There were eight wagons and two buggies gathered at the roadside when Daniel dropped the reins. He felt dismal, knowing the amount of money he had brought and the variety of things he needed. He must choose carefully and wait for his price. He must guard his purchases. There were thieves on the border. Outlaws. Indians. There might be thieves here among the purchasers. A chunk of land was up for sale, along with house and furnishings and tools. Word had it that the young owner had died, leaving his wife and children in debt. Briefly, Daniel imagined himself the holder of such an empire. Then he remembered the humiliating sale of his own household goods and felt sorrow for the widow. He saw a wooden stage in the centre of the farmyard and ten or twelve men standing near it. Pulling at his coat sleeves, he took his first steps toward them. “Tennessee trader’s in a mighty hurry,” he heard someone say and looked up to see a man leaning on the fence, one boot on its bottom rail. “Could be good on us. Or not, dependin.” Daniel fed himself into the crowd, hoping that tools and equipment would be auctioned first, but there was a stir near the farmhouse where a group of slaves stood facing a wall.
The auctioneer wore a black hat and a jacket so shiny it might have been greased. His boots were oiled and the gloves he would wave during his display of wares were a bright shade of yellow. “Gentlemen of Virginia,” he intoned in a voice that commanded all friendly and curious chatter to stop, “we are right close to our border here at the finest farm I’ve had the fortune to put up on offer. We are right here next to Tennessee, where chattel carry scars and bitterness such that it ruins them for work among honest men, but here in Virginia,” he went on without drawing a breath, “we sell only well-tended, healthy Virginia-born flesh. That is our law up here now. No more importation, do you see? Parents or grandparents may have made the harrowing journey from Africa. They may have made landfall in the tidewaters of Virginia or Charleston or the Caribe. More’n likely they got brought into New England is my suspicion, where we all know the most profit in black flesh is made. Here now, today … Come on up here close, gentlemen, and see for yourself some fine Virginia-raised merchandise.” The auctioneer threw his arms out and a stirring and moaning overtook the slaves.
Daniel remembered the song old Luveen used to sing. There’s a betta world a’comin. Will you go along with me? Oh go along with me! Once he’d thought of it, he found he could not banish the tune from his mind even as six faces peered out from the pen where they had been placed along with several cows and four sheep. He understood, in that instant, why Luveen had refused to come to Virginia although she had been with his children since they were born and with his wife from her birth to her death. Luveen had been a servant, decently paid and entirely free. This was something very different, something he had not quite imagined even when he listened to the exhortations of Quaker abolitionists. His mouth felt dry. He retreated to his wagon and stood by it, dismayed. Will you go … along … with me … Still watching, in spite of himself, he saw a woman pulled up onto the stage. He saw the auctioneer open her dress, where there was an infant latched to her breast. Daniel was not a man who had looked on bare arms or shoulders. He had never seen his own dear Rebecca’s entire self, but the dress opened like a wound and he stared now at a woman’s flesh.
The auctioneer declared that the girl was full of good seed and rich milk. “Jus you look here at this baby fat and male and worth an extra fifty dolla. Ima start the bid at a hunnert for this breeder.”
A bareheaded man standing close to Daniel spat a long stream of tobacco juice into the grass, knocking the dusty hat he held against his knee at the same time. “Ain’t so young by the look of her titties,” he shouted.
“Shut it up!” yelled another man amid other and worse complaints. The crowd was eager. They did not want to tarry or amuse themselves. Someone bid and then someone else and the girl was pulled off the stage while a man held her arm in his bunched-up fist.
Daniel watched a young man of sixteen or seventeen years get sold to the slave trader for two hundred and twenty dollars after he had been made to describe his talents. “Which the Lord says we must not waste,” the auctioneer reminded him, shaking a plump gloved finger. Having spoken, the young man was thereafter silent, never taking his eyes off the yellow gloves, never opening his mouth or closing his eyes for a minute.
Next a pale boy was brought up and two or three people roared out that he should not be on the block. “This lad’s Irish!” someone yelled.
