Authors: Edward P. Jones
He washed up. There was still the possibility of some word from the sheriffs all down the line. There was still that. But as he drank more and more of the milk, that hope went away. How could he punish Counsel and Harvey and Oden? He put the glass down and thought how a few sliced tomatoes with some salt and vinegar would give him whatever he needed now. A few sliced tomatoes laid out as pretty as you please on one of Winifred’s precious plates.
He went to the boardinghouse and stepped into Counsel’s room without knocking and found the owner sitting on Counsel’s bed. She had her shoes off and though she was clothed otherwise, she put her hand up to her neck, which was fully covered. She told Skiffington that Counsel was out in the back tending to his business. She put on her shoes and followed him downstairs.
Counsel was coming out of the privy. “John.”
“You get word that that freed man Augustus Townsend was missing?” Skiffington said before his cousin could close the privy door. “Counsel, you tell his wife and his daughter-in-law that you was going to tell me he was missing and then not tell me?”
“Augustus?”
“Augustus Townsend is the man’s name.”
“I might have heard, John, and just forgot. Niggers have stories about such from here until the end of time. Who can believe them?” The owner of the boardinghouse was standing up the three steps at the doorway. There was some light behind her in the kitchen but the light was not strong and it made her a poor silhouette. “You go on in now, Thomasina,” Counsel said. She turned away. The woman said, “I’ll be upstairs if you need me, Counsel.” The amount she charged him for room and board was nearly nothing now. She was a good woman, but she could not one day give him children and stand beside him the way Belle had stood beside him. She always cried and trembled after they made love. A woman long dry coming back to life. He had saved some money by being nice to her but not enough to buy what God had taken from him in North Carolina. “Besides, John, they were three niggers talking about another nigger. I thought you hired me to look after white people.”
“You were hired for the law’s sake.” It was not adultery, whatever there was between his cousin and the boardinghouse woman, Skiffington thought. The fornication sin was on their souls alone, but he felt the lying about Augustus was on his head as well because he had brought Counsel in. Had vouched for him before God. “I won’t have this keeping things from me about the people in this county. You have but one more time to do this. You hear me, Counsel?”
“I hear you, John. I still say—”
Skiffington walked away.
He rode out of the town and a little more than an hour later found Harvey Travis and Oden Peoples riding and talking loud on the dark road. The rules said there should be three of them but Skiffington didn’t notice.
“You men sell that freed man Augustus Townsend back into slavery?”
Travis laughed but Oden was silent. “John, who put that pickle in your ear?” Travis said. “Who would do such a thing to you, John?”
“Tell me if you did it, Harvey? You and Oden.”
“Why, hell no, John. I ain’t gotta do that kinda thing. Ain’t that right, Oden?”
“Thas true, sheriff.”
“Who would tell you that, John? Barnum Kinsey?”
This, Skiffington thought, was the man who tried to sell a dead cow and then wanted it back when the cow returned to life. But this was also the man who had caught three of Robert Colfax’s slaves trying to escape. He and Oden put fear into anyone trying to escape.
“John, don’t put stock in what Barnum says.”
“I don’t want to hear anything like this about yall again.” He thought of Joseph and his brothers: “For they did unto thee evil: and now, we pray thee, forgive the trespass of the servants of God of thy father.” And Augustus Townsend could still be found and brought back to his wife and home. God still had the power to do that. “If I hear something like this again—”
“Well, you know you won’t, John, and thas all there is to it.”
He did not go home pleased with himself. He had been pleased when Colfax praised him to Williams Robbins and some others. He got to town and wanted to just keep on riding, but he could not put his horse through that. He asked for God’s guidance. He dreamed of Minerva that night. He was walking through a field and crows were flying above him all during the walk and he came to a tent in the desert, the opening flapping in the wind. He knew she was inside, waiting for him, because he could hear her crying, and he was ready to go in but he stood observing the flapping of the opening. The tent was a faded blue that shouldn’t have caught anyone’s eye but he could not move from it. Then the wind stopped and it still flapped, and then when the wind came up again, the opening was still.
