The Known World (2004 Pulitzer Prize)

by Edward P. Jones

  Travis shouted, “Seventy-five dollars. For the sake of God in his heaven, Darcy. Don’t let your nigger cheat me. Don’t let a nigger do white folks’ business.”

  “Then fifty dollars it is,” said Darcy, and he sniffed on the beaver feet again.

  “Shit! Then ten dollars for the mule,” Travis said.

  “What mule?” Darcy said.

  “That one right there.” Someone in the back of the large wagon shifted and Augustus heard the chains move. The child coughed again.

  “You can give me that for free, Harvey. I don’t think that’s much of a mule. Does he sing and dance in the moonlight?”

  “Don’t pee on me that way,” Travis said. “You can say like you done in the past that I don’t know nigger flesh. I’ll leave you safe with that one, but I do know my mules and horses. I do know them, Darcy. I want ten dollars. I deserve ten dollars.”

  “All right, Harvey. But that mule had better hold up. He’d better be worth every penny, cause if he ain’t I’m gonna sic the law on you.” Darcy laughed and right away he was joined in the laughter by Stennis. Then Travis laughed, followed by Oden. Stennis reached down between his knees to the floor of the wagon and brought up a strongbox. He unlocked it with a key on a string around his neck, took out some coins and put them in a tiny sack and tossed the sack to Travis.

  Darcy told Augustus to get down from the wagon and Augustus said no. “I’m a free man, mister.”

  “Yes yes yes. Happy Christmas happy Christmas. Now get down from there.”

  Augustus said he would not.

  “Stennis,” Darcy said, “why are we threatened on all sides by the incorrigible? Why do they threaten us every which way we turn? Have we displeased our God in some fashion?”

  “I don’t know, Marse. I done studied it and studied it and I still don’t know.”

  “But, Stennis, you would agree that we are threatened on all sides?”

  “Thas a true statement of what you talkin bout,” Stennis said.

  Travis holstered his pistol and dismounted and then Oden dismounted, still pointing the gun at Augustus. But before either of them was well settled on the ground, Stennis had jumped down from the wagon and over to Augustus in one effortless motion. He pulled Augustus from the wagon and began pummeling him.

  “Don’t bruise my fruit,” Darcy said. Stennis and Travis dragged Augustus around to the back of Darcy’s wagon and soon he was chained to the black man nearest the end of the wagon. Augustus wanted to say again that he was a free man, but he was in too much pain, and the words would not have come through anyway because his mouth was full of blood and no sooner had he spat some out, his mouth filled up again.

  Stennis unharnessed Augustus’s mule and tied it to the back of the wagon.

  “I will now,” Darcy said to Travis when he and Oden were back on their horses and Stennis was back on the wagon beside him, “I will now allow the wind to take me and mine away.” Darcy pulled the pelts tighter around his neck. “Oh, to be in Tennessee. That is my dream, Stennis.” “Thas mine, too.” “I call on God to grant me my dream, Stennis.” Their wagon had two horses and Stennis took up the reins and without a word the horses started going and the mule came along and as quick as anything the wagon had disappeared.

  It was nearing eleven o’clock. Barnum looked down to where Augustus had gone and said, “You oughtna done that, Harvey. You know you shouldna. You know that and I know that.” He turned to Oden. “Even Oden know that.”

  “I don’t know no such thing,” Oden said.

  “Then you should. Both yall shouldna done that. Why?”

  “That is not it,” Travis said to Barnum. “It is not why he and I are doin it, but why you aren’t doin it. That is the question for all time. Why a man, even somethin worthless like you, sees what is right and still refuses to do it.” Travis hawked and spat in the road. He said, “That is all the question we ever need to ask.” He was silent for a few moments. Then he said, “All right now,” and he handed a $20 gold piece to Barnum and tossed another $20 piece to Oden, who had holstered his gun after getting back on his horse and was able to catch the money with both hands.

  “I don’t want it,” Barnum said. “I won’t have it.” He handed the gold piece back to Travis.

  “You’ll take it and you’ll like it,” Travis said, taking out his pistol and again aiming it at Barnum. “You takin the nigger side now? Is that it? You steppin away from the white man and takin the nigger side? Thas what it is?”

  “Yeah, thas what it is,” Oden said. “Takin the nigger side against the white man?”

  “I just don’t want it, is all,” Barnum said.

  Travis rode up beside Barnum, heading south while Barnum was heading north. They were so close their thighs touched and the horses, uncomfortable being so close, began to twitch. Travis put his pistol to Barnum’s temple. “I said you’ll take it and like it.” He put the money inside Barnum’s shirt. “Happy Christmas happy Christmas,” he said.

  Barnum rode away.

  “And not a word a thanks, huh, Barnum?” Travis shouted after him. “I should report you to Skiffington for not carryin your patrollin duties through to the end. Not a word a thanks, Oden.”

  “No,” Oden said, “and not a good night either.”

