The Known World (24 page)

6

A
F
rozen
C
ow and a
F
rozen
D
og.
A C
abin in the
S
ky.
T
he
T
aste of
F
reedom.

On Sunday, the second day Henry Townsend had been in the ground, Maude Newman, his mother-in-law, came into her daughter’s bedroom at the house Henry and Moses had built and sat on the side of Caldonia’s bed, took her daughter’s hand in one of hers, sighing all the while. “My poor widow child,” Maude sighed. Only moments before, Loretta, Caldonia’s maid, had asked her mistress if she wanted her to bring up something for Caldonia to eat or drink. Caldonia told Loretta that her mind was not on food or drink; it was all she could do, she said to the woman who had been with her most of her married life, to open her eyes and to breathe. Loretta said, “Yes, ma’am,” knowing how true that must have been, and stepped back to watch Caldonia take her time to raise herself up in bed. Loretta had known of one woman’s slave who was required to do virtually everything for her mistress, even to wipe the mistress’s hind parts after every bowel movement. Caldonia had always been strong, choosing to do so much on her own, and Loretta had, over time, become more of a companion. “For all thas in her, she coulda been a slave,” Loretta had funned once to Celeste, Elias’s wife, knowing Celeste could keep secrets.

Once Caldonia was up in the bed and leaning back on the pillows, she stared at Loretta as if to ask what next did the world expect of her. Caldonia looked over at the open chiffarobe, whose door was broken and so would never close properly, looked at the black dress hanging there. It seemed to have its own life, so much life that it could have come down and walked over and placed itself over her body. Fastened itself. Her mother had worn the dress for only a month after Caldonia’s father had died. “I cannot do any more time with this dress,” Maude had said when she put it away. “Wearing black makes my skin itch. Mr. Newman was a man after God’s own heart but why should I suffer now that he is sitting with our Lord?” And Maude’s mourning had come to an end.

“My poor widow child,” Maude said again.

“Mama, please. Please don’t give me this today. Tomorrow. The day after tomorrow, but not today.”

“The legacy is your future, Caldonia, and that can’t wait. I wish it could, but no. All else can, but not the legacy.” For Maude, the legacy meant slaves and land, the foundation of wealth. Her fear was that Caldonia, in her grief, would consider selling the slaves, along with the land, as if to accomplish some wish Henry, tied to the want and need of a material world, had been too afraid to try to fulfill in life. “I don’t want you to be like your father, mired in so much grief he didn’t know right from wrong.”

“I learned from Henry not to let something like grief turn me from right to wrong, Mama.” With those words she could see him, in her mother’s garden saturated with the smell of honeysuckle, still wearing clothes too heavy for the season, talking about how he would be a master different from any other, the kind of shepherd master God had intended. He had been vague, talking of good food for his slaves, no whippings, short and happy days in the fields. A master looking down on them all like God on his throne looked down on him. He was a young shoemaker, a bootmaker, who more than a year before had completed the generous deal for Moses with William Robbins. But the words did not matter to Caldonia; she was young, unhappy with the courtship prospects all about her, and so even had he talked all afternoon of planting and harvesting tobacco, it would have been a serenade. This was more than a year after Augustus had broken his shoulder with the walking stick of an acorn and squirrels.

Caldonia considered her mother. Henry had been a good master, his widow decided, as good as they come. Yes, he sometimes had to ration the food he gave them. But that was not his fault—had God sent down more food, Henry would certainly have given it to them. Henry was only the middleman in that particular transaction. Yes, he had to have some slaves beaten, but those were the ones who would not do what was right and proper. Spare the rod . . . , the Bible warned. Her husband had done the best he could, and on Judgment Day his slaves would stand before God and testify to that fact.

“Henry taught me well,” Caldonia said to her mother.

Caldonia lay back down in the bed and closed her eyes. What would his slaves have said that very day about the kind of master Henry had been? Would they be as generous as they would be on Judgment Day when it was all over and they could afford to be generous? She opened her eyes and Maude was smiling at her. In Fern Elston’s class one day when Caldonia was ten, Calvin, her brother, had punched another child on the arm and the boy cried. “I didn’t hit him all that hard, Mrs. Elston. I hit him with a soft lick, a baby lick. I didn’t hurt him.” Fern had come up to Calvin and slapped him and shook him by the shoulders until Calvin cried. “Why are you crying, Calvin? I just gave you a baby lick.” When both boys had stopped crying, Fern said gently to Calvin, “The hitter can never be the judge. Only the receiver of the blow can tell you how hard it was, whether it would kill a man or make a baby just yawn.”