“Here now, gentlemen!” shouted the auctioneer. “Settle your wigs and hear the facts. This lad is the property of the householder like all the rest. How much am I offered for this pretty houseboy?” the auctioneer curtsied flirtatiously. The men gathered below the stage could see the boy’s dark mother come up close and reach up to him. Daniel felt his throat close again but a sound came out of it. He bent his head and moved forward.
The man who’d earlier spat turned to look at him. “Why don we let him go loose, is that it?” He smoothed his hair back with two fingers and put the dusty hat on his head. “But he don have true feelins like us, bein mixed with black. So let us get on with what we come here to do.”
Daniel sat through the auctioning of the boy’s mother, then, and he hated the men as they yelled up their bids but he told himself they would now get to the useful tools when a boy the size of Isaac climbed up on the stage without prodding. He was surely older than nine but no more than thirteen and he got up on the stage as if daring the men below to challenge his right to stand above them. From that height he stood looking down at the pink and white faces below as if he hoped to lock eyes with the one person in the crowd who dared to take charge of his fate – although if his fate can be charged to anything, thought Daniel, it can only be to God as He speaks through each one of us. It occurred to him then to pray for the boy but he did not know where to begin. Instead, he went on trying to organize his understanding of God’s plan and he felt his right arm go up as if pulled by a string.
There was sudden laughter. “Hey! Mister Quaker? Ain’t you wanta listen to the details before you bid?” someone hooted, and the laughter got louder and the right arm would not come down.
The auctioneer started the bidding at four hundred dollars. “And lookee over there to where I got my first offer! Somebody goin to raise it?” He joined the surrounding laughter, bobbing his head and showing teeth in his smile.
“No, no,” Daniel stuttered, trying to shake his head and yanking at his right sleeve with his left hand. “I haven’t got it,” he said, pulling the arm down forcefully as if it belonged to someone else.
The auctioneer in his shiny jacket, buttoned vest, and black hat had a face blazoned by sun or alcohol and he aimed it at Daniel, as if to inspect a man whose credit was in jeopardy. His hands in their yellow gloves made flourishes in front of his stomach. He walked to the edge of the stage and leaned out.
“Says he ain’t gotit!” the spitter of tobacco juice shouted.
“Got a fine pair of mares over yonder,” yelled another.
“Made the bid, dint he?”
“I saw it.”
The gangly boy stood on the stage without moving. He was watching his brother being put into coffles by the slave trader and, with another slave, marched away.
“His hand went up, it shore did!”
“For twice moren that nigger’s worth,” someone sneered while Daniel thought of his infant son, though he had no reason to connect the baby to this awful event. There was a pull on the back of his long Quaker coat. Then two men had hold of his arms and were guiding him off to one side of the crowd where there was a table and chair set under a tree. In order to make himself understood, Daniel enunciated carefully. “I have made an error.” More slowly, “A mistake. I must forfeit the bid.” Each word was a piece of gravel in his mouth because what kind of mistake is a hand raised up by the Lord, which it must have been?
“What cash you brung?” said one of the men, who chewed thoughtfully at a stick he held between his teeth and whose ri
ght eye was unfocused, as if it were coated with dust.
The second man said simply, “How much?”
Like most Quaker men, Daniel wore no beard and this, along with his outdated clothing, may have increased the antipathy of the men now gathering around him uttering threats. “I have some amount just over two hundred dollars,” he admitted quietly. “A little over, which I was told would buy me a plow and farming tools for my new homeplace. Which is all I have come for today. And which represents my entire life savings.” A Quaker must never entail debt.
“Might have done so too,” said a man who seemed to bear a grudge, for he nudged at Daniel with a stick.
“Except that you are in for two times what you brung,” said another, holding up two fingers and rubbing them together.
A Quaker does not swear or take an oath. Daniel licked his lips. He had been driven from the refuge of his people, but his moral nature was unchanged. He looked at the two businessmen and swallowed the last saliva in his mouth. His dry lips parted. “I give you my word,” he said, biting back shame. “I will raise what I owe.” His mind was swinging. Where could he find such a sum?
“Ain’t no use ta me.” The auctioneer had arrived at the table. “I’ll take a mare,” he said hard and clear.
There was general assent. Yes, that’s it, then. Yes. Yes.
