The Known World (20 page)

5

T
hat
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usiness
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p in
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rlington.
A C
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orrows a
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ife from a
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Because Manchester County was mostly a tranquil place, there were months and months when Sheriff John Skiffington had no more to do than tell a drunk to go home, and often that drunk was Barnum Kinsey, one of his patrollers. Once or twice every few months Skiffington and his wife Winifred would accept an invitation for supper from a family, and perhaps stay a night or two when it was too far to return home the same day. They loved the companionship of others, especially Winifred, and, too, Skiffington knew the value of having voters know him as a good man and a good husband, separate from being the good face of the law. If they stayed with a family of means similar to their own, the supper might include couples from the same class and perhaps one, but generally only one, from William Robbins’s class. They also stayed with people in Robbins’s sphere, but when they ate with them, Skiffington and Winifred represented their class alone. As for the class that produced the patrollers, they were a hand-to-mouth people and invitations to anywhere were very rare.

In the spring of 1844, a good many white people in Manchester County remained uneasy about news from other places about slave “restlessness” that had gone on a few years before. In the North, people called it slave uprisings, but in much of Virginia the word
uprisings
had an abolitionist undertone and was felt to be too strong for what many slaveowners preferred to characterize as “a family squabble,” instigated by unknowns not part of the family. One of those who could not shake her uneasiness was a fifty-four-year-old cousin of Winifred’s, Clara Martin. She lived in the most eastern part of Manchester, as far east as Augustus and Mildred Townsend lived in the west. Clara had a distant relative up in Arlington who had a neighbor whose slave cook had been caught, after many such meals, putting ground-up glass in the neighbor’s food. The distant relative wrote to Clara that it was “especially heinous” because the neighbor had raised the cook, Epetha, from a pickaninny, taught her all there was to know about a kitchen, “up and down, and sideways.” Clara read the letter over and over, trying to imagine how the glass could have been ground up so fine that the poor, trusting woman did not know what she was eating. Had she been served greens all those times, Clara wondered, and so was fooled into thinking that the glass was nothing more than grit because the greens hadn’t been properly cleaned? Had she even once reprimanded the cook about unwashed greens? Was the glass still in her, tearing up her insides because, unlike real food, it did not know the right way to come out?

Clara Martin had but one slave to her name, fifty-five-year-old Ralph, a thin man with hair down to his shoulders who suffered with rheumatism throughout the winter. All through those months, hobbled, he moved through a world of thick molasses, suppressing a moan with each step. But come March, his bones, as he put it, got happy again. Ralph had been in her husband’s family since his birth and had come along when she, at twenty, married “my dear sweet Mr. Martin.” Her husband had been dead fifteen years, and their only child, a son, had gone to find an eternally elusive happiness in untamed California, “on the other side of the world,” as Clara once put it in a letter to her Arlington relative. So for years Clara had lived alone, peacefully, with Ralph, who did the cooking, among other tasks, for her. Her nearest neighbor was a long walk away into another county. And then the slaves became restless in other Virginia counties, followed by that awful letter about a once faithful slave up in Arlington who didn’t want to do the usual recipes anymore.

That spring of 1844 on a Friday, Skiffington and Winifred went out to spend time with Clara. They left Minerva—then twelve and coming into her own—at home; Winifred, and even Skiffington, might think of her as a kind of daughter but everyone knew who was included in a supper invitation and who was not. There was but one prisoner in the jail, and Skiffington’s father had agreed to feed and watch over him. The prisoner, an amiable Frenchman named Jean Broussard, had murdered his Scandinavian partner, the first murder of a white person in the county in twenty-six years. Broussard liked to talk. He liked to sing even more. Skiffington had grown tired of Broussard calling him “Monsieur Sheriff.” Indicted only three days before Skiffington left for Clara’s, Broussard had been waiting for Virginia authorities to find a judge to come out his way for a trial. Broussard said he was innocent, and he said American justice would ultimately proclaim it so.

