The Known World (14 page)

When he tried to get close to her, to walk a little bit beside her, hoping that closeness would say what he did not have words for, she would hurry away, believing he only wanted to see her life with a terrible limp. He hurt, day after day, to see her move away. Then, late one evening, almost two months after Oden took the razor to his ear, after all the work of the day and the slaves were in those moments when they set their minds to sleep, he came to the cabin she shared with two other women and Elias tapped until one of the women came to the door. Celeste had brought Luke to live with her, but he was not there.

“Could you mind tellin Celeste I’d like a word with her?” Elias said to the woman.

The woman laughed but when she saw he wasn’t going away, she turned and called to Celeste, “That Elias be wantin you.”

It seemed a long time before she came to the door. He nodded and she nodded back.

“I just wanted a word with you, thas all,” he said.

“All right,” she said.

He looked her full in the face, the light from inside the cabin silhouetting her. “Why you all the time treatin me bad when all I wanna do is treat you good?”

“What that you say?”

“Why you all the time treatin me bad when all I wanna do is treat you good? Thas what I said.”

“I ain’t think I was treatin you no kinda bad way.”

“Well, you was and all I’m askin is that you stop it.”

She put one hand on the doorjamb to steady herself to come down the one step to him and he took her by the other arm. She said after a minute or so, “I didn’t mean no harm by it.”

He believed her and was again without words. He found them when he heard one of the women inside the cabin laugh at something the other woman said. “I be talkin to you, then. Tomorrow if thas all right with you. I be talkin to you tomorrow.”

“Yes.” She turned, a hand again on the doorjamb, and stepped up as he held her elbow. She went inside and closed the door.

A week later he was at her door again and she was in the doorway and he opened a little piece of a rag and presented a comb he had carved out of a piece of wood. The comb was rough, certainly one of the crudest and ugliest instruments in the history of the world. Not one tooth looked like another; some of the teeth were far too thick, but most of them were very thin, the result of his whittling away with the hope that he was approaching some kind of perfection. “Oh,” Celeste said. “Oh, my.” She took it and smiled. “My goodness gracious.”

”It ain’t much.”

“It be the whole world. You givin it to me?”

“I am.”

“Well, my goodness gracious.” She tried to run the comb through her hair but the comb failed in its duty. “Oh, my,” Celeste said as she struggled with it. Several teeth broke off. “Oh, my.”

He reached up and taking her hand with the comb, they extricated it from her hair. “I done broke it,” she said when they had pulled it away. “Dear Lord, I done broke it.”

“Pay it no mind,” Elias said.

“But you gave it to me, Elias.” Aside from the food in her stomach and the clothes on her back and a little of nothing in a corner of her cabin, the comb was all she had. A child of three could have toted around all she owned all day long and not gotten tired.

“We can do another one.” He reached up and picked out the comb’s teeth that had broken off in her hair.

“But . . .”

“I’ll make you a comb for every hair on your head.”

She began to cry. “Thas easy to say today cause the sun be shinin. Tomorrow, maybe next week, there won’t be no sun, and you won’t be studyin no comb.”

He said again, “I’ll make you a comb for every hair on your head.” He dropped the broken teeth onto the ground and she closed her hand tight over what was left of the comb.

She put her face into her other hand and cried. There had been a slave on the plantation she had come from who had come upon her in a field of corn and told her that a woman like her should be shot, like a horse with a broken leg. And she had cried then as well.

Elias put his arms around her, tentative, for this was the first time. He trembled and the trembling increased the closer she got to his body. He kissed the side of her head, near the hairline, and his lips met not only her skin and hair but a tooth from the comb that he had somehow missed.

They ate their supper together the next day at the edge of the field, and when he was done, he told her he had to speak to the master and he got up from beside her and walked out of the field and Moses didn’t ask him what he was doing or where he was going. At the back of the house, he tapped at the door. Zeddie the cook opened it. “Zeddie, I got to speak with Master Henry. Can I speak with Master Henry, please?”

