The Known World (3 page)

Augustus Townsend, Henry’s father, finally bought himself out of slavery when he was twenty-two. He was a carpenter, a woodcarver whose work people said could bring sinners to tears. His master, William Robbins, a white man with 113 slaves to his name, had long permitted Augustus to hire himself out, and Robbins kept part of what he earned. The rest Augustus used to pay for himself. Once free, he continued to hire himself out. He could make a four-poster bed of oak in three weeks, chairs he could do in two days, chiffoniers in seventeen days, give or take the time it took to get the mirrors. He built a shack—and later a proper house—on land he rented and then bought from a poor white man who needed money more than he needed land. The land was at the western end of Manchester County, a fairly large slip of land where the county, as if tired of pushing west, dipped abruptly to the south, toward Amherst County. Moses, “world stupid” as Elias was to call him, would get lost there in about two months, thinking that he was headed north. Augustus Townsend liked it because it was at the farthest end of the county and the nearest white man with slaves was a half a mile away.

Augustus made the last payment for his wife, Mildred, when she was twenty-six and he was twenty-five, some three years after he bought his own freedom. An 1806 act of the Virginia House of Delegates required that former slaves leave the Commonwealth within twelve months of getting their freedom; freed Negroes might give slaves too many “unnatural notions,” a delegate from Northampton County had noted before the act was passed, and, added another delegate from Gloucester, freed Negroes lacked “the natural controls” put on a slave. The delegates decreed that any freed person who had not left Virginia after one year could be brought back into slavery. That happened to thirteen people the year of Augustus’s petition—five men, seven women, and one child, a girl named Lucinda, whose parents died before the family could get out of Virginia. Based primarily on his skills, Augustus had managed to get William Robbins and a number of other white citizens to petition the state assembly to permit him to stay. “Our County—Indeed, our beloved Commonwealth—would be all the poorer without the talents of Augustus Townsend,” the petition read in part. His and two other petitions for former slaves were the only ones out of twenty-three granted that year; a Norfolk City woman who made elaborate cakes and pies for parties and a Richmond barber, both with more white customers than black, were also permitted to stay in Virginia after freedom. Augustus did not seek a petition for Mildred his wife when he bought her freedom because the law allowed freed slaves to stay on in the state in cases where they lived as someone’s property, and relatives and friends often took advantage of the law to keep loved ones close by. Augustus would also not seek a petition for Henry, his son, and over time, because of how well William Robbins, their former owner, treated Henry, people in Manchester County just failed to remember that Henry, in fact, was listed forever in the records of Manchester as his father’s property.

Henry was nine when his mother Mildred came to freedom. That day she left, a mild day two weeks after harvest, she walked holding her son’s hand down to the road where Augustus and his wagon and two mules were waiting. Rita, Mildred’s cabin mate, was holding the boy’s other hand.

At the wagon, Mildred sank to her knees and held on to Henry, who, at last realizing that he was to be separated from her, began crying. Augustus knelt beside his wife and promised Henry that they would be back for him. “Before you can turn around good,” he said, “you be comin home with us.” Augustus repeated himself, and the boy tried to make sense of the word
home
. He knew the word, knew the cabin with him and his mother and Rita that the word represented. He could no longer remember when his father was a part of that home. Augustus kept talking and Henry pulled at Mildred, wanting her to go back onto William Robbins’s land, back to the cabin where the fireplace smoked when it was first lit. “Please,” the boy said, “please, les go back.”

Along about then William Robbins came slowly out to the road, heading into the town of Manchester on his prized bay, Sir Guilderham. Patting the horse’s black mane, he asked Henry why was he crying and the boy said, “For nothin, Massa.” Augustus stood up and took off his hat. Mildred continued holding on to her son. The boy knew his master only from a distance; this was the closest they had been in a very long time. Robbins sat high on his horse, a mountain separating the boy from the fullness of the sun. “Well don’t do it anymore,” Robbins said. He nodded at Augustus. “Counting off the days, are you, Augustus?” He looked to Rita. “You see things go right,” Robbins said. He meant for her not to let the boy go too many steps beyond his property. He would have called Rita by name but she had not distinguished herself enough in his life for him to remember the name he had given her at birth. It was enough that the name was written somewhere in his large book of births and deaths, the comings and goings of slaves. “Noticeable mole on left cheek,” he had written five days after Rita’s birth. “Eyes grey.” Years later, after Rita disappeared, Robbins would put those facts on the poster offering a reward for her return, along with her age.

