Excerpt from Underground Airlines by Ben H. Winters, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

I dug a few crumpled bills from my coat pocket and smoothed them out on top of the check. Then I pushed a piece of paper across the table, a smudged scrap of napkin. "Here, though. That's my cell phone number right there. Just in case you change your mind."

Father Barton stared at the napkin.

"Please, Father," I said. "Would you please just take it?"

He took it, and he rose and adjusted his collar, and for a split second, I hated this man, this confident boy. And I believe in the Cause ... as a matter of policy and faith ... Go to hell, son, I was thinking, just for a moment, just a bare half of a moment. With your pity for me and your stiff collar and your alabaster cheeks. You go to hell. I didn't say it, though. Nothing of the sort. I did not raise my voice or bang a closed fist on the table. Anger wouldn't help.

All it would do, maybe, is draw the attention of those two cops, the white one with the thick neck and his laughing black partner, maybe cause them to amble over here in that slow cop way and ask Father Barton if everything was okay. Ask me if I wouldn't mind providing my paperwork for them to have a peek at, if it wasn't too much trouble.

I excused myself to use the bathroom and hurried away, just barely keeping it together.

Once, I saw a businessman on TV, the owner of a midwestern football franchise, and this very wealthy man was proclaiming his personal abolitionist sentiment while defending his use of the infamous "temporary suspension of status" rule to add PB muscle to his defensive line. "Do I like the system?" the man had said, shaking his head, in his thousand-dollar suit, his hundred-dollar haircut. "Well, of course I don't. But I'll tell you what: this is an opportunity for these boys. And I love 'em. It's a bad system, but I love my boys."

I hated that man so much, watching him talk, and I hated Father Barton the same way there in the diner. Slavery was a game to this child, as it was for that slick team owner, as it is for all the football fans who tsk-tsk about the black-hand teams but watch every Sunday in the privacy of their living rooms. Declaring hatred for slavery was easy for a man like Father Barton; not only easy but useful, gratifying—satisfying. And of course its cold and terrible grip could never fall on him directly.

My anger swelled, then it drained, as anger does. By the time he hugged me consolingly at the door of the diner, by the time the priest was on his way to his car, by the time he stopped to cast a troubled glance back toward me—as I had predicted he would, as I had known he would—that glance found me standing perfectly still in the doorway, a humble man, broken by pain. I had taken off my glasses, and there were tears slipping slowly, one at a time, down my weathered cheeks. The waitress poked her head out, reminded me that she had the rest of my supper for me all boxed up, and I could barely hear her, so busy was I composing this face of grief.

Excerpted from Underground Airlines by Ben H Winters. Copyright © 2016 by Ben H Winters. Excerpted by permission of Mulholland. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.