Authors: Edward P. Jones
“Fix him right here in the road,” Travis said, looking at Moses. “Let him remember every day what he done to John Skiffington. Fix him so he won’t run again.”
Louis said, “That slave does not belong to you for yall to do with as you please. He is not your property. He is not yours.”
Travis said, “He is the reason our John is dead. That makes him everybody’s property.”
“Sure he belongs to us,” Counsel said. “Would we be out here in this hot sun if he hadn’t decided he had a right to run away?”
“Just leave him be,” Louis said. Barnum was silent; something in his heart told him there were many lies about what Counsel said. But John was dead and that was the one big truth. Elias was also silent. He was sitting on a gray mare, which Caldonia said came with his new position as overseer. Celeste had said nothing to him that morning. Less than an hour later on that road, as the group of men and horses moved toward Caldonia’s place, Elias would falter and be unable to ride. As he fell farther and farther behind, Louis, surprised at how close they had become in the last few days, would go back to him, dismount and help Elias off his horse, and both men would walk with the reins in their hands, Louis telling Elias all the while that they should take all the time they needed. “There’s no hurry now.” At that point in the road, most of the day was behind all the horses and their men, as was the sun.
Moses, still behind Counsel and his horse, said to the white men and to Louis, “Please, yall, don’t hurt me like that. Please.” He called out to Elias, “Please, don’t let em hurt me. Please, tell em to let me be, Elias.”
Elias could see Celeste standing in their cabin doorway, waiting for him. He needed Celeste now. He needed Celeste to tell him right and point him toward home. How had he come to forget just where he was in the world? He worried at that moment that something would happen to him on that road with the white men raging and that he would never see his family again. After Moses, Elias knew he would be next, and then Louis, the son of a black woman. And if they needed more, the white men would jump on the Indian, who wasn’t as white as he always thought he was.
Counsel and Travis and Oden got off their horses. Moses turned to run but Counsel took the rope he had tied Moses with and pulled him back. Barnum, on his horse, said, “He ain’t the one that hurt John. He ain’t the one. And besides, it look like he done learned his lesson.” Oden looked at Travis and the two men laughed.
With Counsel and Travis holding the still-tied Moses, Oden bent down and put his knife, in two swift back and forth motions, through Moses’s Achilles’ tendon. “Please,” Moses kept saying, “let me be.” He tried to get Elias’s attention, and he tried to get Louis’s attention. “Please let me be.” Moments after the cutting, Oden applied his blood-stopping poultice to Moses’s wound and the slave collapsed, screaming in agony.
Barnum rode away, rode toward his home and his family. There was not anything in Virginia for him anymore. He had been treading water all his life in Virginia—not enough water to drown him, but just enough to always keep his feet and britches wet. He was many miles away before he heard Moses stop screaming.
Hobbling anyone left a mark in the dirt for someone to always take note of, and that would be the case with Moses. A person knowing anything about the science of hobbling wouldn’t take note of the mark in the road for very long. But a person ignorant of the science of hobbling might well bend down and wonder for the longest why a barefoot man would walk full on one foot and then tiptoe along forever on the other foot.
Back in Mildred’s house two hours earlier, Moses said some words over her body but he knew what he was saying was not enough. He had never really listened all the way to a funeral speech and so was at a loss to say the proper thing. Had I only listened, he berated himself as he cleared the kitchen table of everything. He put the bowl of apples on a chair and took off the tablecloth. He knew he was grateful to her and so as he worked he thanked Mildred for helping him and then he picked up her body and laid her out on the table. He closed Mildred’s eyes. A slower death would have given her all the time she needed to lie down and close her own eyes. Moses covered her body with the tablecloth and began thinking of more words to say. “You know, Moses,” she had said only the day before, “I love a good tablecloth. I would rather have a good tablecloth over a good quilt any day. The bed could go naked for all I care, but I got to have my tablecloth for my meals.”
