The Known World (8 page)

3

A
D
eath in the
F
amily.
W
here
G
od
S
tands.
T
en
T
housand
C
ombs.

Loretta, Caldonia Townsend’s maid, came down from the house about sunrise the next morning and opened Moses’s cabin door after one knock and told him their master Henry was dead. He scratched at his whiskers. “How long?” he said. “Last night,” she answered. Priscilla, Moses’s wife, came up behind him, her hand to her mouth. “Oh, Lord,” she said. “Massa dead.” She turned to her son who was sitting before the hearth, eating cornbread and gravy. “There been death in the family,” she said to the boy. He considered his mother for a second or so then went back to eating. Something told the boy that his mother, with the dead master on her mind, might not eat her portion, so he took her food as well.

”Loretta, whas gonna happen to all us now?” Moses said, thinking that her being up in the house gave her more to know. Priscilla came up closer behind her husband and Loretta could see the third of her body that wasn’t obscured by the man.

“I don’t know, Moses. We just have to wait and see.” The three of them were thinking of the six slaves of the white family just down the road apiece, the six slaves who were so close by they were like family to the slaves at Henry’s place. Those six were good workers and had made their owner quite wealthy in a small Manchester County kind of way. Loretta said, “We just gon have to wait and see which way the wind gon blow.” The white man down the road had died four months ago, and at first the widow, his third wife and mother to his two children from his second marriage, told the slaves they would not be sold off. But before the white man could even get settled in his grave, his widow had sold them to finance a new life in Europe, which she knew about from two fanciful picture books she had treasured and hidden for years in the chimney from her husband. One of the books showed what an artist claimed were the Paris fashions of 1825. There were nearly thirty years separating the year of the fashion picture book and the year the widow finally got to France, so all the material of her dreams, the fashions of 1825, was no doubt out of style by the time she arrived. White people said she took the dead white man’s two children with her to the new life in Paris, but colored people, slave and free, said that didn’t happen, that the woman had sold the children once she was safely out of Virginia. Negroes said that somewhere in the world, known or unknown, someone might not think twice about buying two happy white children with plump cheeks and able to write and sing like angels and do basic ciphering.

Priscilla now stepped even closer to her husband, and most of the third of her that Loretta could see disappeared. Priscilla said, “I would hate to go from Massa Henry’s place. I would hate all that not knowin again where in the world I was.” The six slaves down the road—along with the animals and the land and its equipment—had brought the widow just a tad over $11,316, which supplemented the $1,567.39 her husband had in the bank and buried in the backyard. Only the land remained where it had always been after the widow sold everything; all else, including the slaves, was scattered to the farthest winds. No two slaves ended up together. Five of them were related by blood. One, Judy, was married to a young man owned by Henry Townsend. Another, Melanie, not seven months old, was just getting used to solid food, had begun to crawl and so had to be watched every waking second. Nicknamed “Miss Frisky” by her maternal uncle, the baby Melanie—her parents bragged to any soul who would listen—had the spirit of three babies and would crawl and crawl all over the world until someone picked her up to stop her or until her hands and knees wore out.

Moses scratched his whiskers again, and things were so quiet beyond the crackle of the fire in his hearth that someone passing in the lane could have heard his fingers going over his whiskers. Right then, Elias came out of his cabin next door, carrying an empty water bucket. He nodded “Morning” to the people in Moses’s doorway, but no words were spoken by anyone. Loretta nodded “Morning” to Elias; she depended on Moses to tell him about the death of Henry.

“Moses,” Loretta said after Elias had passed, “just about everything can wait till Henry is safe in his grave, till we put the master down. You hear what I’m sayin?”

“I hear you,” Moses said. “I hear you good.”

Loretta said, “Is there any trouble down here from anyone? Is there any trouble from somebody that might spoil that man’s trip to the grave?”