  “We may as well shut the night down,” Travis said. “We have found, tried and punished the one criminal out here tonight. The one true runaway out and about. We may as well shut down the night, Oden.”

  “May as well,” and then Oden started up. “Give a greetin to Zara and the chaps for me, willya? Say I’m thinkin bout em.”

  “Yes. And a greetin to Tassock and them chaps for me,” Travis said. “I’ll see to the nigger’s wagon. Good night.”

  Oden said, “Good night.”

  Travis watched him go away and after a few minutes he dismounted and used the fire from Augustus’s lantern to set ablaze the straw in the back of the wagon that cushioned furniture on its way to new owners. When the fire was good and strong, Travis picked up kindling from the side of the road and threw it into the wagon. Then he mounted again and looked at the fire and did not move. He was determined to see the fire through to the end. The horse backed away as the fire grew hotter and Travis let him do it. After nearly an hour, Travis got off the animal, and walking with the reins in his hand, he stood at the fire. His horse was slightly uncomfortable but he turned and reassured it that everything was good and the animal calmed. It was the smartest beast he had ever known. He had taught it to back away when he said the word “Fire.” And at the word “Water” it knew to come forward again. Now the horse stood silent behind him and Travis thought he could hear its heart beating in the quiet with just the crackling of the fire and the insects communicating with one another as the only other sounds in the world. Every now and again the breath of the horse would blow Travis’s hair all about.

  He stayed to the end with the fire, watched as the metal on the wagon dropped as all the supporting wood gave way. About one that morning, the fire began to fail, then, nearly an hour later, it went to its dying side, with just a few strong embers here and there. He dropped the reins and took up dirt from the road and poured it over what was left of the fire. Smoke rose, gray, feeble, almost pointless because it went up only a foot or so and then dissipated.

  He had first come to know Augustus Townsend many years ago through a chair Augustus had made for a white man in the town of Manchester. The man weighed more than 400 pounds. “Over twenty-seven stones” was how the man put it. He was a bachelor, but that had nothing to do with his weight. Harvey Travis had gone to see the man one day about a woodcutting job. In the man’s parlor was Augustus’s chair, plain, not even painted, but smooth to the touch, and when the man sat in it, the chair did not complain, not one squeak. It just held up and did its job, waiting for the man to put on another 300 pounds. When the man left the room to get Travis’s money, Travis examined the chair, looked all about it trying to discover its secret. The chair gave
nothing. It was a very good chair. It was a chair worth stealing.

  Now, as the fire from the wagon died out, Travis turned around and wiped both hands on his pants and took up the reins. He had taught the horse to bob his head once at the words “Good morning.” “Good mornin,” he said to the horse and he bobbed once. The horse had also been taught to bob twice at “Good afternoon,” and with “Good evening” or “Good night,” it would bob three times. Travis said “Good mornin” again but felt the need for far more and he continued saying it and the horse continued bobbing his head. Then, as if “Good mornin” was not enough, he went through again and again all the greetings of a day and a night and the horse kept bobbing until, at last, the animal, exhausted, confused, lowered its head and did not respond anymore. Travis stood for a long while and rubbed the horse’s forehead. He had, as well, taught the horse to take him home. It helped when the road was a straight one, straight as the crows flew. Otherwise, the horse sometimes went down a road that was not toward home. Travis mounted. “Take me home,” he told the horse, who had just been through one of the longest days of his life. The horse took him home.

  7

  Job. Mongrels. Parting Shots.

  Somewhere between the town of Tunck near the Waal River, the Netherlands, and Johnston County, North Carolina—where Counsel Skiffington, cousin to Sheriff John Skiffington, and his people had done well for three generations—Saskia Wilhelm, a newlywed, contracted smallpox, though she was never to be ill from it a day in her life. Married three months, she and her husband, Thorbecke, who also contracted the disease, took two months to get across Europe to England. Thorbecke was not a good man, would not make a good husband and father, something Saskia’s father told her for the eleventh time a month before she ran away with Thorbecke. The love she had for Thorbecke, however; was a fevered one. Her mother told her it would burn itself out if she gave it time, but Saskia disappeared with Thorbecke and the love only grew. After what happened to her with him, in Europe, in America, she would never love another human being in the same way.

  The young man knew that along the Waal River he had a reputation worth nothing and during the trip across Europe he vowed, not to Saskia but to himself, that he would do better and one day return to Tunck and all the other towns along the Waal and have everyone say to his face how wrong they had been about him. He vowed this in France, but was sent away because of various misdeeds, and he vowed it in England, but was sent away from there as well. His punishment would not be prison, the English decided, but the pain of never being able to enjoy England again. Thorbecke made the vow again on the ship to New York, where he and Saskia settled more than five years before Henry Townsend died. Thorbecke would live to be seventy-three, but he never returned to the Waal, and neither did Saskia, who lived to be seventy-one. They died in places four thousand miles apart. She had no children when she died. Nothing had ever come along to tell her, as her mother and father might have told her, that there was a love beyond Thorbecke.

