Elias stood up and brushed the shavings from his shirt and pants. He was alone in the lane. The silent pledge he had made to Henry once upon a time was now no more. But that did not matter, dead man or no dead man. Elias looked up and found the winking stars in a clear part of the sky that were supposed to have guided him away. How ready he had been, at ease, legs powerful, heart desperate to beat under another moon and sun. He sat down again and put the doll inside his shirt and leaned over to pick up another piece of wood. It was nearing nine-thirty. As he took up the knife, Alice came out of her cabin and danced down the lane and stood before him with her hands on her hips. They had rarely spoken because nothing she said ever made sense. “Whatcha makin now?” she said, surprising him. “Somethin for my boy.” “Well, you just make it good, make it to last,” Alice said. He waited for her to follow up with some nonsense, but she just stood as she had been. Maybe the moon, or the lack of it, determined her ways. “Don’t be late,” Elias said to her. “Don’t be late goin out and about.” “Don’t you be late neither,” she said and danced away. He watched her, and for the first time he was afraid for her. He would begin at the horse’s head, which would be the hardest part. No boat. Why put such a notion in a boy’s head anyway? He put the wood in his left hand and the knife in his right, and then he began to cry. “Don’t be late,” he said over and over again. “Don’t be late.”
Two days after Henry bought Elias in 1847 from the white newlyweds passing through from Bath County, Elias found Celeste sitting on the ground. He knew only Moses and the men in his cabin, but had seen her from afar, limping here and there. She seemed to have been playing with or helping two children who were now skipping away. “Come on, Celeste,” the children said. “I be there directly,” she said. She struggled to get to her feet and after many tries she was standing. She stood quietly and unmoving for some time, looking down at her feet covered by her long green frock. The children called to her but she did not move. Finally she went off, taking one lumbering step after another. He watched the whole time but had not moved to help her. Escaping had been his only thought since he had come from Bath with the newlyweds who had argued with each other the whole way, and he didn’t want to be touched by any other notion. He turned and thought he was getting away before she noticed him, but she had first sensed and then seen him and she would not forget it. She had not wanted his help, but she felt he was watching a show with a cripple woman and had enjoyed it and that was not right.
She had been bought for $387 a year or so before him, but as long as she had been on the plantation, Celeste had not been known by anyone to be a hurtful woman. She never said “Master” or “Mistress” to Henry or Caldonia; just “Mr.” and “Ma’am,” her small way of saying no to everything. She had the best heart, people said of Celeste. But over the next weeks she came to resent Elias for being a cripple woman watcher and could not stop herself from being mean to him whenever she could. He would be eating his dinner at the edge of a field off to himself and she would go out of her way to limp by him and work up as much dust as she could, dirtying his food. She liked to work a row opposite one he was on just to show others how slow he was. She told people he was a lazy somebody and she didn’t mind if he heard her. When she walked down the lane and he was standing in her way, she limped faster and dared him not to move. “What you do to that woman,” someone funned him after seeing Elias nearly run over, “for her to rue the day you was ever born?”
Toward the end of his second week on the Townsend plantation, Elias became ill, suffering headaches that hammered him senseless. He could not keep food in his stomach, and there were unaccountable blisters on the soles of his feet. At times, he had to lean over in a furrow to collect himself, as some rush of pain overwhelmed and seemed to want to tear him apart right where he stood. He knew that in order to slip away one night he had to be seen as reliable, but his work suffered with his sickness and Moses also took to calling him a lazy man. “You mighta bought a pig in a poke, Master,” he told Henry one day. Elias would wake in the night and hear the wind counting off the days he had to live. “Better play. Better play,” the wind told him, “cause ain’t no more after today.”
He had never been one to believe in root work, but he began to feel that Celeste was doing something to him and that it would lead to his death, a long way from freedom. He dreamed she had gotten her limp by wrestling with the devil. But she wasn’t one for root work, and because she was the kind of woman she was, her resentment against him had actually dissipated after the third week. To her he had become just another man who couldn’t stand to be around a cripple woman. By the fourth week, she would see him bent over in a furrow and feel sorry for him.
Then, toward the middle of the fifth week, he began to improve and the wind stopped talking to him. He had been weakened by the illness, however, and tried to restore himself by working harder and longer in the fields, often staying there long after Moses told him he was finished for the day. But even by the ninth and tenth weeks his body was not what it had been, and by the fourth month, he began to despair. He continued planning to run away, but he worried that he might not have the strength to run for miles, might not be able to turn and break the necks of any dogs chasing him.
In his fourth month there, he got up off his pallet about midnight and walked away, following the stars that pointed north. This was in the time when Sheriff John Skiffington’s patrollers were getting used to their new jobs. Elias got about five miles from the Townsend place when he began losing his strength. He ate most of the hoe cakes he brought with him, thinking the problem was a body rebellious due to hunger. He stopped as often as he could to collect himself but each time he started up again, he was weaker than before. At about seven miles he was nearly reduced to crawling, and at the eighth mile he collapsed. He awoke, stretched out in the road, to hear a slow horse coming his way. Uncertain which way the horse was coming from, he began crawling toward the side of the road where tall grass waited. He parted the grass and made a place for himself and heard the horse come up and stop. It was William Robbins on Sir Guilderham. “Whatever you are, I know you are there,” Robbins said. “Come out if you’re nigger, and if you are white, tell me your name and I’ll leave you to it.”