“You best tell her bout Stamford,” Priscilla said. Stamford was forty years old, desperate for any young woman he could get a hold of. A man had told Stamford when he was no more than twelve that the way for a man to survive slavery was to always have a young woman, “young stuff” was how the man put it. Without “young stuff,” a man was destined to die a horrible death in slavery. “Don’t you be like that, Stamford,” the man had said more than once. “Keep your young stuff close by.”

“Whas the problem with Stamford?” Loretta said, her eyes on the top of Priscilla’s head, which was now just about all she could see of her. “Is it Gloria again?” Gloria was Stamford’s latest young stuff.

Moses said, “That might be finished. I think she kicked him out day fore yestiddy. Stamford probably out there with nobody and he ain’t a happy man when that happens.”

“Please check him, Moses,” Loretta said. “Don’t let him start up somethin. We can deal with Stamford after the funeral. I don’t want a lot of Who-Shot-John when we start puttin Henry in the ground.”

“I’ll check him,” Moses said, “or I’ll break him in two tryin.”

“No breakin, Moses.” Loretta looked down the lane to where a little girl was standing with her hands on her hips, staring at her. Loretta knew her name, had helped the girl into the world. Say good mornin to me, honey chile. Say good mornin to Loretta. “No breakin, just checkin. And I hope you ain’t wrong about what trouble Stamford is, the way you was wrong bout Elias.”

“Elias still trouble to my way a thinkin,” Moses said.

Loretta looked from the girl and said to Moses, “Mistress Caldonia and Miss Fern want you get evbody to come out front maybe in another hour, after breakfast,” and she looked to find that the little girl was gone. Where the girl had stood was where the sun would first come over the horizon. “Go tell em Henry dead.” He nodded. He was barefoot. They both knew where he was on the pole of who was and was not important on the Townsend plantation, so he did not tarry when she told him to do something. Once, not long after Henry had purchased her for his bride, Loretta had spent weeks thinking Moses might make a good man for her, a tolerable match, but one morning she had awakened to hear him out somewhere screaming at someone or something. A scream so loud all the morning birds quieted down. He went on screaming until Henry came out and told him to hush. That morning he screamed was so cold she hurt her hand cracking the water in the face basin. And as she put on her clothes, wishing for warmth, she knew that he would not do. Loretta turned from Moses and Priscilla now and stepped away from their door.

Heading back to the house, she met Elias, carrying a bucket of water from the well.

“Tell Celeste that Henry be dead,” she said.

“You stick a needle in him to make sure?” Elias said. “You poke him and poke him to make sure?”

At first, before remembering everything, she did not understand what he could mean by that and her mouth opened in a small O of surprise. Once upon a time he would have been a better man for her. Loretta looked down at the water, at the way it came right up to the lip of the bucket. There was none spilled behind him, which said something about the way he moved through the world, even with his head unbalanced with part of one ear gone. “He dead, thas all,” Loretta said. “I know dead when I see it, Elias. It don’t put on a face to make him look like nothin else but dead. Master dead.” It was said by many a slave that a servant’s feeling about a master could be discerned on any given day by whether the slave called him “Master,” “Marse,” or “Massa.” “Marse” could sound like a curse if the right woman said it in just the right way. Alice, for one, said “Massa,” but it came up out of her like a call from a tomb. “Master dead,” Loretta said again, and it struck Elias that he had never heard her say “Master” before. He felt compelled to repeat her words, as if to make it so once and for all. “Master dead.” She went around him and disappeared into the fog, which the sun was fast burning off. Back in the house, she stood at the kitchen window and watched the world come up out of the fog. There was no need to tell Zeddie, the cook, to fix breakfast or to tell Zeddie’s man Bennett to fix the fire. For the moment, death was giving all the orders. All was quiet. Loretta was thirty-two years old. When the day came when all the slaves were slaves no more and decided that they should choose a last name for themselves, she would not pick Townsend or Blueberry or Freeman or Godspeed or Badmemory, as many would. She would choose nothing, and she stayed with nothing even when she decided to marry.