”I go tell him,” Zeddie said. “You step in here.” She opened the door wider and he came in, his first time in the house. He smelled what a tree smelled like when it was first cut into, the wood blood from the first wound of the ax. Elias shut the door. She returned in moments with their master and Henry said before he was fully into the kitchen, “What is it there, Elias?”

Elias looked at Zeddie, then said, “I be likin Celeste, Master, and I be likin her more as the day go by. That likin ain’t gon stop tomorrow, as I can see.”

“That so, Elias?”

“Yes, Master. I wanna marry her. I wanna be with her. There ain’t nothin more I want sides that, cept to live.” He had dreamed again last night that he had run away to freedom. He had been as safe as an angel at God’s knee, safe on the road to freedom, and then he remembered that there was something way back in slavery that he had forgotten and so he ran back into slavery, passing millions who were running toward freedom. He searched the empty slave quarters for what he had forgotten and in the last cabin out of the hundreds he searched, he had come upon Celeste, without even one leg to stand on. She saw him and turned her face from him.

“And you be wantin me to say ‘Yes’ to this?”

“Master, I make her a good husband and I be a good worker every day God gimme strength. I would hate, Master, for us to be took apart after she my wife. It would feel bad for us to be sold apart. It would feel bad.” Elias knew what he was saying and he knew that if his master blessed it all, he would never again dream of being on that road. “I would hate to lose a good wife and Celeste would hate to lose a good husband. We would hate bein separate.”

“I want you happy, Elias. And I want to make Celeste happy. So you get back now and both yall be happy.”

“Thank you, Master.”

Zeddie had been stoking the fire in the stove and now she left off that and opened the door for Elias. He went out. Henry went through his house and came out the front door in time to see Elias walk down to the fields. Elias was the only human being about, and the way to the road was closer than the way to the fields. Henry went down the stairs and followed Elias, who went straight to the fields and took up his work, just as he had done before supper, which was now over for every slave in the field. Henry could see Celeste limping up the rows, limping and fast at work, and she was in one part of the fields and her husband-to-be was in another part. Elias did not look at her and she did not look at him. Moses waved to Henry and Henry waved back.

Henry stood watching Elias for some time, and in all that time Elias did not look at Celeste. His feelings were all the looking he needed, Henry realized. And he realized, too, that what was happening was better than chains. He had them together, bound one strong man to a woman with a twisted leg, and there was not a chain in sight. He could not wait to tell William Robbins. Henry went back the way he came, back to the house, and he put in his big book the day he had decided that Elias and Celeste would marry, wrote it in the flowing script that Fern Elston had taught him when he was twenty years old.

Moffett married them, and while he was away his sister-in-law beat her sister half to death. It took a little shifting around but Celeste and Elias got a cabin to themselves and brought Luke to live with them. Skiffington arrested Moffett’s sister-in-law, but nothing came of it because her sister did not want her prosecuted. She went back home and the three of them went on as before.

The boy Luke was happy. When Shavis Merle, a white man with three slaves to his name, sought to hire Luke during the harvest, Elias told Henry he would go instead, for all the world knew how hard Merle could be. But Henry did not want to grant Elias two wishes in one year and he hired Luke out for $2 a week. Merle believed in feeding his workers plenty of food, but they gave it all back in the field, from sunup to sundown, and no one that year gave up more than Luke did. After Luke died in the field, Merle protested up and down about paying compensation, but William Robbins got him to pay Henry $100 for the boy. “Fair business is fair business,” Robbins had to keep telling Merle. Moffett was early to the boy’s funeral, which Merle attended, and Moffett said some words at the gravesite, but no one said more than Elias and at the last his new wife had to put her arms around him to bring an end to all the words.

4

C
uriosities
S
outh of the
B
order.
A
C
hild
D
eparts from the
W
ay.
T
he
E
ducation of
H
enry
T
ownsend.