He wrote to Richmond the next day, telling the authorities that the Commonwealth of Virginia should be aware of a slave speculator who was selling free Negroes back into slavery. On a separate sheet of paper he answered the questions from the usual form about the alleged crime, the alleged victim or victims, and the alleged perpetrator or perpetrators. When he started writing, there had been certainty that selling Augustus Townsend was a crime, but he became less certain not long before he had to sign his name under all the answers. Had Virginia, in fact, declared such a sale a crime? Could the cord of a man born into slavery ever be cut forever and completely, even if he had been free for some years? Was he not doomed by virtue of the color of his skin? And what would he do with Travis and Oden with only Barnum to stand and say a crime had been committed? The word of a white man against those of another white man and an Indian. Barnum’s word against Travis’s would be something of a fair fight; Barnum was a drunkard but Travis was known to be a cheat and a brute. The dead-cow episode had been widely discussed. But Travis’s word had help from Oden’s word, which was worth only half since he was an Indian. But that half was a half Barnum did not have. Skiffington put the sheet with answers in a drawer and expanded on the letter.
He wrote, as always, to a Harry Sanderson, who was a kind of liaison at the Capitol and was generally helpful when Skiffington needed a circuit judge to come by and preside over a matter. “I have the Governor’s ear,” Sanderson wrote in a curious aside in one letter. Now, Skiffington said, something was amiss with the man Darcy but he needed help in determining what that something was. He wanted to know what the law wanted him to do.
Two days later, in response to one of his telegrams, he heard from a sheriff near the North Carolina border. Darcy had passed through, he said. There had been no trouble, “air undisturbed” was how he put it, but after Darcy left the county the sheriff had discovered a dead Negro child on the side of the road, “not a member of our community, as far as we can tell.”
He got a letter from Sanderson three days after that. A crime had indeed been committed, he wrote, and Sanderson included material he had copied from books saying so. Skiffington heard from Richmond again four days later. In handwriting he did not recognize, a Graciela Sanderson let him know that her husband, Harry, was dead and that she was now charged with keeping up his correspondence. He read the eight-page letter twice but he found nothing in it about what Virginia was doing about the crime of selling free Negroes. The widow told him about her husband, how she had met him when he vacationed in Italy, how he had wooed her, brought her to America after their wedding, and made her a happy woman in Richmond, “where the Governor is in residence.” She closed the letter with two paragraphs about the recent “discouraging” weather in Richmond, and then she asked Skiffington if she should return to her home in Italy, “where the sun is not as spiteful,” or remain in the Capitol where her children and grandchildren were prospering. “I am despondent and I await some answer from you about what I should do.”
He would get more letters from her over the next few days but there would not be time to write her back.
At Hazlehurst, Georgia, just beyond the Altamaha River, Darcy and Stennis met a man outside a saloon. The man was somewhat tipsy but quite alert and he had a Negro beside him. It was evening but there was enough light for the white man to see Augustus in the back of the wagon.
”He’s good flesh,” Darcy said.
“Good flesh,” Stennis said.
“I ain’t in the business for no slave right now,” the man said, one hand on the floor of the wagon.
Darcy said, “Four hundred dollars. Just four hundred, it don’t get any better than that.”
The man hiccuped. “Anything can get better on another day.” The Negro with the white man had stayed near the saloon but now he came down to the street and looked up at Augustus and they nodded at each other.
“Not with this it don’t,” said Darcy. “Four hundred dollars is all I’m asking and I’ll go home tonight and cry bout how you cheated me with that.”
“That price seems a bit much to me,” the man said.
“Not from where I’m standin and I’m standin in good boots. I paid five hundred dollars for this nigger up in Virginia.”
“We a whole lot smarter about our money in Georgia.”
“Yes, you are,” Darcy said. “You certainly are. Why, just the other week when I was up in North Carolina, I said to a gentleman and his gracious and hospitable wife—I said, ‘You can’t beat the Georgia people for their knowledge and intelligence. You can’t beat it with a stick.’ And they agreed.”
