Robbins stood at the closed door for a long time and Henry stood less than two feet away, wanting, for the first time ever, not to be anywhere near the white man who had come to mean so much to him. At last Robbins turned and looked briefly at Henry in the dim hall. Henry held a lamp the owners of the house had given him but the smoking lamp was poor with light. “What is today, Henry?” “Wednesday, Mr. Robbins.” “I see. And so far from midnight to make it Thursday.” “Yessir. A good ways from midnight.” Robbins opened the door.
Henry watched from the doorway, afraid to go and afraid to stay. Philomena was sitting on the side of the bed, one slipper on and the other across the room, and she did not look surprised to see Robbins. She was alone in the room and the two lamps there, one on the table beside the bed and the other atop the chiffarobe, gave abundant light to the room. Henry could see her face almost as well as he could have seen it under a midday sun.
“I don’t wanna go back. You hear me, William? I don’t wanna go back! Don’t make me.” He went to her and held her shoulders and she pulled away and fell back on the bed. “Where are the children?” Robbins asked and she managed, after a time, to raise her finger and flick it feebly toward the wall, toward the room on the other side of the wall. He looked at the wall as if he could see through it and into the other room and when he looked back at her he was angrier than the moment before. He picked her up by the shoulders and when she began to wiggle, he slapped her. She slapped him, the first time only a soft tap but the second had the force of a punch and it turned his head. He released one of her shoulders and showed her his fist, then he punched her and he immediately was sickened. She dropped her arms and fell back on the bed. Henry, seeing Philomena dissolve into nothing, screamed and Robbins then remembered he had not come alone.
Henry continued to scream until Robbins reached him and told him to be quiet. “Stop that! Stop that, I say!”
“But she dead,” Henry said, looking around Robbins and pointing at the still Philomena.
“She ain’t no more dead than you or me.” Robbins held him gently by the throat. “Now hush that ruckus.” Robbins went back to Philomena and Henry followed him. The man sat on the bed and held Philomena and shook her, and with each moment, the sickening subsided. Henry watched and said nothing. “Go find them children,” Robbins said. “In the next room. Go find em and see to em.” He watched Henry leave and wished he had not told him to go. I am in this nigger house, he thought, surrounded by niggers. He watched the pulsing vein in her neck, counting the beats. When the number was nearing 75, he closed his eyes but went on counting.
Henry did not see the partly opened door to the left leading to the room where the children were. He went out into the hall to the right, never thought to knock and simply pushed open the door and saw only darkness. He did not sense that the children were there and went to the door on the other side of Philomena’s room and opened that door. Dora and Louis were in the bed and the girl was holding her brother. They had heard their mother shouting and then their father shouting and then they had heard Henry screaming.
He went to them and told them everything would be fine and, within a few minutes, they began to believe him. He had made their shoes, which were in a little pile in the corner. He gave them water and they drank as if it were the first in a very long time. This was the beginning of why Louis would get down into the hole without a second thought and dig for some while to help make Henry’s grave. Without even knowing why, Henry began to sing to them and gradually Dora was able to let go of her brother.
Robbins found Henry kneeling beside the bed, still singing. Henry had found a piece of string from somewhere and with the string he was making and unmaking Jacob’s Ladder, the one thing Rita, his second mother, had known how to do with string.
“I’m just a little somebody and I don’t care a bit,” he kept singing. “I’m just a little somebody and I don’t care. A little somebody . . .” Robbins stood in the doorway and listened. “I’m just a little somebody and I don’t care a bit.” He wondered if his wife back home was asleep. Someone across the hall laughed and he remembered the laugh from a slave working in his fields. Robbins touched the door with his fist and watched it open wide and then wider.
Dora saw him first and bounded out of the bed and into his arms. He kissed her cheek. She held on to him until he took her back to the bed and put her down. He touched Louis’s cheek, but the boy did not respond because Henry had given him the string and that was all the little boy knew for that moment.