Robbins gave a last look at Henry, whose name he also did not know, and set off at a gallop, his horse’s black tail flipping first one pretty way and then another, as if the tail were separate and so had a life all its own. Henry stopped crying. In the end, Augustus had to pull his wife from the child. He turned Henry over to Rita, who had been friends with Mildred all her life. He lifted his wife up onto the wagon that sagged and creaked with her weight. The wagon and the mules were not as high as Robbins’s horse. Before he got up, Augustus told his son that he would see him on Sunday, the day Robbins was now allowing for visits. Then Augustus said, “I’ll be back for you,” meaning the day he would ultimately free the boy. But it took far longer to buy Henry’s freedom than his father had thought; Robbins would come to know what a smart boy Henry was. The cost of intelligence was not fixed and because it was fluid, it was whatever the market would bear and all of that burden would fall upon Mildred and Augustus.

Mildred fixed Henry as many of the things she knew he would enjoy to take with them on Sundays. Before freedom she had known only slave food, plenty of fatback and ash cakes and the occasional mouthful of rape or kale. But freedom and the money from their labors spread a better table before them. Still, she could not enjoy even one good morsel in her new place when she thought of what Henry had to eat. So she prepared him a little feast before each visit. Little meat pies, cakes that he could share with his friends through the week, the odd rabbit caught by Augustus, which she salted to last the week. The mother and the father would ride over in the wagon pulled by the mules and call onto Robbins’s land for their boy, enticing him with what they had brought. They would wait in the road until Henry on his stick legs came up from the quarters and out to the lane, Robbins’s mansion giant and eternal behind him.

He was growing quickly, anxious to show them the little things he had carved. The horses in full stride, the mules loaded down, the bull with his head turned just so to look behind him. The three would settle on a quilt on a piece of no-man’s-land across from Robbins’s plantation. Behind them and way off to the left, there was a creek that had never seen a fish, but slaves fished in it nevertheless, practicing for the day when there would be better water. When the three had eaten, Mildred would sit between them as Augustus and Henry fished. She always wanted to know how he was treated and his answer was almost always the same—that Massa Robbins and his overseer were treating him well, that Rita was always good to him.

The fall that year, 1834, just dropped away one day and suddenly it was winter. Mildred and Augustus came every Sunday even when it turned cold and then even colder than that. They built a fire on no-man’s-land and ate with few words. Robbins had told them not to take the boy beyond where his overseer could see them from the entrance to his property. The winter visits were short ones because the boy often complained of the cold. Sometimes Henry did not show up, even if the cold was bearable for a visit of a few minutes. Mildred and Augustus would wait hour after hour, huddled in the wagon under quilts and blankets, or walking hopefully up and down the road, for Robbins had forbidden them to come onto his land except when Augustus was making a payment on the second and fourth Tuesdays of the month. They would hope some slave would venture out, going to or from the mansion, so they could holler to him or her to go get their boy Henry. But even when they managed to see someone and tell them about Henry, they would wait in vain for the boy to show up.

“I just forgot,” Henry would say the next time they saw him. Augustus had often been chastised as a boy but though Henry was his son, he was not yet his property and so beyond his reach.

“Try harder to remember, son. To know the right way,” Augustus said, only to have Henry do right the next Sunday or two and then not show up the one after that.

Then, in mid-February, after they had waited two hours beyond when he was supposed to appear on the road, Augustus grabbed the boy when he shuffled up and shook him, then he pushed him to the ground. Henry covered his face and began to cry. “Augustus!” Mildred shouted and helped her son up. “Everything’s good,” she said to him as she cradled him in her arms. “Everything’s good.”

Augustus turned and walked across the road to the wagon. The wagon had a thick burlap covering, something he had come up with not long after the first cold visit. The mother and her child soon followed him across the road and the three settled into the wagon under the covering and around the stones Augustus and Mildred had boiled. They were quite large stones, which they would boil for many hours at home on Sunday mornings before setting out to see Henry. Then, just before they left home, the stones were wrapped in blankets and placed in the center of the wagon. When the stones stopped giving warmth and the boy began complaining of the cold, they knew it was time to go.

