The Known World

by Edward P. Jones

  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 th
e 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.

  “Then you ready?” Counsel said.

  “Yes, I be ready,” Moses said, not offering a “Master” or even a “Mister,” but just saying again, “I be ready.” Counsel didn’t notice that he wasn’t getting a “Master” or a “Mister.” They both looked at Skiffington’s body. Moses thought the white man would want to take the dead white man with them. He informed Counsel that Mildred’s place did not have a wagon to carry the dead man. Skiffington’s horse had wandered off.

  “That so?” Counsel said about the missing wagon. He had never intended to take Skiffington with them. There would be time enough to come back and get him. “That so?” Moses nodded. “If you’ve done all your business in there, we may as well leave. So les you and me go,” Counsel said as Moses walked toward him and held out his hands to be roped and tied.

  Three years and nine months after John Skiffington was killed, Minerva Skiffington, the young woman who had been like a daughter to him, came out of a butcher shop eight blocks from the Philadelphia town hall and turned left. It was, as usual, a day of crowds. She lifted the tea towel over that morning’s purchases in her basket with the notion that she was forgetting something. She made her way to the druggist for the soap she and Winifred Skiffington, John’s widow, liked. Her skin had thrived once freed of the lye-based soap that was the standard in Virginia. They lived with Winifred’s sister, who herself was a widow, and with John’s father, Carl.

  At the corner, one block from the druggist, Minerva stepped without looking into the street and was nearly knocked over by a white man on a horse. “Watch how you step!” the man shouted. Minerva screamed and was pulled back in time by someone behind her. She turned around to see a very dark black man a head and a half taller than she was. “You could get killed,” the young man said. He was the darkest handsome man she had ever seen. “You could get killed by a horse,” he said and let go of her shoulders. “Go on with all care,” he said and she nodded. “Take all care.” He raised his hat good-bye and stepped around her and went across the street and down the block.

  Watching him blend into the crowd, Minerva crossed, and as she did, a pack of three dogs, smelling the purchases from the butcher, began following her. She walked right past the druggist, and near the end of that block, the black man turned around and she stopped and the dogs behind her stopped. She followed the man for one more block. The dogs continued to follow her. The dogs knew that people made mistakes and that at any moment the basket could become vulnerable.

  The man turned around again just three blocks before the town hall and seemed only half surprised to see her. He came toward her and she bent to set the basket on the ground. The dogs came closer and she noticed them and pulled the tea towel away to make it easier for them. The man walked to her and people passed on either side of them. “Afraid of all them horses?” he said. “I’m not afraid of any horses,” she said, “or anything like that.”

  She began telling him her story and he took her to the house where he lived with his parents and two sisters, one younger than Minerva and one older. Three days later the man saw a poster on a building and a similar one just two blocks away. He took the second poster to Minerva, to the room she had been sharing with the younger of his sisters. Minerva read the poster again and again. The next day she and the man went to the constabulary to tell the authorities that she was not missing and that she was not dead. She was, she said, nothing more than a free woman in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

  The black man and his family would try for the longest to get her to go to Winifred to explain her new life but Minerva refused.

  The posters read: “Lost Or Harmed In Some Unknown Way On The Streets Of This City-A Precious Loved One.” They gave Minerva’s name, height, age, everything needed to identify her. A daguerreotype of Winifred and Minerva had been taken not long after they came to Philadelphia, both women sitting side by side in the photographer’s studio. The poster reproduced that portion of the photograph that contained Minerva. But at the bottom of the posters, like some kind of afterthought, in words much smaller than everything else on the poster, was the line “Will Answer To The Name Minnie.” And so Minerva did not see Winifred Skiffington again for a very long time.

  It was the “Will Answer To,” of course, that had done it. Winifred had meant no bad thing by the words. With what little money she had, she hired a printer-an enlightened white immigrant from Savannah, Georgia-to make up the posters and put them up all about Philadelphia, “where any eye could see,” she had instructed the printer. She had meant only love with all the words, for she loved Minerva more than she loved any other human being in the world. But John Skiffington’s widow had been fifteen years in the South, in Manchester County, Virginia, and people down there just talked that way. She and the printer from Savannah would have told anyone that they didn’t mean any harm by it.

  April 12, 1861

  The City of Washington

  My Dearest and Most Loved Sister,

  I take pen in hand to-day to write you not more than a fortnight after I have arrived in a City that will either send me back in defeat to Virginia or will give me more Life than my Soul can contain. I may be able to postpone forever my need to be in New-York. My thoughts have been on you and Louis, as they have been since the long ago day you married. My promise to return to be with you when your child is born remains steadfast, no matter how much Life this
City affords me.

  The City is one mud hole after another, and there is filth as far as the eye can see. Virginia green has been reduced to a memory. It has only been in the past three days that I have summoned enough courage to go much beyond the five square blocks that make up what I have come to call my habitat. I am staying close to Home because the streets (I have trained myself to refrain from calling them roads), particularly after dark, are not safe for any man, even the ruffians have a hard time of it, and while I am prepared to use my pistol, I would rather hold it back just yet. Aside from the fear of man unleashed, there is also the general fear of such a large metropolis, and I am more than afraid of being lost in the City.

  My Accommodations are more than adequate, certainly far more than those some Immigrants must endure. How I came by those Accommodations is an interesting story, and I trust that you have the time, and the fortitude, to read how I came to be situated where I am.

  The friend whose name Louis gave me has been dead for a year, I learned to my disappointment. I was told there might be lodging at a Hotel on C Street. I was also told that while Senators and Congressmen lodged there, it was hospitable to people of our Race because that was the way the owners and proprietors wanted it. The door facing C Street took me into the Saloon, which is on the first floor of the Hotel. While the people of renown in this City take to hard drink by one in the afternoon, I satisfied myself with a lemon drink at the bar. As I neared the end of my drink, I took on more courage and looked about. The room was empty save myself and two other gentlemen, one a man of our Race at a table in the corner.

  I could see people coming and going from a room next to the saloon. I assumed it was the dining area of the establishment. I drank the last of my courage and decided to investigate that particular room. It was indeed a dining room, a rather large one with more than 30 tables, but I discovered that that was not why people were coming and going, Dear Sister. The dinner hours were over and supper was still a time away.