By mid-morning of that Friday, Skiffington and Winifred had reached the plantation of Robert and Alfreda Colfax, a white family with ninety-seven slaves to their names, and it was there that they took a twelve-thirty dinner. Robert had a collection of antique European pistols that he loved to show anyone he felt was capable of enjoying them without letting envy intrude. His problem was that most men envied, so he could not show the pistols the way he wanted. Robbins, a good friend to Colfax, did not envy and they often enjoyed them together, sometimes well into the night. Skiffington also did not envy. Colfax’s sons thought the pistols no more than toys. So he loved when Skiffington visited because they could, together, with such care, take down the pistols one by one from the cabinet Augustus Townsend had made and admire what some German or Italian had crafted a long time ago as if his life had depended upon it.

The Friday Skiffington and Winifred arrived about three o’clock, Clara Martin was standing in the yard, and Ralph came from around the back and took their horse and carriage. “Good mornin, Mr. Skiffington. Good mornin to you, Miss Skiffington,” he said. His long hair was tied back with a rope.

Skiffington and Winifred said good afternoon. Ralph turned and looked at them, then nodded. “Yes. Yes, good noon,” he said. Clara watched him lead the horse and carriage away and when he was gone, she gave Skiffington a knowing look. “What am I gonna do with him, John?” she said.

He smiled. “He’s fine, Clara. A little slow, but he’s fine.” Skiffington had had his patrollers look in on her from time to time but that had not been enough. “John, she skittish as a colt,” Barnum Kinsey told Skiffington after one visit. “And to tell you the truth, John, I ain’t seen nothin for her to be skittish about. I looked but I couldn’t find it.”

They ate a little after five, with Ralph preparing the meal and then retiring to his room that had been built onto the kitchen not long after Clara had married. Clara picked at the food. Winifred and Skiffington ate heartily, hoping that their good appetites would show her that there was nothing to fear. She said nothing but Winifred could see that Clara had lost weight since the last time she saw her. Winifred had had an aunt who had wasted away to skin and bones but that had been from consumption and the woman had lived in Connecticut.

“I’d like you to talk to him,” Clara said to Skiffington after supper. They were in the parlor. Ralph had appeared to take away the dishes and then disappeared again before bringing in coffee some fifteen minutes later. The rope was gone from his hair. Once, some five years before, he had come into the parlor and found Clara struggling to comb and brush her hair. “Oh, my goodness,” she kept saying. “Better I should have no hair at all than all this mess.” “Now don’t you say that, Miss Martin.” “Well, it’s just a mess, Ralph. It most certainly is.” It had been raining all day and it was summer so his bones gave him nothing to complain about. “My sister,” she said, “got the hair God shoulda given me. And she has never appreciated it, I must say. Wondrous red hair. A queen’s hair. Not one day has she thanked God for that hair and yet he lets her keep it right on.” “Yo sister got nothin on you, thas for sure, Miss Martin. Let me now, if that be fine with you,” he said, standing behind her, touching the back of her hand. He had never touched her before in any deliberate way, only in some innocent, accidental way no witness would ever think anything about. Hesitantly, she raised her hand higher and after a few seconds she opened it and he took the brush. There had been thunder and lightning earlier in the day but now there was only rain, falling on the porch, tapping the window, watering the plants in the garden that had gone so long without. “Let me, if that be fine with you,” and he gently worked through her hair. When the brush had done its work, he reached around without asking permission and took the comb, which had been resting in the very center of her lap. There were a few strands of hair in the comb and he took them out and they took their own time falling to the floor. She leaned back in the chair and closed her eyes, thinking,
Yo sister got nothin on you
. He spent an hour on it, brushing and combing and applying a little sweet oil, and before he was done, she had fallen asleep, which was unusual for her because she always said the bed was the only place where her body could sleep. She awoke hours later to find Ralph gone and her hair in plaits, soft to her fingers, callused and bony. She called his name, once and once again, and when she saw the candle, dancing with a feeble light, and became aware of a silence that seemed to have a kind of voice, she thought there was something wrong in calling him like that and so closed her mouth. She sighed and leaned back in the chair. She soon fell asleep again and stayed much of the night in the chair. The rain went on for another two days and he did her hair each of those days but never again after that. “That should do, Ralph,” she said that final time. “That will do for now.” “Yessum.”