Robbins waited for several minutes and then opened his coat and took out his single-shot pistol. “Then you are nigger and not white,” he said. He fired once into the grass, grazing Elias’s left thigh. Elias did not move and after a short while Robbins said, taking out another pistol, “I smell your blood all the way over here. If you don’t want me to draw more of it, rise up and come to me.” Robbins aimed and as he did, Elias got to his feet, his arms high in the air, his fingers spread out. It was not a full moon but it was bright enough for Robbins to see Elias’s fingers wiggling nervously. The blood was flowing slowly down his leg.
“You free or slave?”
“Slave.”
“And no pass. I can tell that just from the smell of fear in your blood. Who do you belong to?”
“Master Henry Townsend, sir.” The “sir” was so he would not be shot again just out of pure meanness.
“Come here. What you out here cattin around for?”
“No, sir.” Elias started to move but found his left leg mired in a puddle of blood and he had to pick his leg up to go forward. When he reached Robbins, the white man leaned down and punched him as hard as he could in the jaw and Elias fell back. Then he took two quick steps toward Robbins, thinking that if he killed the white man, there was no witness except the horse. But Robbins cocked the second gun and held it out. Elias stopped.
“I know Henry Townsend,” Robbins said, “and if I have to pay for a dead one, then that is what I will do. Come here.” He held the gun an inch from Elias’s face and punched him again. Elias fell. “If you live to be a hundred, know not to run up on a white man.”
The word seemed to go out among the slaves at Henry’s place even before most of them had come out of their cabins: Somebody done got a
way. It was Sunday and Moses slept late and got the word last. People were happy for Elias. “Somebody’s soul done flew away. Whooossh . . . Feel that breeze from them wings. Lord almighty.” Stamford could not place Elias’s face and thought he was the dark-skinned fellow with a June-bug-sized mole on his left cheek until Delphie reminded him that Henry sold that man away because the man with the mole liked to fight everybody. “Was fightin from the time he got up till the time he shut his eyes. Would see his shadow pesterin after him and started hittin that. Po thing. Lord . . . Was fightin even you, Stamford,” Delphie said. “Hmmp!” Stamford said. “He musta lost that fight then. Musta got his head knocked off and thas why he was sold off. Didn’t have no head and couldn’t work. Had to sell that fool for scrapple meat.” Delphie said, “That ain’t the way I member it.” “Then you memberin wrong,” Stamford said and held his fists out to her to show what the man with the mole had had to contend with. This was in the days when Stamford had another young woman to be with, in the days before Gloria. “Get outa my face with them things, man,” Delphie said. The few children then on the Townsend place took much of their happiness from the adults and they began funning Stamford. The doomed Luke, then eleven, the boy who would be worked to death, shared a song he had learned from his mother—“I’m over here, I’m over there, I ain’t nowhere . . .” Celeste heard about the runaway Elias as she was eating the last of her ash cakes. She did not like Elias but she, too, was happy for him. What she herself could not have she always wished for someone else, so her food went down well that morning. After he got the word, after he ate his breakfast, Moses went up and told Henry, “Master, that new nigger’s in the wind.”
On Sundays, a preacher, a free man named Valtims Moffett, came over and held services for the slaves, in the barn when it was cold and out along the lane when the weather was nice. He would preach for some fifteen minutes and then everyone would sing two or three songs. The day Robbins caught Elias was a day of nice weather, not too warm, though the preacher liked to say that every day was a good day for God’s word. The preacher was a large man who suffered with gout and rheumatism, which, he was quick to tell people, “God put upon me the same way he put the cross on our savior Jesus Christ.” Some mornings it took him more than an hour to get out of bed and dressed. He had a wife and one slave to his name, but the wife, Helen, was a tiny woman and so was their slave, Pauline, full sister to the wife, and both of them together could do only so much with a large man with a cross to bear. The preacher was quite late that Sunday morning after Elias ran away, but he was not as late as he was the day Henry was buried.
Moses had just told Henry that Elias was gone when they heard Robbins’s voice and they both went around the side of the house to the front. Robbins had awakened that morning and not remembered the encounter with Elias the night before, that he had taken Elias back to his plantation and chained him to the back porch. His cook came in and reminded him at the breakfast table.
Robbins now said to Henry, “Good mornin. Sweet good mornin. Are you and Caldonia well?” Elias, chained, stood next to Robbins, only inches from his booted foot in the stirrup.
“Yessir, Mr. Robbins, we well enough,” Henry said.
“I have something of yours,” Robbins said, and he kicked Elias and the slave fell to the ground. “Picked him up on the road home last night. He has a wound somewhere in his leg, but it won’t kill him and it won’t amount to anything if you decide to sell him off one day. Less he had a very noticeable limp.” He laughed, a little joke between them, because Robbins was even less inclined those days to sell a slave and that was what he always advised Henry. He had said once, “Niggers appreciate in value, so appreciate them.”