“I have no doubt that Henry taught you all you need to know,” Maude said and squeezed Caldonia’s hand. “But like your father, you have too much melancholy in your blood for your own good.” The death of his youngest child some thirteen years before had led Tilmon Newman to believe God wanted him to free his slaves, which numbered twelve at the time of the child’s death. God, Tilmon told Maude, had failed to get his meaning across with the deaths of Tilmon’s parents and his brothers—all of them in captivity—so he had started in on Tilmon’s children to bring the lesson closer to home. “Ain’t none a yall safe from God,” Tilmon said, days after he buried his child, who had been four years old. “Not even you, Maude. He will come through every mountain to get at you.”

Loretta now stepped back until her back was touching a bedroom wall. Then she edged herself so that she was all but enveloped by the shadow in the corner. She had to be near if Caldonia wanted her, but it would not do to have Maude think she was taking in every single word of the whatfors and whynots of their lives and making some strange sense of what was overheard. Some white mistresses did not care what their servants heard; they felt the servants had no more ability to hear and judge than the cups and saucers. And some, like Caldonia, saw some servants as confidants. But others, like Maude, felt God had pitted the world against them and no one could be more against them than property that could hear and speak and think. They would never make the mistake of believing a slave was no more than a cup or saucer. It seemed to Loretta that Maude rose each and every morning with the heat under her blood and a sword in both hands, and even her own children had to make known their loyalty to her all over again. Mistresses like that could be far more brutal on a slave, whether she owned the slave or not, and would do everything to separate a nosy slave from what little life she was used to. Years of serving with Caldonia might not mean anything to Maude. In a few moments, as the conversation continued, Loretta made her way unnoticed out into the hall.

“Mama, give me a little peace. My husband is not even cold. Just a little peace before you close me in with this. Moses is taking care of so much. And Calvin is here. I can mourn for just a bit more. Calvin is here.”

“Calvin, Calvin,” Maude said. “His blood has even more melancholy than yours. Leave it to him and your legacy will be out the door before morning.” Caldonia slid down even more in the bed, withdrawing her hand from her mother’s. “Don’t be some little girl, Caldonia.”

“I’m not being a little girl, Mama. I’m just being a poor widow child.”

“I won’t stand for any foolishness from you, Caldonia.” Loretta stood where Caldonia and Maude could not see her but where she could see anyone coming up the stairs. “I won’t go through this again.” Tilmon Newman, like Augustus Townsend, had worked to purchase his own freedom. His plan had been to buy the freedom of all in his family, some four people, including his parents. But in the early days of his freedom, the young man had met Maude and married and they had started to build a life for themselves, a little land here, one or two slaves there. A child. Maude kept reminding him what a kind man his parents’ master was and so his family’s bondage was not the burden it was for many other slaves. “You were there,” she said. “You know what kind of man Horace Green was. Your parents and your brothers will wait until we are good and set on our feet, until we have enough of everything so they can come into freedom and not want for anything.” But in less than three years they all perished before he could buy them away: his mother drowned, his father was killed in a fight with another slave, his oldest brother died of food poisoning from a pig stolen from a neighboring farm, and his youngest brother, sent by his master to find a lost cow in a snowstorm, was discovered four days later, boy and cow huddled and frozen together. The boy and the beast had to be thawed out before they could be buried separately.

Caldonia sat up in bed again. “Mother, Henry worked too hard to give me all of this. I would not squander it away, not in any way you could imagine. I know my duty to what he left me. However much I am Papa’s daughter, I am just as much your daughter.”

“You must remember that it is so easy to go down into destitution.” Her own family had been free for generations but they had never had enough to buy even one slave. “I would not want that for you. A destitution brought on by grief.” They looked at each other. “You should eat something, Caldonia.”

“My heart is not in food, Mama.”