“I want you to stay with em tonight, Henry,” Robbins said, pulling the covers up to Dora’s neck and blowing out the lamp on her side of the bed. “Stay with em and keep em peaceful. Just stay with em.”
“Yessir.”
He went to Louis’s side of the bed and laid him down and pulled the covers up to his neck. “Yall listen to Henry,” he told them. He took a few blankets piled on a chair and told Henry to lie beside the bed, and Henry took off the shoes he himself had made and he lay down and Robbins blew out the candle at Louis’s side of the bed and left the room.
The owners of the boardinghouse were with Philomena when he returned to her room. The side of her face was bloating, turning purple with each moment, but he didn’t know what color it was because the lamp on that side of the room had gone out. “I want somebody to attend to that,” Robbins said to the husband and then repeated himself to the wife, nodding all the while in the direction of the injury. “We will,” the woman said. “We will,” the husband said. He went to the bed and thought for the first time that what he felt for Philomena might well doom him. His wife liked to retire early, but his daughter would stay on in the parlor to read or to keep up with her correspondence. The downstairs of his mansion his daughter called the South and the upstairs she called the North. “Go to the East, Mama,” Patience, the daughter, would say years later on that day Dora came to the mansion. It was the day Patience thought William Robbins was near death. “Go to the East and I will seek you out there. Please, Mama. Please, sweetheart.” Dora would be standing in the mansion doorway. The two daughters had never seen each other before that day. “Go to the East and I will seek you out, Mama.”
Robbins knew Philomena would not be able to travel in the morning and he decided then that he would have to leave her. And he did not want his children to see her face. He told the boardinghouse owners that he wanted to see that Philomena got back to Manchester. “I see to it,” the man said. “I got somebody and we see to it.” Robbins had no faith in the man’s word but it would have to do. “She be ready in a day or two,” the woman said, holding Philomena’s chin and inspecting the injury. Even as they all spoke and the man and the wife tried to assure him that they would bring Philomena to him, he began to fear that he would not see her again. He looked at her and could not take his eyes from her. He hoped that her love for their children would compel her back to Manchester. He dared not hope that any love for him would do it.
He went back to the white hotel he had registered in earlier and drank a good bit, though that had not been his intention when he first entered the Negro boardinghouse. He awoke about eight, later than he would have liked, and returned with his horse to the boardinghouse and was surprised to see that Henry had already made arrangements for the trip. He had secured a surrey for himself and the two children and for Philomena, since he had not known that she would not be returning with them. The surrey would be pulled by the horse Henry came in on and another horse he had gotten from a stable nearby, using the name of William Robbins as currency because he had come to Richmond with little money of his own. After seeing to Philomena, Robbins found the children in their room, fed and rested and full of giggles. He took them to Philomena, for the swelling in her cheek had subsided, and then he took them out and down to the carriage. Philomena slept through their visit.
They left for Manchester near about ten o’clock. At five that day they stopped at a house close to Appomattox, about halfway to their destination, and
at that house they stayed the night. The owner of the house, a white man of forty-nine then married to his fourth wife, who was the sister of his dead second wife, was used to much traffic on the road, had made a good life catering to it. He knew Robbins well enough to let him keep three Negroes in the room next to Robbins and he didn’t charge him any extra for having Negroes in the place and not in the barn.
Henry drove the surrey the whole way to Manchester, Louis beside him and Dora in the back, a cloth doll for company, and for a good bit of the way Robbins rode Sir Guilderham beside them. Once, way on the other side of Appomattox, Dora looked out and up at him. He smiled at her and then, after about half a mile, told Henry to stop and he tied the horse to the back of the carriage and he got in with Dora and she moved without words into his arms. Robbins looked at the back of Henry’s head, at the way Louis watched him, as if this was all a lesson he would later be tested on. Dora dozed and Robbins thought that this would be a good way for him to die, right there, on the road home with his children. The only thing to make it better would be to have his daughter Patience on the other side of him. Looking at the back of Henry absorbed in his work, it came to him like something he had long been avoiding, that the world would not be very good to the children he had had with Philomena, but whatever world it would be, he wanted Henry in it for them.
