Spoilers

Grace’s journey…

Ridgeway caught Cora by accident in a small town where she was hiding out in an attic. She shared that attic with a girl named Grace. Episode seven picks up from the point the fire has been set in that town – backwards in time from the last episode, from the lantern thrown at the wooden building by the Irish servant girl so consumed with hatred for people of colour she was happy to burn down a building in which they’d be hiding.

The problem is that the fire spread among the close-cropped buildings until the entire town is ablaze. Given what these people believed and did it’s hard, perhaps, to sympathise with their plight.

Other White folk drag her off and beat her for her actions but then they all return to stand and stare at what they’ve done – burn their town to the ground.

There is something deeply poetic in this event – that their hatred ends up destroying everything they’ve built. Personally, it’s hard not to wish a deeper more permanent kind of ill fortune on them but Jenkins is on point here.

Hatred eats itself.

After assuming Grace was doomed we discover that she escapes out the back of the burning house (in scenes so beautifully rendered I could have left the shots on freezeframe and watched them for minutes).

Grace finds her way down into the tunnel her benefactor blew up and slowly walks along the underground railroad – not knowing what she’ll find but certainly better off than if she remained above ground in the burning house.

Eventually she comes across the back of a train – illuminated like a skull in the darkness, the warm yellow glow inviting her in.

Climbing on board she meets the conductor – who tells her they’ve been waiting for her to arrive and it’s a wonderful moment of hope rekindled and terrified vulnerability. A sense that perhaps there are other powers in this world who want something other than her death.

Grace is sorry for what she’s not been able to bring with her, but the conductor reminds her that our stories live inside us, that what she’s lost is nothing more than ink and paper. It may be the records of others lost to slavery and persecution are gone from the world, never to be remembered, but the message is they live on in the landscape, in who we are. As if their memories, their experiences are somehow part of the fabric of the world, shaping it.

If that is the case it is both a good and bad thing depending on your point of view.

Grace is asked about her story, about her name, but beyond the basics she’s unwilling to speak.

Left to her own devices, she starts to write and we understand she’s forming her own witness – just as it should be. I yearned to see what she wrote, what story her words breathed into life.

Verdict: This episode is a fearsome interlude in which we’re given unexpected hope, the aftermath of trauma and the possibility that others are waiting for us to be free, to find a shape in the world not defined by those who wish us harm. 7/10

Stewart Hotston