As they drank their coffee, Clara said again to Skiffington, “I’d like you to talk to him.”

“Now what would I say to him, Clara?” Skiffington said.

“I don’t know. Somethin sheriff like. Somethin a sheriff would say to a miscreant. A possible miscreant. ‘I have my eyes on you, you possible miscreant.’ ”

Winifred laughed. She had been drinking coffee at that moment and now set the cup on the tiny table beside her. The laughter came from what Clara had said but also because the word
miscreant
reminded her of school days and spelling tests in Philadelphia. Her husband had been sheriff for about a year. He called her “Mrs. Skiffington,” and she called him “Mr. Skiffington,” except when he had displeased her or made her unhappy, and then he was “John” for days and days.

“It is all so very serious, John,” Clara said. “It really is. You have no servants to speak of, only a child you have raised. But Ralph is not a child, and the world is changing from once upon a time.”

“But you’ve known him for a very long time, haven’t you?” Skiffington said.

Winifred turned to Skiffington. “Since before God sent the flood to Noah, probably.”

Clara said, “Time has no meaning anymore, Winnie. Loyalty either. The world is turning upside down.”

“Has he said something to you to make you afraid?” Skiffington said. “Something,” and he winked at his wife, “something I could arrest him on.”

“No, no, Lord no. There is just . . . ,” and Clara held her hand out before her and fanned it a few times. “There is just the miasma. The miasma he and I have.”

Winifred thought: “M-I-A-S-M-A.”

“What is that?” Skiffington asked. “What is that word?” It certainly wasn’t one he had ever come across in the Bible.

“It’s the air, Mr. Skiffington,” Winifred said, then tapped her forefinger to her closed lips as she fought with her memory for a better meaning. “It’s the atmosphere. It’s the air.”

“Bad air,” Clara said. “Bad air.”

“I’ll go out to talk with him before I leave,” Skiffington said.

“What will you say?” Clara said. “Don’t say anything to hurt his feelings. Please don’t say anything mean, John.”

“Clara, either he is a miscreant or he isn’t. I don’t know what I’ll say. None of it will come to me until I’m standing before him. But it won’t be anything harsh because I think he’s a good servant, and I have to tell you that or I wouldn’t be honest with you. He’s served you all these years and he will go on serving you, despite all the foolishness you hear from somewhere else.”

Clara sighed. “A half a loaf is better than nothin.”

“A slice of bread is better than nothing,” Winifred said.

After the women had retired for the night, Skiffington remained in the parlor, reading the Bible, as he often did at home, after Winifred and Minerva had gone to bed. His father smoked a pipe at night before sleeping, and while the son had tried to take it up, he had not found the enjoyment his father had. It was a pity, he often thought, because the words of God sometimes put his mind in a turmoil that a pipe might calm.

He heard Ralph in the back and got up, placing the Bible open to his page on the chair. In the kitchen, Ralph was in the last stages of cleaning up before going to bed.

“Is there somethin I might get you this mornin, Mr. Skiffington?” he said as Skiffington stood in the doorway. “We got some more that pie you was so fond of. Put a nice little piece on a plate for you, send you off to sleep like a baby.”

“No, Ralph. I just wanted to come in and say good night. I wanted to make sure everything was fine with you. I know caring for Miss Clara can be a mighty chore. You have served her well and she knows that.”

“Night? Good night?”

“Yes. I just wanted to say good night.”

“Yessuh. Thank you. And good night, suh.”

“Yes, well . . . Good night.”

“And good night to you, suh. A good night.” His hair was in the rope again. “No pie? It’s fine pie if I say so myself.”

“No, thank you. But good night. And thank you for a fine meal. For the pie, too.”