They arrived at the house he bought for Philomena a little after sundown of the second day of their trip. Philomena’s mother was at the door, waiting. She had been seeing a man from a nearby plantation and he had just left after she fed him. That man liked the banjo, which he played for her all the time, but it had a strange sound because it was missing a string. The children’s grandmother came down to the surrey and made quite a fuss over the two children, whom she called her little hushpuppies. Her daughter owned her but that didn’t mean anything between them.
When Henry, at twenty, bought his first piece of land from Robbins, he told his parents right off. The land was miles from where they lived but a short ride from Robbins’s plantation, though it was not connected. By the time he died he would own all the land between him and Robbins so that there was nothing separating what they owned. He had supper with Mildred and Augustus the day of the land sale. But the day he bought from Robbins his first slave, Moses, he did not go to their house and he did not go to them for a long time. He spent that first day of ownership with Robbins, and Moses and he and the white man planned where he would build his house. He did not have a wife, was not even courting anyone. When he told his parents about Moses, the house—two floors and half as large as Robbins’s—was a third completed, and still he did not have a wife.
When the house was half done, Robbins, one afternoon in early fall, rode up on a horse sired by Sir Guilderham and stopped, watching Henry and Moses tussling in front of the unfinished house. Henry and Moses had not noticed him come up, and the dog, so used to seeing Robbins, had not bothered to bark.
“Henry,” he said at last, still on the horse. “Henry, come here.” He turned and rode away several yards and Henry came out, followed by Moses. When Robbins, still moving, turned his head to see Moses following, anger appeared on his face. He shouted to Moses, “I said ‘Henry, come here.’ If Ida wanted you, Ida said for you to come.”
Moses stopped and Henry looked back at him. Robbins rode slowly on, then a bit faster, and Henry finally had to run to keep up. When Robbins had come to the road again, he stopped but did not turn around. When Henry reached Robbins, he could hardly catch his breath. He leaned over behind Robbins, his hands on his knees. “Yessir?” Henry kept saying. “Yessir?” Robbins still did not turn around and Henry went around to face him, putting a hand up to the horse’s forehead, which was a good two feet higher than his own head.
“Yessir?”
“Who is that?” Robbins said, raising his gloved hand and pointing his thumb over his shoulder. “Who is that you playin with like children in the dirt?”
“That Moses. You know Moses, Mr. Robbins.” Moses had been his slave for less than six months.
“I know you bought a slave from me to do what a slave is supposed to do. I know that much.”
“Yessir.”
“Henry,” Robbins said, looking not at him but out to the other side of the road, “the law will protect you as a master to your slave, and it will not flinch when it protects you. That protection lasts from here”—and he pointed to an imaginary place in the road—“all the way to the death of that property”—and he pointed to a place a few feet from the first place. “But the law expects you to know what is master and what is slave. And it does not matter if you are not much more darker than your slave. The law is blind to that. You are the master and that is all the law wants to know. The law will come to you and stand behind you. But if you roll around and be a playmate to your property, and your property turns round and bites you, the law will come to you still, but it will not come with the full heart and all the deliberate speed that you will need. You will have failed in your part of the bargain. You will have pointed to the line that separates you from your property and told your property that the line does not matter.” Henry pulled his hand down from the horse’s forehead. “You are rollin round now, today, with property you have a slip of paper on. How will you act when you have ten slips of paper, fifty slips of paper? How will you act, Henry, when you have a hundred slips of paper? Will you still be rollin in the dirt with them?”
Robbins spurred the horse and said nothing more. Henry watched them, the man and the horse, and then looked over at Moses, who waved, ready to return to work. Moses, with a saw in his hand, did a little dance. Henry went to him.
“We can get in a good bit fore dark,” Moses said and lifted the saw high above his head.
“We ain’t workin no more today.”