Daniel took a step closer to his wagon. It sat on the other side of the fence but he seemed to be shaking, legs and hips, as he forced his knees to bend, his legs to lift his feet. The two businessmen moved along beside him, focusing on a wagon that was as worthless to them as it was valuable to Daniel, and then gazing at the horses. “That chestnut is nice enough,” one said.
Daniel was partly glad because Mulberry was slightly lame and it would not do to send her off with a careless man. Moving to his more beloved mare, he touched her muzzle and breathed into it and promised her that he would redeem her, that she would not be taken from him for more than a few days. “Even if I have to sell my land,” he told her. He said to the auctioneer, “I give her only as mortgage on my debt.”
The auctioneer winked at the listeners, who were waiting for drama. “Fine. Fine. And with the lame mare you can get yourself home at least,” he added with a note of benevolence. “The road to my place is marked out by old Eagle Rock when you come ta redeem.”
Daniel touched his right arm, which had betrayed him. He ran the criminal hand along his favourite mare’s warm flank. He put his head against her neck and again whispered his promise into her listening ear. By four o’clock that same afternoon, he was moving along the road behind Mulberry, who had been separated from Miss Patch as abruptly as the wiry boy in the back of the wagon had been separated from his brother and from everything else in his former life.
The ride home was slow and silent. All three creatures grieved. The boy thought about jumping out but decided that he was better off with the quiet man who had paid too much for him than with a search party and its hounds. Daniel lifted the reins and cracked them in the air over Mulberry’s head to console her, but his own head was very low on his chest. He could not imagine how to free himself from the wretched situation he was in. What he had done.
“I have five children living in a lean-to,” he said into space. “I need to put up a house and get a crop in, which means plowing up a field that was never broken yet. And I have no tools. Which is what I came for. And no plow.”
Behind him, the boy said nothing.
Was it possible to ascribe blame? An arm had no mind; it was only part of a man. A man was only a small part of God. And had he not been led?
“Can you build?” Daniel shouted over the noise of hooves and the sound of blowing, starting rain that came as cold, almost as ice.
“I ken not,” came the boy’s voice, sullen and forbidding, as if Daniel had taken the last friend that voice had ever loved in this world, which is just what Daniel had done by not bidding for his brother, who must be in a coffle on his way to Tennessee.
“You have planted.” Daniel made it a fact.
The long silence that followed seemed to go on until the sun dropped down behind trees and made its reflected shine on the wet black road. “I brung up pigs,” the boy said at last.
Daniel regretted the afternoon with such intensity that he decided it was his father’s warning that had doomed him to shame: A place of slavery … a place where no paid labour is to be had … If I had been innocent of such warnings, thought Daniel, my hand could not have been raised even by the Lord. He thought of Christ telling his disciples that one of them would deny Him … before the cock crows. He thought that Christ had created Peter’s downfall and that it might be best if he should never see his children again. It might be that he should drive on and on with the lame horse and the purchased boy and his shame and apprehension. What hope was there for a world in which earthly and heavenly parents created the holes their children fell into? He should never have come to the auction, where it was certain that his right hand would be raised up in protest or diligence, who knew which?
Had he raised it himself? No, he had not. It was beyond his imagination, this notion of the vile purchase he had made. A human being! A child! And yet, he was now the owner of a boy who could not be given freedom until Miss Patch had been redeemed. Without the boy, how would he ever make enough profit to bring his horse back? He had not a cent in the world. He had no tools and no way to build. Somehow he and this stranger must find, between them, a way to raise two hundred dollars by making with their four hands something valuable and worthy. And it must be quick! They must do it fast. Tobacco, he said to himself, is too slow. And so is wheat. But everything would be slow now, since it was taking twice as long to get back home without a second horse and the dark was falling hard with fresh, cold rain and he had purchased a growing boy for the trade of two hundred dollars and that much needed horse, which was, in and of itself, a sickening thing.
Certainly, this boy was not what he had bargained for, not that he had bargained in the first or even the second place. No, this boy was not what he needed and he at last began to pray. As usual, the prayer was without words, was even mentally silent. Then words sprang up of themselves: Thee did not choose me, but I chose thee that thee should go and bear fruit.