“Put your heart into it, Caldonia. A little milk. A little bread. Try and put your heart into a little something.” Tilmon Newman had planned to find a way to get all his slaves to freedom, had been in touch with a white man from South Carolina who thought they could load them all up and drive up to freedom. “We must go before God with no more than what babies come into the world with,” Tilmon told Maude. But she had poisoned Tilmon before anything like that could happen. Arsenic pie. Arsenic coffee. Arsenic meat. The servants had thought she had gone mad wanting to do all the cooking for her husband. “He has done so much for me, so why shouldn’t I tend to my husband from time to time?” she said to them. The arsenic devoured Tilmon, ate all the meat and muscle off his bones. “For the life of me,” the white doctor said, “I can’t find what’s ailing him.” Years later, Maude still had some arsenic left, kept it in a bottle in a corner beside her chest of drawers. The servants who cleaned that room thought it some remedy for Maude’s frequent headaches. The house servants had never gone into the bottle when they had headaches for they all believed that what worked for Maude would never in a month of Sundays work for a slave.

“Some preserves on a piece of bread, then,” Caldonia said.

Loretta was standing at the bed. “Some milk?” she said.

“Plain water. Cold, plain water, Loretta. Please.”

Maude stood up. “And once she’s eaten, Loretta, help her get dressed.”

“Yessum.”

“I always dress myself, Mama.”

“You needn’t go on with the old ways, Caldonia.”

“They will do for now.”

Loretta and Maude left together. Downstairs, Loretta went to the kitchen and Maude went out onto the verandah where she knew she would find Calvin.

“I hope you haven’t been at her so early in the morning, Mama,” Calvin said. He was leaning against a post and his arms were crossed. He had brought the white man from South Carolina to his father. “With all that legacy rigmarole. She shouldn’t have to hear that so soon after burying Henry.”

“Calvin, with each day of your life, you pull me deeper into misery,” Maude said and stood at the other post. She realized after Tilmon was dead that her husband had known the South Carolina white man, the abolitionist, only because of her son. Within months of where they were that day, Maude would become terribly ill and would stay that way for years. Calvin would stay by her side, a kind of nurse to a mother who really didn’t like him anymore. “For the life of me,” the white doctor said to Calvin in the third year of his mother’s illness, “I can’t find what’s ailing her.”

“I’m sorry for that, Mama,” Calvin now said to Maude. “For all the misery.” It was getting harder and harder for him to think of a reason to remain in Virginia. He had, as he dug Henry’s grave, thought that he would speak to Caldonia about freeing her slaves but he knew now that her mind was not going that way. And, too, his mother was formidable.

Maude came to him. “It’s not your fault, Calvin. We are what God puts in us.” She touched his arm and he looked at her briefly. “I do not want you to talk to Caldonia about selling her legacy. Telling her that she can be happy somewhere over yonder without all of it.” He put a hand over hers, the one that was on his arm. “Don’t try to put your dreams in her head.”

“That was far from my mind, Mama.”

Maude went back inside, then she returned in moments. “I want you to know that I have a legacy for you, whether you want it or not.”

“I really don’t.” He waited for her to remind him that he lived in her house, which was run by slaves. Ate the food they prepared. Slept in a bed they made. Wore clothes they cleaned.

“Still. I have it, Calvin. With Caldonia on her own, I have no one but you to give it to. Everyone else is dead. I will leave it all to you. They may not allow me to take the legacy into heaven, so I will just leave it to you.” She went back into the house.

Later that morning, the slaves of the field went back to their labors. Only those under five years were exempt, cared for in Caldonia’s kitchen by seven-year-old Delores. Some weeks, Tessie, Celeste and Elias’s six-year-old, cared for the small children. Though it was Sunday, a day Henry always gave them to rest up from the other six, Moses the overseer decided on his own to put them back to work. Valtims Moffett came very early to preach to them and was surprised to see them in the field. He simply shouted out a few words to them as they labored and left without seeking payment. When Calvin—less than two hours after the slaves, including Celeste, four months pregnant, went to the fields—learned what Moses had done, he spoke with Caldonia and she said she wanted no work that day. Calvin went out and told everyone to come out of the fields and go back to their cabins. “Caldonia doesn’t want you doing anything more on your own,” Calvin told Moses. Moses disturbed him in a way he had never been able to understand and it pleased him to pull Moses down a peg. “Don’t do anything without coming to her first. Or me.” “Yessir, Mr. Calvin,” Moses said. “I understand that now.”