Not long after John Skiffington’s murder, Barnum Kinsey took his family to Missouri, where his wife had people. Barnum died not long after they crossed the Mississippi River, in a town called Hollinger. His oldest child from his second marriage, Matthew, stayed up all the night before he was buried, putting his father’s history on a wooden tombstone. He began with his father’s name on the first line, and on the next, he put the years of his father’s coming and going. Then all the things he knew his father had been. Husband. Father. Farmer. Grandfather. Patroller. Tobacco Man. Tree Maker. The letters of the words got smaller and smaller as the boy, not quite twelve, neared the bottom of the wood because he had never made a headstone for anyone before so he had not compensated for all that he would have to put on it. The boy filled up the whole piece of wood and at the end of the last line he put a period. His father’s grave would remain, but the wooden marker would not last out the year. The boy knew better than to put a period at the end of such a sentence. Something that was not even a true and proper sentence, with subject aplenty, but no verb to pull it all together. A sentence, Matthew’s teacher back in Virginia had tried to drum into his thick Kinsey head, could live without a subject, but it could not live without a verb.
At Mildred’s house the day she died, Counsel stepped out onto her porch and looked but once at his cousin’s body and took out his tobacco and paper and rolled a cigarette. He had no more chewing tobacco. John Skiffington’s foot finally came out of the stirrup and Counsel watched as John’s horse began to walk away. Counsel wondered if the beast knew the way home, or would some bear ultimately come upon him drinking at a stream and take him down. He heard just a little movement from Moses inside the house. He should have picked up the dead woman’s gun after all. The nigger could take it and hit him upside the head. Knowing this was possible, Counsel turned fully toward the doorway so he could be ready. All the gold would mean that he could buy a giant tombstone for John’s grave, one as large as the man himself had been. He envisioned a tombstone so big that wild and insane men would come down from their lairs in the Virginia mountains and worship at the tombstone, thinking it stood over the grave of someone who had been a god.
On the road some two hours later, after Oden had hobbled Moses, he got back up on his horse. He looked down at the man writhing on the ground and at his own handiwork. Moses certainly could not walk back home now and Oden extended his arm down. He had gone out without a saddle that day. Oden said, “He won’t bleed for long. Heft him on up here.” Everyone, except Elias, helped Moses up onto the back of Oden’s horse. Louis trembled to see Moses in pain. By rights, Oden could have made Elias the slave carry Moses, but he didn’t like the evil that seemed to be building in Elias. He might have been able to make Louis carry him if he hadn’t been William Robbins’s son. So it was just as well that he chose to carry Moses and not make a fuss about it. “Heft him up. I’ll take him in. He ain’t gon bleed for long,” Oden said, though no one could hear him above Moses’s cries. Oden would never put his knife to a man again. It was one thing to cut a man, collect money for a job well done and go home and sup with his family. It was another to ride a long way with the man at his back, agonizing all the way in Oden’s ear, the man’s arms around Oden’s waist because the man had a fear, even in his great pain, of falling off the horse.
After Moses covered Mildred’s body with the tablecloth, he stepped onto her porch and got his first good look at the body of John Skiffington in the yard. He had no words for the dead man because he could not think of one good thing Skiffington had ever done for him. There would be plenty of people to mourn him, Moses thought, maybe even just as many as would mourn Mildred. Counsel looked at Moses, stepped onto the ground and put out his cigarette in the dirt. There was no use chancing a fire before he could get out all the gold.
Counsel Skiffington did not find any more gold at Mildred’s place. The five twenty-dollar pieces were all there was. For weeks, he went out to her place alone and dug all about her land, then, as he felt time was running out, he got the help of Oden and Travis. A split treasure was better than none, and he could get away with giving the Indian less than he would have to share with the white man. They found hidden compartments in the house that they did not know were designed to hide slaves for the Underground Railroad. In their frustration, they burned the house down, but Counsel kept many things, including the walking sticks. But the law eventually made him give everything he had taken to Caldonia Townsend. For years and years, Counsel fought for the land in the legal arena. He used a theory cooked up by Arthur Brindle, the dry goods merchant who had once been a lawyer, and claimed that there was some basis for him to have the property because his cousin had been murdered there. He enlisted the help of Robert Colfax, but the law went to Caldonia’s side. He married the boardinghouse woman. They had no children.