“I see,” Henry said. Moses was behind him. “Help him up, Moses. You wanna come in, Mr. Robbins.” Moses picked Elias up by the shoulders and gave him a little bit of a smile and reminded Elias with the smile and his eyes that he never liked him.
“No, not today, Henry. Not today, but tell Caldonia I will come back this way soon. I promise.” The land they stood on had once belonged to Robbins, sold to Henry at a price far cheaper than Robbins had ever sold anything, save the slaves Toby and his sister Mindy. Robbins looked once at the side of Elias’s head and nodded to Henry. Henry told him good day. Robbins raised the reins up from his lap and pulled gently and the horse, in a slow and beautiful move of its grand head and neck, the glinting bit in its mouth a kind of accent to all that grandness, turned, and they left, prancing away down to the road, where they took off in a full gallop. The glint would stay forever in Elias’s mind. The night his second child was born he would hold him, still wet from fighting into life, and the fire from the hearth would reflect off that wetness and that glint would come forward again until he blinked it away.
Henry went to Elias and slapped him. “This is a hurtful disappointment to me. What I’m gonna do with you? What in the hell I’m gonna do with you? If you want a hard life, I will oblige.” “I will oblige” was a favorite phrase of Fern Elston’s during her lessons, heard by Henry the first time as he sat with her in her parlor dominated by trees, a peach and a magnolia, she and her servants had managed to domesticate. Her husband the gambler had seen it done by foreign people in a Richmond whorehouse and brought the technique back to Manchester County. “Is that what you want?” Henry asked. “I will oblige you with a hard life.” The trees in Fern’s house disoriented most people, those used to the inside always being inside and the outside always being outside. People said nice things about the trees to Fern even as their minds were swirling. Those people were all free Negroes because white people never came to Fern’s place. Henry had feared that Caldonia might want that done with their parlor.
“No, Marse.” Elias was still chained, Robbins having forgotten that the chains belonged to him. Other slaves had come out and were watching. Celeste was just behind the first row of people and Stamford twisted his shoulder a bit so she could see.
“You sure don’t act like it,” Henry said. Once you own them, once you own even one, you will never be alone, Robbins had told Henry after Henry purchased Moses from him. Knowing how painful loneliness could be, having been separated as a child from Augustus and then Mildred, Henry had thought that a good thing, never to be alone, to always have someone. Henry said to Elias, “If you want a good life, I will oblige that, too.” Fed by light streaming in from windows that went from the floor to a foot shy of the ceiling, the trees in Fern’s parlor grew to a height of about eight or nine feet, then stopped, as if on command. The peaches born on the tree were very tiny, could fit on a man’s thumb, and they were very sweet, too sweet for a pie or cobbler if the cook could manage to collect enough of them. The magnolia blossoms were also small, so beautiful that Fern’s gambling husband said he would frame them if they were pictures.
“Moses,” Henry said, “take him and chain him till I decide if he wants a good life or a bad life.” Since the day was a good one and Valtims Moffett the preacher would hold the services in the lane, Moses chained Elias in the large barn. “You want a good life or a bad life?” Moses mocked and then left him.
His first hours in the stall were spent thinking how he could kill everyone around him, first everyone on the plantation, then everyone in the county, in Virginia. Colored and white. He tried not to move the chains because the sound of their rattling hurt his ears, spread a dryness throughout his mouth. He could stand comfortably enough, if he wanted to stand all the time facing that section of the barn wall, the one section that was without a hole through which he could see the outside. When Elias sat, he found he could twist himself a little away from the wall, but his hands were suspended about level with his face and it was impossible to lie down. For a long time he looked up at the rafters, at the sparrows coming and going to the nest they were building. Engaged in a simple task of living—take straw to the nest, go back for more. The sun came in on them but there was not much of it near where their nest was. He wondered if he would be there long enough f
or the birds to have eggs, then chicks, to see the chicks grow and then make their own nests. Take straw to the nest, go back for more. To see the grandchildren sparrows become parents. He could wring the neck of everyone on the plantation, it was just a matter of whether to start with Moses or the master. Moses’s neck was thicker. The children’s necks would be the hardest. But over and done with in a snap. He could close his eyes tight with them, with the children, and with the old people. The women would scream the loudest, but God, being the kind of God he was, would give him strength.
He was very tired, not having slept at Robbins’s place. When he leaned his head forward and closed his eyes, his neck soon stiffened and he finally had to lean his head back as far as he could and accept what relief came with that. He closed his eyes but there was no sleep, not even the jittery dozing that had come at Robbins’s place.
Not long before Moffett arrived, Elias opened his eyes and saw a boy watching him. When the boy saw him open his eyes, he came closer, asking, “You want some water?”
Elias closed his eyes again and did not answer because he did not want to spare anybody’s neck.
“You want some water?”
The Known World (2004 Pulitzer Prize) Page 9