“Two sticks,” said Stennis. “Three sticks. Four sticks.”
“Why, I said, Georgia done give us our best president yet.”
“What?” the man said. “What president?” He seemed to sober up.
“I said you can’t beat the Georgia folks for what they gave and give and will continue to give this country, startin with that fine president.”
“What? What kinda president you be talkin about?” He put the other hand on the wagon’s floor, then shook Augustus’s chain. “What damn president you talkin about?”
“Why, the president of the United States, of course. What other kind of president is there?”
“No other kind,” Stennis said.
“There ain’t been no Georgia president of the United States far as I know.” He hiccuped. “I ain’t heard of one yet.”
Augustus and the Negro with the white man had not taken their eyes from each other.
“Why sure, there has been, sir. He was a fine president, too. What was his name, Stennis?”
“Lemme see. Whatn’t that President Bentley? I think it was.”
“Yes, President Bentley fom Georgia. Hooray for President Bentley. Hooray! Hooray!”
“I tell you there ain’t been no damn president from Georgia.”
“There ain’t?” Darcy said. “There ain’t? Well, there damn well should have been. And I’ll tell you somethin—there will be a president from Georgia and real soon.”
“Yes,” Stennis said. “There will be. There will be five at least, as far as I can tell. Maybe ten. Maybe ten. There’ll be ten if I have anything to do bout it. Could go to be twenty or thirty.”
“All right, Stennis, thas anough of that. You see, mister,” and Darcy took his hand. “I’m tryin to give you a good bargain in this here nigger. Just four hundred and fifty. Thas all I’m askin.”
“I thought you said four hundred dollars a minute ago.”
“Did I? Did I say that? Well, it jus goes to show how valuable this nigger gets every minute that goes by. Lordy lordy! Why, in another hour this nigger be so valuable you couldn’t buy him if you was the king of England.”
“I have to be going,” the man said, “I got the queen of England waiting for me.”
“Please, sir,” Darcy said. “Maybe three hundred and fifty, and I’ll be crying in my soup tonight about that.”
“No.” The man began walking away. Darcy followed him and Stennis followed. The Negro stayed with Augustus.
“Three hundred? Two hundred and fifty. Two hundred.” Darcy tugged at the man’s sleeve.
“No. Come along, Belton,” he said to the Negro, but the slave did not move.
“Please. Two hundred dollars. What you want me to do, give him away?”
“That would be a good notion. Come on, Belton,” and both men disappeared around a corner.
“Damn damn damn,” Darcy said, looking at the space the man had just occupied. “You think I was too hard with the bargainin, Stennis.”
“No, Master, I think you was right on the money.”
“Hmm. Well, we best get to beddin down with this fella. I hate to think about headin into Florida. I don’t see good luck in Florida, but tomorrow is another day.”
“And another dollar, Marse.”
A P
lea
B
efore the
H
onorable
C
ourt.
T
hirsty
G
round.
A
re
M
ules
R
eally
S
marter
T
han
H
orses?
The day Skiffington first came out to Caldonia’s place about Alice and Priscilla and Jamie disappearing, Moses had expected to eat supper again with Caldonia that night, but she was not hungry and the dinner meal would be the only one of her day. She had thought all that day that the three would return before nightfall, finding it difficult to believe that two women and a boy would leave what she and Henry had made. A man perhaps, someone like Elias or Clement, not a madwoman and a woman who seemed to adore her. She had informed Skiffington as a kind of courtesy to the law, but when he showed up and stood before her, the whole matter of the disappearances became more important than the nuisance she figured it to be. It was as if one of her bulls had escaped and before a servant could find and bring him back, he had not just run through someone’s fields but run over a child or two. A simple misdemeanor correctable with money had become a felony. What saved her was that she was the victim.
Moses told her in the parlor that all had gone well even without Alice and Priscilla and Jamie. The harvest would be good. She reached her hand out to him, wanting him to sit beside her.