The Known World (45 page)

There was once a generally well-liked white man in Georgia, near Valdosta, quite a wealthy man with his slaves and his land and his money and his history. This man, Morris Calhenny, suffered from a crushing melancholy, particularly on days when it rained. He would get on his horse, the mare that he used only on rainy days, and would ride and ride until he reached some peace with himself. The peace, to be sure, never lasted, but there wasn’t anything Morris could do about any of it.

There was as well a black man, Beau, in that place near Valdosta, Georgia. His last name was also Calhenny, but only because all Morris’s slaves had his last name. When they, Beau and Morris, had been boys, they were almost as close as brothers, and Morris would seek out Beau when the melancholy hit because Beau never asked why he suffered like that, why Morris couldn’t just get up and walk away from whatever was bothering him. Beau just stayed by his side until things got a bit better.

When the two reached the age of fourteen, there was the inevitable parting and they never came back together in the same way. But many times when they were adults, Beau remembered how the sad days would take a hold of Morris and he would take one of Morris’s horses without asking anyone and go out in the rain in search of his master. The two of them would ride for a long time until Beau would ask Morris, “You done had anough?” The question always came at the right moment, even with the rain still coming, and Morris would nod his head and say, “I done had enough.” Then they would go slowly back to the barn, the one that housed only the Calhenny horses, and then Morris would go into his big house and Beau would go to his cabin where his family was waiting to ask what he was doing out in all that rain.

On one rainy day, Beau and Morris rode out to the eastern edge of Morris’s land and they sat their horses and looked down across the hill to the line where the white man’s land ended. On a back road not on his property, they saw a young white woman trying to get a white mule to stand up from the muddy road. The mule had been pulling a wagon in the rain, and it wasn’t clear to Beau or Morris whether the animal had sat down because it was tired of working or because it just liked sitting down in the rain.

The white woman was named Hope Martin, but only Beau knew that. Though white, she was not in Morris’s class.

“You want me to go down and help her?” Beau asked Morris.

“No,” Morris said, “give her a little time.”

The woman at first seemed to be talking to the mule, trying to convince it that it should get up so they could continue. The mule didn’t move. Finally, Hope went to the back of the wagon and took out several apples from a covered basket. She sat down in the road in front of the mule and ate an apple as she fed first one and then another to the mule. She got more apples several times from the wagon. The rain did not let up and the black man and the white man on the horses did not move.

After some thirty minutes of eating apples, the mule stood up but Hope still sat in the mud, taking her time as she ate her fourth apple. Seeing Hope sitting there, the animal became restless, its tail swishing and its head going up and down, first one front hoof stamping the mud, then the other. After fifteen or more minutes of this, Hope stood and stretched, the rain still coming on. She said something to the mule and pointed up the road to where they had to go. The mule started moving even before she got back on board.

“What’s her name?” Morris asked Beau as they watched the woman and the mule and the wagon go up the hill without any trouble.

Beau told him who she was, that she had come down from north Georgia to take care of her aunt and her ailing uncle. Both aunt and uncle were very old people, not long for the world. “She’d make some man a good wife,” Beau said, putting an end to the woman’s history.

He would not have said this if he didn’t think his master was already thinking it.

“You done had anough?” Beau said.

“I think I have,” Morris said.

Morris was father to a young man—the only white child he would ever have—with a wonderfully complicated mind. On the day they saw Hope and the mule in the rain, that child, Wilson, had been a year and some months in Washington, D.C., at the medical school of George Washington University. Wilson had learned a great deal at that university and his mind would have contained even more but well into his second year the cadavers began to talk to Wilson, and what they said made far more sense than what his professors were saying. The professors, being gods, did not like to share their heaven with anyone, dead or alive, and they sent the young man home in the middle of his second year.

Even before the professors had sent Wilson back home, his father had been thinking that he wanted Hope as his son’s wife. Though she came from a different place in life, Morris felt that she could be cleaned off, made wholesome, the way an apple fallen into mud could be cleaned up and eaten. Morris had an emissary go to her and her relatives and tell them he wanted to see her, but the woman never came to him, and in the end Hope married another young man, Hillard Uster, poor except for the nice parcel of land he had inherited from his parents. Hillard was not as handsome as she was beautiful but Hope thought she could live with that, and indeed she did.