“What? But why not?”
“I said no more, Moses.”
“But we got good light here. We got good day here, Massa.”
Henry stepped to him, took the saw and slapped him once, and when the pain begin to set in on Moses’s face, he slapped him again. “Why don’t you never do what I tell you to do? Why is that, Moses?”
“I do. I always do what you tell me to do, Massa.”
“Nigger, you don’t. You never do.”
Moses felt himself beginning to sink in the dirt. He lifted one foot and placed it elsewhere, hoping that would be better, but it wasn’t. He wanted to move the other foot, but that would have been too much—as it was, moving the first foot was done without permission.
“You just do what I tell you from now on,” Henry said. He dropped the saw on the ground. He bent down and picked it up and looked for a long time at the tool, at the teeth all in a row, at the way they marched finely up to the wooden handle. He dropped the saw again and looked down at it. “Go get my horse with the saddle on top of it,” Henry said, still looking at the saw. “Go get my horse.” “Yessir, I will.” Moses soon came with the animal.
Henry mounted.
“I be back later. Maybe I be back tomorrow. But I want you here doin right when I get back, doin good.” The horse walked off. Henry was many yards from his place when he remembered that he had left his hat, but the day had been a pleasant one and he figured he could get by without it. It was not many more feet beyond that point that he heard the sounds of Moses working. The birds of the day began to chirp, and in little more than a mile, the bird songs had replaced completely the sound of the man working behind him. Then, in little more than another quarter-mile, a mule was honking, joined by the lowing of a cow, and as he rode on farther, the crickets came in, and then the birds and the cow mooing and the crickets and the evening air all came together.
Moses finished the kitchen floor before he lay down to sleep. The darkness came on but he felt some need to complete the work and set up candles and a few lanterns about the room and worked on with their flickering help and with some inner sense of what should go where. It was a sense that would have served him somewhat even if he had
toiled in perfect darkness. And gradually, as the evening and night went on, he forgot everything but what he was doing. There was not time and there was not darkness out there beyond the room. There was no empty stomach. There was only work. The sweat came down his face and he licked at the sweat that came near his mouth and drank it. When the work of that day—the thirty-third since the first nail was pounded into wood—was done, he ate some biscuits and three apples and drank all the water his body could hold. He went out to the cabin he and Henry had shared, and he knew that now the cabin would be his alone. Tomorrow, or whenever his master returned, they, he and Henry, could move through from the kitchen toward the front of the house. They might even make it to the beginning of the second floor, and in one of those rooms on the first floor, whether the completed dining room or the parlor, Henry would sleep. Moses stopped at the door of the cabin and looked up at the night. His grandmother, or a woman who told the world she was his grandmother before she was sold away, had tried to tell him about the stars (“Them stars can guide you”), but he had no head for the stars. Now he looked at them and he raised his hand to his eyes to shade them, just the way he would have done if it were the middle of the sunniest day. He was standing less than ten feet from the spot where he would die one morning.
Leaving Henry’s place that day, Robbins went to Fern Elston’s before going home to his wife and daughter. What had always surprised him was that he had never seen as many flaws in Henry as he had seen in white men who had enough possessions in their lives to bring on the envious wrath of the gods. Robbins had always believed that the fewer flaws in a man, the fewer doors there were for the gods to enter a man’s life and pull him down to nothing. And not seeing as many failings, Robbins had thought Henry would make a way for himself where even some good and strong white men had faltered and been ground back down to dust. But over the years he had seen enough wrong in the way Henry sometimes conducted himself to worry him. And no failing had worried him more since the day he brought Henry into his life than wrestling around with the slave Moses like some common nigger in from the field after a hard day. How could anyone, white or not white, think that he could hold on to his land and servants and his future if he thought himself no higher than what he owned? The gods, the changeable gods, hated a man with so much, but they hated more a man who did not appreciate how high they had pulled him up from the dust.
The Known World (2004 Pulitzer Prize) Page 13