offensively easy, like the good Lord had planned it himself. I stepped outside to stretch my legs and take in a bit of the bustling St. Louis I’d heard about when I saw a ticket—first class to Denver—fluttering out of a white woman’s embroidered purse as she collapsed into the waiting arms of a man. The debutante, who clearly had no intention of meeting whoever her family had selected for her in Colorado, flitted off without so much as a backward glance at the small square of paper that now lay trembling on the platform, a tiny bird with nowhere to land.
I waited. Timing was everything. Not when the train was boarding, not when the platform swarmed with people, and not when the woman’s perfume still hung in the air.
No, I waited until the chatter thinned, until the whistles began to blow and the train groaned to life, and I slipped inside the whites-only first-class rail cart like a needle in fabric.
I had to admit to a tiny libidinal thrill at sitting here unnoticed. I’d once walked into a candy shop on Canal Street, with its gleaming jars and suspicious white eyes that tracked my every movement. The trick, I’d learned, was not stealth but entitlement. Chin up, eyes forward, move like you’ve got a moral right to take up space, even when you know you don’t. Especially when you know you don’t. What was a white woman, anyway, but the right nose in the right context?
Still, my pulse betrayed my confidence. It raced wildly as I passed through the narrow corridor of the railcar, my hand gripping the ticket like it might dissolve at any moment. When Ifinally reached my seat, a plush thing upholstered in green velvet, I lowered myself with the grace of a queen and the pounding heart of a thief.
The train pulled out and,Mon Dieu, the cabin was whisper quiet and perfumed with the faint scent of lavender sachets. It was as peaceful as a Sunday morning, yet every time a shadow passed by the frosted window of my private car, my stomach tightened. I flinched reflexively, holding on to my borrowed dignity like a pastor’s rag.
I was a VIP.
HEIST
It started, as many of my worst ideas do, with perfect posture and a total lack of a backup plan.
The three of us—Lessie, the future tycoon; Major, the bounty hunter; and myself—pulled off what can only be described as a minor miracle of logistics.
Step one: I marched into the VIP cabin like I belonged there. Which, to be fair, I did. In spirit. I muttered something about my “uncle’s urgent dietary needs” and fluttered a handkerchief.
Step two: Major, playing the role of bored staff and also, bafflingly, my “porter escort,” lingered near the refreshment tables. Ushering foods out while I covered with over-the-top banter with patrons. So far, no one blinked an eye.
Step three: Lessie Mae waited at the rear of the train with a knife and spoon.Mon Dieu, that woman could do more with old bread than Jesus had done with loaves and fishes.
Together, we liberated no fewer than seventeen sandwiches, two wheels of cheese, and a decorative bowl of pickled things no one had touched since Arkansas.
We wrapped them in linens stolen from under a pyramid of teacups and slipped out just before a steward asked me for my card. I handed him the name of an entirely invented person. “Mrs. Adelaide F. Van Dorsen,” I said, spelling it slowly. “You’ll be hearing from my mother.”
That seemed to scare the fire out of the poor boy.
We were getting away with it! Later that evening, as the sun fell over the Mississippi in a buttery collapse, the colored car feasted.Lessie, radiant, laid out her bounty with a small flourish. She had added mustard and cured salami. I don’t know how. I didn’t ask.
And thatreallyshould have been the end of it.
But then the conductor caught Lessie swiping sugar—and all hell broke loose.
Apparently, sugar theft is the number one criminal threat to the American railroad industry. Which felt like a bit of drama on the conductor’s part. Regardless, he came upon her red-handed—or rather, sticky-fingered—palming lumps of cane sugar from the refreshment table. She froze, of course. Guilty. Mid-pocket. The cubes glinted in the light like criminal diamonds.
This was a test of my umbrage. I was up for it. I straightened my shoulders, squared my hat, and marched up to the conductor with the full, brittle force of righteous indignation.