William Robbins would enter the legal fray over the Townsend estate because he felt it rightly belonged to Caldonia, who was to become his son Louis’s wife. Robbins and Colfax had not been getting along since Robbins bought the widow Clara Martin’s place from her heirs, a piece of land Colfax had long coveted. The end of the friendship of the two wealthiest men in the county affected just about everyone in Manchester as white people took sides and sought alliances in neighboring counties. Four white people were ultimately murdered over the dispute, one of them on Robbins’s side, his wife’s brother, and the other three on Colfax’s side, including two cousins. Over time the bad blood helped to tear apart the county, so that by the fire of 1912, when all the judicial records of the county were destroyed, the town of Manchester was the county seat to nobody. Manchester became the only county in the history of the Commonwealth of Virginia to be divided and swallowed up by other counties, by Amherst County, by Nelson County, by Amelia County, by Hanover County. . . . “The County of Manchester,” a University of Virginia historian wrote as he borrowed from the Bible, “was torn asunder.” The historian called it “the greatest disappearance of land” in the Commonwealth since large western sections of Virginia, historically known as “The Mother of States,” were taken to form eight other states, including Michigan, Illinois, Minnesota, West Virginia, and Wisconsin.
The men who kidnapped and sold Augustus Townsend—the white man Darcy and his slave Stennis—were caught without incident near Virginia’s border with North Carolina. They were riding in a brand-new covered wagon. In the back of the wagon were two children, a boy and a girl, both stolen from their free parents. The children were Spencer and Mandy Wallace. Mandy would go on to become the first black woman to receive a Ph.D. in literature from Yale University. Also in the new wagon were two adult sisters, slaves, who had been taken one evening on their way home from the funeral of a third sister at a nearby plantation. Those sisters, Carolyn and Eva, might not have been on the road to get themselves kidnapped if the owner of their dead sister had not decided that her funeral should be in the late afternoon, after most of the work in the fields was done, so as to maybe cut down on the length of another colored funeral.
Stennis and Darcy were tried and sentenced, Darcy to five years in the penitentiary, and Stennis to ten years. Darcy spent his time at the same prison where the murderer Jean Broussard had met his end. Stennis would have gone to a prison for Negroes in Petersburg, but the day before Stennis was to enter, the authorities decided better use might be made of him if he was sold to help pay the families of the slaves they had kidnapped and sold. He had a colorful history and was bought and sold five times in six weeks. Only the owners of slaves were compensated, all of them white; those people the government could find were paid $15 for each stolen adult slave and $10 for each stolen slave child. All the money left over, some $130, was put in the Virginia treasury.
There was nothing the Commonwealth of Virginia could do about the stolen loved ones of freed people, since such people really didn’t have a money value in the eyes of the law. So they received nothing but an earnest letter of apology from a dreamy-eyed assistant to the governor. The government acknowledged that it had failed to protect the loved ones and for that it was sorry, the assistant wrote.
Stennis was finally sold for $950 to a white man, a Kentuckian. On the way there, Stennis asked if Kentucky was anywhere near Tennessee. “Next door,” his new master said, “but we in Kentucky stays to ourselves.” Stennis, driving the wagon, went on and on about how the air from Tennessee wouldn’t have that far to travel to get to him in Kentucky. At the last, his new owner had had enough. He took out the pistol he had tucked in his coat and told Stennis to stop the wagon. He put the pistol to his temple and said, “I’m tired of your yappin so you best shut up right here and now. The people of Kentucky don’t care one whit for a nigger woodpecker.”
On Mildred’s porch the afternoon she died, Moses looked at Counsel putting out his cigarette in the yard. He said to Moses, “You done your business?” Moses looked one last time at Mildred’s covered body. Just before Moses came out, Counsel had been talking to God and God was answering back. God said, Job, I have not forgotten you. I heard you crying out there. You have been my worthy and loyal servant, and I have not forgotten you, Job. I will do what is right by you. I will put you back where I found you. I promise. “Your business done here?” Counsel asked Moses.
Moses nodded. He shut the door to Mildred’s house.