10 - Democratic liberty and the tyrannies of place

Summary

Until early 1943, a muddy canal near Pike Road, just outside a hamlet called Pantego, had traced the northern rim of Ardie Winsley's life. On the warm evening of Monday, 5 April, she was sent north by train, beyond Beaufort County and even North Carolina itself. The nine-year-old girl's train ride started in the unfamiliar town of Wilson, on the trunk line running up from Florida to Boston and beyond. The Atlantic Coast Line's Train 76 – known to the road's scheduler as the “Havana Special” – all but forbade her the venture:

When we got on the train, it was like “Never enter!” … “Restricted!”…. It was like you was sitting there and not knowing where you're going and it was really awful. [Uncle] was there and he had never been that way either so he was all excited … But then he was a minister and he was looking forward to it. I just wasn't. I was unhappy the whole trip.

Train 76 carried Ardie and her reverend uncle out of Carolina about dusk, and ran on through the darkened silence of Virginia. Richmond, Washington, Baltimore and a score of lesser towns passed in darkness before dawn came near 30th Street Station, Philadelphia. As she tells the story, it is easy to imagine Ardie glued in fascination at the metallic gloom of Trenton, Elizabeth, and Newark, to say nothing of the subriparian rush beneath the Hudson and into the catacombs of New York's Penn Station.