Beginning in the mid-1870s and continuing throughout most of the 1880s, a white man from Canada, Anderson Frazier, made a good living in Boston publishing two-cent pamphlets about America and its people, especially what he called their “peculiarities.” Most of what he published was gleaned from newspapers and magazines, but he rehashed everything in his pamphlets in a most colorful way, delighting thousands of readers. He had come to America in 1872, having grown frustrated with what little he had in Canada. He was the middle of seven children and did not want to go into the trading business that his father and his grandfather had established and that his older brothers were so comfortable with. He was also tired of what he saw as a certain Canadian ruggedness that had served the country well in the days when Europeans set out to make the place safe for white people; but he had come to believe that that once-necessary ruggedness, most evident in his brothers, was becoming the defining quality of the country. And he wished to be free of it. He did not see Canada again until 1881. The country would be more or less the way he had left it, but his family would be different, for the worse, and there was a part of himself—as he sat in a kitchen full of nieces and nephews talking to one of his sisters—that felt had he not gone away, most of his family would have remained going down the fairly good path on which he last saw them.

Once he went into pamphlet publishing in Boston, he began traveling up and down the east coast of America, down to Washington, D.C., and all the way out to the middle of the country, gathering additional material for The Canadian Publishing Company. In 1879, he met in New York a young woman named Esther Sokoloff, who returned with him to Boston but who refused to marry him though she would never say why. He loved Esther more than he thought he could ever love an American, he wrote to a friend in Canada who could not read and had to get someone else to read Anderson’s letters. During their first year and a half together she would leave him from time to time without a word and go back to her people in New York, refusing to see him when he came to that city. He once had a female intermediary go to her house to ask that she meet with him, and when Esther refused, Anderson decided to visit the America below Washington, D.C., an area of the country he had not been curious about before the pain that came with Esther.

It was in the South that Anderson came upon material he would later put in a new series of pamphlets he called
Curiosities and Oddities about Our Southern Neighbors.
The Economy of Cotton. Good Food Made from Next to Nothing. The Flora and Fauna. The Need for Storytelling. This series was Anderson’s most successful, and nothing was more successful within that series than the 1883 pamphlet on free Negroes who had owned other Negroes before the War between the States. The pamphlet on slaveowning Negroes went through ten printings. Only seven of those particular pamphlets survived until the late twentieth century. Five of them were in the Library of Congress in 1994 when the remaining two pamphlets were sold as part of a collection of black memorabilia owned by a black man in Cleveland, Ohio. That collection, upon the man’s death in 1994, sold for $1.7 million to an automobile manufacturer in Germany.

Anderson Frazier began the southern series just three months before Esther returned from New York one March day and told him she would not leave him again. He converted to Judaism two months later. He kept putting off the circumcision until his rabbi, a very short man with untamable hair, told Anderson he was in danger of abandoning his faith and his covenant with God. He and the rabbi sat in the rabbi’s study. “God is all,” the rabbi told him. He had known the rabbi for many years by then, had sought him out for advice and comfort the first time Esther returned to her people. Before Anderson had found the rabbi that first time, he had heard that a rabbi in the area had recently lost his son and daughter-in-law and three grandchildren in a fire. Anderson went to the man’s house that first day seeking solace, not knowing that he was entering the home of the rabbi who had had the tragedy. Anderson thought that the deaths of five people had happened to another rabbi in another neighborhood.

So after the rabbi told him he was in danger of abandoning the covenant, Anderson was circumcised and then was married.

The pamphlet on free Negroes who had owned other Negroes was twenty-seven pages, not including the six pages of drawings and maps. There were seven pages devoted to Henry Townsend and his widow Caldonia and her second husband, Louis Cartwright, the son of William Robbins. Cartwright was the last name Louis’s mother, Philomena, had chosen for herself and her children. On one of those seven pages in the pamphlet there were two long paragraphs mentioning Fern Elston the teacher, who “herself had owned some Negroes,” Anderson wrote.