When she’d first shown Daniel into that long-ago parlour, his dear wife Rebecca had pointed him to a straight-backed chair, then gone quickly to a silver urn, poured cold coffee into a cup, and offered it without apology. “Luveen?” she’d called out. “Go tell my father he has a visitor from Lancaster. Someone selling something.” There was such disdain in her voice. Daniel had simply sat. Several minutes had simply passed. A piece of cake was brought into the room by the tall black woman who had met Daniel at the door and he had almost stood, unused as he was to the company of servants. The dog had lifted a paw, and behind her servant’s back Rebecca had surely winked. In the wagon, with its one horse and its sullen slave, Daniel remembered the wink and wondered what Rebecca would think of him now, parking his crippled horse under the rain-drenched trees with a tired wagon and its unwelcome cargo. He climbed down. There was a loaf of bread and Daniel split it and took his fill from the water flask, then handed it to the boy. “What is your name?”
Silence.
“Don’t you have a name?”
“Onesimus.”
Daniel tried to remember the story of Paul saving Philemon’s slave, Onesimus. The man is now a Christian, Paul had written to the runaway slave’s owner. So I send him back and hope that you receive him as a brother. Daniel hoped he was more Paul than Philemon. He said, “I shall call you Simus. I have my jacket that will do as my bed. Please take the blanket.” He climbed back into the wagon.
The boy was holding the flask without putting it to his lips. He took the blanket that was handed down to him. His brother must by now be on his way to some demon place fastened to a coffle and driven to a shed to be branded. Onesimus looked at the ground. He would not take the water but gave the flask back up
to Daniel. Any slave known to put his mouth on the rim of a white man’s cup would catch the whip. What man, white or black, didn’t know that?
Daniel thought he heard the moon rise up through the trees as if it were knocking against the branches. He thought he heard Miss Patch, her tender whinny, far away. What was he doing here in the darkness alone with a boy who meant nothing to him, a boy he had inadvertently purchased? He wanted to run back up the road on his own two feet and take back what belonged to him. But he would have to find two hundred dollars first and then he would have to find that accursed auctioneer. In his pocket, he had a receipt for his mare and on the receipt was the auctioneer’s name. Now the jacket was stretched over him and he was stretched out in the bed of his wagon as if he had fallen into it. Under the wagon, the boy was a shadow, doubling him. Thee did not choose me, but I chose thee. Daniel wondered what such a boy would dream. He thought that if his arm had been lifted by the inner voice that sometimes guided him, he might perhaps be doing God’s will.
They left the stopping place long before dawn, with Mulberry finding her way by feel or scent. The moon sank at last and the sun began its rise and the two went on in the wagon without anything more to eat although the lame horse had replenished herself. When they came to the road that led to his homeplace, Daniel turned. “It is a few miles more. Will you not sit up here with me?”
The boy leaned against the side of the wagon, resting his head on its edge and rubbing his eyes. Mulberry went on pulling the wagon over the road, which was steep now and hard to climb.
Mary was watching sparrows. They would soon make a nest and lay pretty eggs. “Yea, the sparrow hath found a house,” she said to them, although she couldn’t remember the rest. Then she spoke other words. “I watch and am as a sparrow alone upon the house top. Psalm 102:7,” she told the sparrows. “The other is Psalms something or other.” The sparrow’s house would have fledglings and in time the fledglings would flutter from branch to branch. A short time ago, she had watched baby Joseph learning to crawl, lurching and pocketing into the bed tick or onto a quilt spread out on the dirt floor. Now she watched the birds and thought how necessary it was to have parents, both male and female. While the father kept guard, the mother taught the babies what they needed to know just as her own mama would have taught baby Joseph the ways of this provoking world, with all its habits and contradictions. I watch and am as a sparrow while Papa is married to someone who does not belong with us, someone who had no mother to teach her, someone with no proper upbringing. She put her head down and smelled the new grass. She watched the sparrows. Even the sparrow finds a home, and the swallow a nest for herself. That was it. Her eyes felt small and she closed them and fell asleep.
The Purchase Page 3