That Sunday Augustus pushed Henry, the three of them ate, once again, in silence.

The next Sunday Robbins was waiting. “I heard you did something to my boy, to my property,” he said before Augustus and Mildred were down from the wagon.

“No, Mr. Robbins. I did nothin,” Augustus said, having forgotten the push.

“We wouldn’t,” Mildred said. “We wouldn’t hurt him for the world. He our son.”

Robbins looked at her as if she had told him the day was Wednesday. “I won’t have you touching my boy, my property.” His horse, Sir Guilderham, was idling two or so paces behind his master. And just as the horse began to wander away, Robbins turned and picked up the reins, mounted. “No more visits for a month,” he said, picking one piece of lint from the horse’s ear.

“Please, Mr. Robbins,” Mildred said. Freedom had allowed her not to call him master anymore. “We come all this way.”

“I don’t care,” Robbins said. “It’ll take all of a month for him to heal from what you did, Augustus.”

Robbins set off. Henry had not told his parents that he had become Robbins’s groom. An older boy, Toby, had been the groom but Henry had bribed the boy with Mildred’s food and the boy had commenced telling the overseer that he was not up to the task of grooming. “Henry be better,” Toby said to the overseer so many times that it became a truth in the white man’s head. Now, all the food Mildred brought for her son each Sunday had already been promised to Toby.

“We wouldn’t hurt him to save the world,” Mildred said to Robbins’s back. She began crying because she saw a month of days spread out before her and they added up to more than a thousand. Augustus held her and kissed her bonneted head and then helped her up on to the wagon. The journey home to southwest Manchester County always took about an hour or so, depending upon the bitterness or kindness of the weather.

Henry was indeed better as a groom, far more eager than Toby had been, not at all afraid to rise long before the sun to do his duties. He was always waiting for Robbins when he returned from town, from Philomena, a black woman, and the two children he had with her. Henry would, in those early days when he was trying to prove himself to Robbins, stand in front of the mansion and watch as Robbins and Sir Guilderham emerged from the winter fog of the road, the boy’s heart beating faster and faster as the man and the horse became larger and larger. “Mornin, Massa,” he would say and raise both hands to take the reins. “Good morning, Henry. Are you well?” “Yes, Massa.” “Then stay that way.” “Yes, Massa, I plan to.”

Robbins would go into his mansion, to face a white wife who had not yet resigned herself to having lost her place in his heart to Philomena. The wife knew about the first child her husband had with Philomena, about Dora, but she would not know about the second, Louis, until the boy was three years old. This was in the days before Robbins’s wife turned beastly sour and began to spend most of her time in a part of the mansion her daughter had named the East when the daughter was very young and didn’t know what she was doing. When the wife did turn beastly sour, she took it out on the people nearest her that she could not love. It got to be, the slaves said, as if she hated the very ground they had to walk on.

Henry would take Sir Guilderham to the stable, the one reserved for the animals Robbins thought the most of, and rub him down until the animal was at peace and the sweat was gone, until he began to close his eyes and wanted to be left alone. Then Henry made sure the horse had enough hay and water. Sometimes, if he thought he could escape the other tasks of the day, he would stand on a stool and comb the mane until his hands tired. If the horse recognized the boy from all the work he did, it never showed.

Henry waited eagerly at one end of the road Robbins took at least three times a week, and at the other end of the road, at the very edge of the town of Manchester, the county seat, was another boy, Louis, who was eight in 1840 when Henry was sixteen and an accomplished groom. Louis, the son, was also Robbins’s slave, which was how the U.S. census that year listed him. The census noted that the house on Shenandoah Road where the boy lived in Manchester was headed by Philomena, his mother, and that the boy had a sister, Dora, three years his senior. The census did not say that the children were Robbins’s flesh and blood and that he traveled into Manchester because he loved their mother far more than anything he could name and that, in his quieter moments, after the storms in his head, he feared that he was losing his mind because of that love. Robbins’s grandfather, who had stowed away as a boy on the HMS
Claxton
’s maiden voyage to America, would not have not approved—not of Robbins’s having lost himself to a black but of having lost himself at all. Having given away so much to love, the grandfather would have told his grandson, where would Robbins get the fortitude to make his way back to Bristol, England, back to their home?