Their marriage angered Morris, and he was still angry when his son came home from Washington, D.C., for good and tried to tell Morris and his mother what the cadavers had been saying to him. The father and his son talked late into the nights, and there were many times when what the cadavers said began to make sense to the father. In the morning, though, Morris would have more clarity and he would blame many people—but especially Hope and Hillard—for all the things the dead people were putting in his son’s head. Morris told people in that part of Georgia that Hope and Hillard were to suffer alone and everyone was forbidden to help them. And that was how it was for a long time.

The Usters’ children were small and weak of bone and lung and the inherited land was left mostly to Hope and Hillard alone to try to make a living. Then, in 1855, Hillard managed to save about $53 and met a black man named Stennis and his white master, Darcy, who feared taking one last piece of property into Florida, where he had never known good luck. Hillard used the money to buy that human property from Darcy.

That day in September, Darcy and Stennis said good-bye to Augustus Townsend, who said nothing, and he watched them ride away in the wagon that had held up all the way from Virginia. They had sold Augustus’s mule back in North Carolina. Augustus stood on the edge of Hillard’s field, free of his chains for the first time since Manchester County. Hillard held a rifle. On either side of the white man was a boy. On the porch of the tiny house Hope was holding a baby. On either side of her was a little girl.

“I don’t want no trouble outa you,” Hillard said to Augustus. Darcy had said that Augustus, still new to Georgia, might be testy for a few days. “I don’t want no trouble.”

“I won’t be nothin but trouble,” Augustus said, looking around, getting his bearings.

“We got a nigger just like evbody else, Pa?” the boy on Hillard’s right said.

“Hush.”

“I just wanna go home and then I’ll be outa your way.”

Hillard raised his rifle, pointed it at Augustus. “Then you and me will have trouble.”

“We gon have trouble, Pa,” the boy on the left said.

“Hush,” Hillard said. He raised the rifle higher, up to Augustus’s face. “I just want you to work, like you suppose to.”

“I done done all the work I suppose to do.”

“I wanna feed my family and I’ll do anything to make that happen. I just wanna feed my family. Thas all there is to it.”

“I know family. I know all about family. But, mister, you can’t raise your family on my back,” and Augustus, noting where the sun was, turned and headed north.

“Our nigger goin, Pa?” the first boy said.

“Hush.”

Augustus was a few yards away when Hillard said, “You come back here. You better come here. I’m tellin you to come back here.” Augustus continued on.

“Stop, you,” the second boy hollered. “You stop.”

“Hilly?” Hope called from the porch. “Hilly, what is goin on?”

Her husband raised the rifle and fired a shot into Augustus’s left shoulder. Augustus stopped, looked at the ground, and lifted his head again. The blood took its time spreading all over the top of the shirt, then spread down and all about, down some more to the top of his pants. Augustus lowered his head and fell to the ground. Hope screamed.

Hillard and the boys ran to Augustus. The girls on the porch ran as well, and so did Hope, but with the baby in her arms she was not as fast as the girls were.

“I told you to stop. All I wanted was for you to stop.”

Augustus was on his back and he looked up at the man and at the boys. He didn’t look at the girls and the woman with the baby because by the time they got there his eyes were closed, which helped with the pain.

“I told you to stop, dammit! Nigger, all I wanted was for you to stop.”

Augustus heard him and he wanted to say that that was the biggest lie he had ever heard in his life, but he was dying and words were precious.

Hope and her family—except for the baby, who was put for the moment on the ground where Augustus fell—managed to get him to the barn, which is where Hillard had intended for Augustus to live when he wasn’t working. Hope stayed with him most of the day and the evening and a good part of the night. Hillard did not come out to him, and the woman said to Augustus at one point, “I hope you won’t hold his not comin out against him.” There was a brave man in the neighborhood, a healer of sorts, a man not afraid of Morris Calhenny, and that man came out and tried to get the bullet out of Augustus, but the bullet was stubborn, having found a home.

