The Known World (36 page)

“You won’t forget him,” she said at last.

“Ma’am?”

“You won’t forget Henry Townsend, will you?”

“I’d sooner forget my own name, Missus.”

“Good night, Moses. Tell Loretta to come in.”

He waited as long as he could and then took the image of her on the settee with him out into the woods. He had not thought of a real woman, a woman he had met in the flesh, since the early days when he would come out there and think of Bessie, the woman Jean Broussard and his Scandinavian partner had purchased along with Moses in Alexandria. Moses rose without lingering in the woods when he was done and listened for Alice.

When he got back to the lane, she was coming out of her cabin and he stepped into her path. She tried going around him but he followed her. “Leave me be or I’ll send you to hell,” he said and raised both fists to her face. “Oh, Marse, I’m just goin to feed my chickens,” she said. “What?” Moses asked. “Whas that you say?” “I’m just goin to feed my chickens. Here little chick. There little chick, lemme feed you.” He pushed her down as hard as he could. “I told you to leave me be.” Alice began crying. “I told you to leave me be.” He left her on the ground. Alice lay down all the way and spread her arms and legs and cried even harder.

Delphie came out and went to her. “Moses, whas this goin on? All right, child. I’m here. Moses, whas the matter with her? You know this ain’t right.”

“I told her to leave me be. You tell her leave me be or I’ll kill her next time. I’ll kill her down dead.” He went home.

Delphie helped Alice to her feet. “You stay in tonight, all right?” Alice stopped crying once she was in the cabin, but an hour later she was back outside, sniffing at doors before setting off.

The next day was Sunday and he did not go out, but on Monday night he waited near the house and watched Alice emerge from the area of the cabins and walk with purpose to the road. The night was very warm and insects pestered him. He did not know how far he would follow but less than half a mile from the plantation he heard the horses galloping toward them. He stepped down into a ravine and could see her and the horses and their men many yards away. Alice lifted her frock and danced and tried to climb onto the horse with one man. The man pushed her away just as the horse reared up. The horses and the men charged off and Moses lay in the ravine until they were gone, closing his eyes and mouth and covering his nose from the dust.

When he raised up, Alice was walking away. Then she stopped and looked around and cocked her head just so. She began chanting again, softly at first, tentative. She stopped chanting several times to listen and to take note of all around her. Each time she took up the chant again, it was with less of the confidence of any previous nights. He waited for more than an hour for her to return, and when she didn’t, he went home. And even after an hour waiting outside his door, she did not appear. He went inside and felt some satisfaction as he remembered how she had looked about and listened for him. Maybe you could just be crazy by pretending to be crazy for a long, long time. He lay down, and before he went to sleep he went through his memory, trying to remember if there had been any slave who had ever escaped from the Townsend plantation. There never had been.

He did not bring up Alice to Caldonia again. The patrollers would take care of her one way or another, he thought. On Wednesday evening the heat of the past few days subsided and Caldonia had Loretta bring him cake along with the coffee. She asked that he tell her again about Henry building the house, tell her about his constructing the parlor and the bedroom alone. “Tell me what he did,” she said, leaning back and closing her eyes.

”Now I’m surprised this house didn’t take years to put up, the way Marse Henry went at it,” Moses said. “Lookin at every nail, as I member. Weighin every board, every board of this very room. Missus, this house will be standin the day Jesus returns to take us all home, thas all the work Marse Henry put into it, all the time and care. I can see him just like it was yesterday.”

“Moses, you won’t forget him, will you?” Before he could answer, she leaned over and put her face in her hands, crying. He stood up. Would Loretta hear and think he had harmed their mistress? He looked at the door and it did not open. He listened, waiting for some great stirring in the house, the converging of dozens on a slave who had taken one step too many, and all he could hear was the house settling in one corner or another, and the sound of a woman crying and filling up the rest of the silence. He went slowly to her and knelt down. “I won’t forget Marse Henry, Missus. I told you I wouldn’t and I won’t, not till I ain’t here anymore.” She continued crying, and then, as the house settled in other corners, he took her hand and opened the fist one finger at a time, ending with the thumb which had been encased in the other four fingers. He kissed the open hand and his world did not end. She pressed her hand to his face and when he looked up at her, she leaned down and kissed him, and still the world did not end.

