This is the writer's voice, new fiction from The New Yorker.

I'm Deborah Treesman, fiction editor at The New Yorker.

On this episode of The Writer's Voice, we'll hear Tanahasi Coates read his story,

conduction, from the June 10th and 17th, 2019 issue of the magazine.

Coates is the author of the nonfiction books, The Beautiful Struggle, We Were Eight Years in Power,

and Between the World and Me, which won the National Book Award in 2015.

His first novel, The Water Dancer, from which this story was adapted,

will be published in September.

Now here's Tanahasi Coates.

Conduction. I departed Virginia with few effects to my name and no real farewells, on a hot summer Monday morning, four months after I had run from Lockless, the plantation of my birth,

the plantation of my father. And though I knew that I would be somehow called back there,

it was for now behind me, along with the crimes of my father, the slave catchers known as

Rylins' hounds, and the specter of my dancing mother, whom I could barely remember, a void in me

that I knew was somehow tied to her sail. I walked most of that day and spent the night in the

small farmhouse of an old widower sympathetic to the cause. Then on Tuesday, I set out for the town

of Clarksburg, where the first leg of my journey would commence.

The plan was to cross through Virginia by the Northwest Virginia Railroad, and then once in

Maryland, link up with the Baltimore and Ohio, and proceed east and north up into the

free lands of Pennsylvania to Philadelphia. There was a shorter route due north, but there had been some recent troubles with Rallin along

the rail there, and it was felt that the audacity of this approach right through the

slave port of Baltimore would not be expected.

When I reached the Clarksburg station, I spotted Hawkins and Bland sitting beneath a red arning where

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