When Augustus Townsend died in Georgia near the Florida line, he rose up above the barn where he had died, up above the trees and the crumbling smokehouse and the little family house nearby, and he walked away quick-like, toward Virginia. He discovered that when people were above it all they walked faster, as much as a hundred times faster than when they were confined to the earth. And so he reached Virginia in little or no time. He came to the house he had built for his family, for Mildred his wife and Henry his son, and he opened and went through the door. He thought she might be at the kitchen table, unable to sleep and drinking something to ease her mind. But he did not find his wife there. Augustus went upstairs and found Mildred sleeping in their bed. He looked at her for a long time, certainly as long as it would have taken him, walking up above it all, to walk to Canada and beyond. Then he went to the bed, leaned over and kissed her left breast.

The kiss went through the breast, through skin and bone, and came to the cage that protected the heart. Now the kiss, like so many kisses, had all manner of keys, but it, like so many kisses, was forgetful, and it could not find the right key to the cage. So in the end, frustrated, desperate, the kiss squeezed through the bars and kissed Mildred’s heart. She woke immediately and she knew her husband was gone forever. All breath went and she was seized with such a pain that she had to come to her feet. But the room and the house were not big enough to contain her pain and she stumbled out of the room, out and down the stairs, out through the door that Augustus, as usual, had left open. The dog watched her from the hearth. Only in the yard could she begin to breathe again. And breath brought tears. She fell to her knees, out in the open yard, in her nightclothes, something Augustus would not have approved of.

Augustus died on Wednesday.

Skiffington had slept little since the day Bennett came to tell him about Moses. The Thursday after Augustus was killed had brought on a small toothache that became overwhelming by midday Friday. He lay in bed beside Winifred that Friday night only to avoid her pestering him about not getting enough sleep; he lay and listened to her quiet sleeping, thinking about where Moses could hide in his county and shifting now and again as the toothache hounded him into Saturday morning.

He had been berating Counsel and the patrollers all week, and he had them all out most of the days and the nights to search for the man he began calling the murdering runaway. “Which is the worst,” Harvey Travis the patroller joked behind Skiffington’s back, “the murdering or the running away?” The bloodhounds in Manchester seemed most ineffectual, “couldn’t find stink on a skunk,” Oden Peoples complained, and more dogs were brought in from other counties. But they failed as well. The patrollers and the dogs concentrated on places to the east of the town, the places that were the closest to the north. By that Saturday they were searching not only for Moses but Gloria and Clement as well. “Somebody,” Travis said, “should close the gate at her place, or teach her how to own a slave. A man dies and a woman runs his place into the ground.”

Skiffington spent the days chewing bark that a slave, a root worker down the street, said would give him some relief for his toothache. She had peered into his mouth on Tuesday and told him there wasn’t much she could do for his suffering. “I do believe,” she said looking from one tooth to another, “that that pain is bringin you down and you just gotta pull it out. Just take it by the root and yank and yank till there ain’t nothin left.” They hadn’t bothered going inside to where she lived and she used the dying sunlight to investigate his mouth. “Open just so, Mr. Sheriff.” She touched the bad tooth with the end of a piece of bark and he shrank away in pain. He thought all the talk of yanking was her way of saying she could perform the task. But she told him, after pulling him back to her and closing his mouth with both her hands, that the mouth wasn’t something she liked to spend time thinking about. “You got a back ache, you got a heart ache, you got a foot ache, I can help you. But I don’t like to go to the mouth. Too far away from what I know bout helpin people. Too near the brain.” He came on Wednesday and offered her a fifty-cent piece to pull out the tooth but she said no and put the money back in his hand. Her master allowed her to do extra work for people so she could buy her freedom. On that Wednesday she had saved up $113 after three years of work. The price her master had quoted for her freedom was $350. “I can’t touch your mouth, Mr. Sheriff. I might hurt you more than I can help you.”