They stood and held on to each other, and then, as if sharing the same thought, they separated and she put her hand to his chest, counting the beats of his heart. She was still crying. He touched the side of her face and told himself to leave, that that was enough for the evening. She had reached 109 in the beating of his heart when he went to the door and told Loretta that Missus wanted her and walked down the hall to the kitchen, to the back door.

The next night they stayed in their places. He had thought all that day she would not want him to return, but when he went to the back door and Loretta escorted him to the parlor and he saw her sitting just as she had the evening before, he lost the need to worry. That evening he weaved the most imaginative story yet about how Henry Townsend had tamed the land and made the place he would bring his bride to.

“I knowed the minute I laid eyes on you, Missus, that you was the one to make Marse Henry happy. He had this, that and the other but what he really needed was a somebody to set it all right, to shine on it and prettify it.” He went on to create the history of his master, starting with the boy who had enough in his head for two boys. He was present at Henry’s birth, he was there the day he was freed, he gave testimony of how all the best white people stretched out their feet and bid Henry to make them shoes and boots that they could walk to heaven in.

The next evening she cried again and he sat on the settee and held her. Then she allowed him to put her on his lap, with him filling every moment with words about Henry. The lovemaking would not happen for another week, with both of them still mostly clothed and the house very quiet, having done all the settling it would do for that day.

9

S
tates of
D
ecay.
A M
odest
P
roposal.
W
hy
G
eorgians
A
re
S
marter.

Darcy and Stennis and the people—including Augustus Townsend—they had stolen reached South Carolina in less than two weeks. Stennis had dumped the dead child, Abundance, on the side of the road long before they hit North Carolina, the child who had been coughing since Manchester. “We should bury that poor baby,” the chained Augustus said as Stennis got back in the wagon after dropping the girl’s body in the weeds. Augustus had held the dead child for miles, not wanting to believe she was dead. “Don’t leave that poor baby out there like that.” Darcy and Stennis had kidnapped Abundance Crawford, a free girl suffering from a cold, as she walked down a road outside of Fredericksburg in her new shoes. She would have turned nine years old in two more weeks.

”Should we bury her, Stennis?” Darcy said.

“Ain’t got no shovel, Marse,” Stennis said.

“I’ll do it,” Augustus said. “I’ll dig her a grave with my hands. Just gimme some time.”

The people in the back of the wagon with Augustus said they would help him dig a grave with their hands. Those people were two men and one woman. All of them, except for Augustus, would be sold before the wagon reached Georgia. The two men were Willis, a thirty-seven-year-old brick maker who had one leg shorter than the other, and Selby, a twenty-two-year-old baker who five weeks ago had married a woman whose hair went down two feet beyond her neck. Those two men had been free people, like Augustus. The woman was Sara Marshall, a twenty-nine-year-old seamstress whose master and mistress had given her their last name ten years before. “Don’t bring shame to our name, Sara,” they had said in a kind of ceremony in their kitchen. “Always bring honor to our name. The Marshall name stands for something in this land.”

“Don’t know bout no buryin, Marse,” Stennis said of the child Abundance, “gettin them chains off and on. Watchin em so they don’t run away. Lotta trouble for somethin that won’t cause no more trouble in this world.”

“Well,” Darcy said, “if you don’t know, how am I to know? Push on, Stennis. Push on.”

In North Carolina, as they approached Roxboro, Augustus asked if Darcy might not send a telegram to Mildred, “my worryin wife,” and let her know that he was alive. Darcy asked Augustus if he knew that sending a telegram would mean a loss for his pocket and told him that a careful man of business would try to cut down on losses as much as possible. A telegram was a loss, he said, adding that it was better that “poor Mildred” think he had just ascended to heaven due to his good nature. In Roxboro, Willis the brick maker shouted to a passing white man that he was free and had been kidnapped. Darcy grinned at the white man and said, “We done had this problem with him since Virginia.” The man nodded.