Moses made to go down the lane of cabins, eight on one side of the lane and eight on the other side, laid out just the way Henry Townsend had seen them in a dream when he was twenty-one years old and without a slave to his name. Moses thought at first he might send his son or another child to tell all to gather in the yard of the house, but as he stepped out of his cabin and saw the sun-filled fog fraying away to nothing, he realized that this was one of the last things he would ever do for his master. Not knowing that Loretta had already told him, he went to Elias’s cabin first, the one next to his own, and Celeste, Elias’s wife, came to the door. Whether she sensed something or was about to take in some morning air, Celeste opened the door before he could knock. “Master dead,” Moses said. “So it is,” she said and stuck her head out the door just so and looked up toward the house, as if there might be a sign on the verandah announcing the news. “We gotta get up to the house,” Moses said. “Elias,” Celeste said to her husband, turning around to face him. “That Henry gone.” She could tell in his eyes that he knew already and had just not bothered to tell her. The smallest smudge of dirt on one of his children’s cheeks was important, but the death of his master was no more than the death of a fly in a foreign place he had never even heard of. Celeste had no love for Henry either, but death had taken all his power and now she could afford a little bit of charity. “That Henry be dead. Let God be kind,” she said and limped to Elias, to her three children playing on a pallet. The limp was a horrible one, and it pained most humans to see because they thought it must pain her to move. They shot animals for far less, Moses once thought after Henry brought her home. But she was a good worker, limp or no limp.

Moses went back and forth across the lane and told all. All of the cabins, save one, were occupied. A man, Peter, had died in that one and his widow, May, had abandoned it, to give Peter’s spirit time and space to prepare to go home. Before Moses had reached the last cabin on his side of the lane, the one Alice, whom he called the Night Walker, shared with Delphie and her daughter Cassandra, the slaves were filling the lane. A few women had cried, remembering the way Henry smiled or how he would join them in singing or thinking that the death of anyone, good or bad, master or not, cut down one more tree in the life forest that shielded them from their own death; but most said or did nothing. Their world had changed but they could not yet understand how. A black man had owned them, a strange thing for many in that world, and now that he was dead, maybe a white man would buy them, which was not as strange. No matter what, though, the sun would come up on them tomorrow, followed by the moon, and dogs would chase their own tails and the sky would remain just out of reach. “I didn’t sleep well,” one man across the lane from Elias said to his next-door neighbor. “Well, I know I sure did,” the neighbor said. “I slept like they was payin me to, slept anough for three white women without a care in the world.” “Well,” the first man said, “sounds like you gotta hold a some of my sleep. Better give it back. Better give it back fore you wear out my sleep usin it. Give it back.” “Oh, I will,” the neighbor said, laughing, inspecting loose threads on his overalls. “I sure will. Soon as I’m finished. Meantime, I’m gonna use it again tonight. Come for it in the mornin.” They both laughed.

It was often the case that Alice, the Night Walker, would be standing just inside her door when Moses opened it each morning, dressed and ready to work, as if she had been standing at the door waiting for him all night. She was waiting now and she was smiling, the same smile she had for everything—from the death of a neighbor’s baby to the four oranges Henry and Caldonia gave each slave on Christmas morning. “Baby dead baby dead baby dead,” she would chant. “Christmas oranges Christmas oranges Christmas oranges in the mornin.”

“I don’t want no foolishness from you, woman,” Moses said now. He turned and saw Stamford, the seeker of young stuff, in the middle of the crowd, eyeing Gloria, who didn’t want to be his young stuff anymore. “Master dead,” Moses said to Alice. “No foolishness this mornin, woman.” Alice went on smiling. “Master dead master dead master be dead.” “Hush, girl,” Moses said. “Respect the dead the way they need to be respected.” The story went that mule that kicked Alice in the head when she was years younger had been a one-eyed mule, but no more ornery for being one-eyed than any other mule. The story continued that when she regained her senses, moments after the kick, she slapped the mule and called it a dirty name. This was before Henry bought her for $228 and two bushels of apples from the estate of a white man who had no heirs and who was afraid of mules. It was the dirty name that made everyone know she had gone down the crazy road, because before the kick Alice had been known as a sweet girl of sweet words.