It was in South Carolina, at Kingstree, at the Black River, that Augustus decided that he would do as little as he could to help his kidnappers, but beyond that he was helpless. By then, way before Kingstree, Selby the baker was gone for $310 and Sara Marshall was gone for $277 and an early-nineteenth-century pistol that Darcy was to learn only worked when it wanted to. Sara’s buyer thought it amusing that she had a last name. “Shows her good breedin,” Stennis said to the buyer. And there at Kingstree, Willis began to lean forward all the time, his chest over his thighs and his face in his hands. “We gon get outa this,” Augustus kept telling him.

Darcy went up to a man in Kingstree as the man came out of his house. The house was on the only street in the place. “Might you be interested in some good nigger flesh,” Darcy said and took the man back down to the end of the road and around to an alley where the wagon of people was. Darcy had the man by the elbow the whole time and the man had not protested. Stennis brought Augustus down from the wagon. Willis did not raise his face from his hands.

The man had the look of someone who did not have anything better to do at that moment. He said to Augustus, “Open your mouth.” He himself did not own any slaves but had been to enough auctions to know that having a slave open his mouth was one of the first things a potential buyer did.

Augustus mumbled and put his open hand to the back of his ear. He mumbled some more.

“Why, hell, this nigger’s deaf and dumb.”

“The devil you say?” Darcy said.

“The devil he say, Marse?” Stennis said.

“I tell you he can’t hear and he can’t talk. Can you?” the man said to Augustus, who looked at him expressionless, his hand still to the back of his ear. “What kinda flesh you tryin to peddle, mister?”

“No no. He hear, he talk,” Darcy said. “He was talkin and hearin in Virginia. He was talkin and hearin in North Carolina. He can hear and he can talk, I’m tellin you.” Then, to Augustus, “Open your mouth and tell this white man howdy, tell him that it’s a good goddamn afternoon.”

Augustus mumbled and put the other hand to the back of his other ear. The white man looked from Augustus to Darcy and then to Stennis. “Well, it must not be a good goddamn afternoon cause he ain’t tellin me so.”

“He ain’t deaf and dumb. You got my word on that,” Darcy said. “Can’t he talk, Stennis?”

“Yes, Master. He can talk. He can talk clear as a bird singin in the tree, clear as—”

“All right, Stennis, thas anough of that. I wouldn’t lie to you, mister.”

“I don’t want a deaf-and-dumb nigger. I want a whole nigger, top to bottom.”

The man turned to go and Darcy pulled at his sleeve. The man said, “Unhand me, sir, or I will hand you to God.” Stennis grumbled loudly. Darcy stepped back and the man went away. Darcy said to Stennis, “You know better than to bark at a white man, even one thas an unwillin customer.”

He turned on Augustus and poked him in the chest with two of his fingers. “What is the gallumpin about you, nigger? You ain’t no more deaf and dumb than Stennis is. What is the gallumpin?” Augustus said nothing. “You done lost your hearin here in South Carolina, that it? Lost your tongue, too, huh? What did you lose in North Carolina? Your pecker? And Virginia, your brain, what little there is of it? And what it gonna be in Georgia? Your arms? And then your legs in Alabama and Mississippi, if we git that far? Just wastin away with every state we come to. That it?” Darcy looked at Stennis. “I bet if we got him to Texas, he’d be gone altogether, Stennis. Just a puff of nothin by the time we got to Texas. And wouldn’t that be a shame? That would be a damn shame. Cause they don’t pay a whole helluva lot for a ghost nigger in Texas.”

“What we gon do?” Stennis said.

“We gon carry on, Stennis. We gon carry on till all the birds fall from the trees.” He spat, then picked up the foot of one of the dead beavers hanging from his chest and inhaled it deeply. “Tennessee is a good place to be this time of the year, Stennis. The air will carry you along, wherever you wanna go.” He dropped the beaver’s foot and poked Augustus again. “And we gon sell this here nigger if I have to throw in my father and grandfather and his father with the bargain. Les go.” Stennis yanked on Augustus’s chain, picked him up and tossed him into the wagon. Darcy picked up another beaver foot and most of the leg and inhaled deeply again. “The air of Tennessee will cure all that ails you, Stennis.”