  Saskia had a sense of her mistake midway on the journey to America. She could have returned to her people in Tunck, but she still felt for him and thought all along the way that she would never be forgiven, might even be told just to return to her husband. At first, Thorbecke worked as a fisherman along the Hudson River, but the captain and his crew got the notion that Thorbecke was bad luck and he was sent on his way. He went to peddling in New York City after that, clothes, trinkets, fruits and vegetables. He failed again, as he had a viperous temper and drove away customers. Soon he began to live on just what Saskia was making as a maid with the wealthy in the city. One of those families was the one in the photograph that Calvin Newman owned. The frozen dog in the picture was named Otto, after Saskia’s own dog back in Tunck.

  She did not make much as a maid. Room and board were part of what she made, and that could not be turned into money for Thorbecke. He sent her into prostitution and then, after more than a year, he sold her to a man who took her and three other women, all of them from Europe, south, first to Philadelphia and, finally, to North Carolina, where that man’s father and mother had a brothel. In that brothel, Saskia worked and put Thorbecke away, then she put her people and all of Tunck away.

  It was there that Manfred Carlyle fell in love with her. By the time they met, a little less than three years before Henry died, love was not something Saskia cared about. She welcomed him each time he came, told him all that he wanted to hear, and though he forgot during the course of it that he was paying for the words, she did not. He came to her often, forever desperate to be near her. “I made the trip here in less time than I thought I would,” he said once, his face sweaty and red from the ride. “Then I will prepare your reward,” Saskia said.

  Carlyle was twenty years her senior, and he was one of Counsel Skiffington’s creditors. John Skiffington’s cousin allowed Carlyle to “air out” at his plantation from all the whiskey and sex at the brothel. Counsel had always been pleased to accommodate a man he owed money to and he told his overseer, Cameron Darr, to stay by Carlyle and make him happy. In a little cottage at the northeast corner of Counsel’s plantation, Carlyle would air out, sleeping for some fourteen hours a day. On what would be his last visit, Darr made him happy by drinking with him. After the three days of airing out, Carlyle went the twenty miles to his own place, to his family who were gray things after his colorful time with Saskia. Like Thorbecke and Saskia, Carlyle, too, would not suffer a day from smallpox, and his family and his slaves were spared as well. On that last trip from Counsel’s plantation, someone stole his horse while he peed down at a riverbank. “That shoulda told me somethin,” he told a friend months later, back at the brothel.

  Counsel Skiffington had suffered through three years of failed crops and then, in the fourth year, the year Saskia arrived in Johnston County, he began to prosper again. He considered it a good year if each slave produced $250 worth of crops but for those three terrible years, he got only $65 from each slave. The times had been so hard that the house servants, people with flawless skin and hands that had not known any blisters that mattered, were sent into the fields to work with the hope that more hands could wring more from the land. Carlyle was one of four creditors, only one of them a bank, and the creditors were kind to him during those years, though the bank sent a man out every other month to check on the health of the plantation. In that fourth year, the year of recovery, the profit from each slave was $300, and the bank man stopped coming. Counsel was on his way to an even better fifth year when, in the middle of a quiet night, Darr the overseer woke with a cough so loud that it woke Counsel’s wife, Belle, in their mansion a quarter of a mile away. Her husband slept on, being the kind of man—as Belle noted once in a letter to her cousin-in-law Winifred Skiffington—who could sleep through Jesus knocking on the door. Darr’s coughing woke the four Skiffington children, too, but Belle and two of the children’s slaves managed to get them back to sleep. She told the servants to return to bed and she did the same, but found sleep elusive even after the overseer’s coughing abated about an hour later.

  There was no more coughing from Darr after that first night, but one slave after another began to fall ill with headaches, chills, nausea and an overwhelming pain in their backs and limbs. “They are not pretendin,” the overseer told Counsel. “I would know pretendin and this ain’t it.” Darr, a man with five children, had very little beyond the life he had on the plantation, and he had so liked hearing Carlyle talk of all the places he had been and all the women who gave him heaven and how he settled at last on Saskia. Darr was not a drinking man but he had drunk that last time with Carlyle because it made his tales all the sweeter to hear, all the sweeter to remember. He told Counsel about the slaves not pretending a day or so before the dusty red spots began to appear on the slaves and on his own children. Counsel decided to bring in the white doctor, knowing that what the slaves had was not a one-week stumble on the way to a profitable fifth year.

  The doctor quarantined the place and it wa
sn’t long before word spread throughout the region that “A Child’s Dream,” as Belle had christened the plantation, was falling to pieces. The man from the bank, fearing that his employer would make him go out to Counsel’s even with the quarantine, quit his job.

  By the time Manfred Carlyle had been home four weeks with his family, more than half of the slaves on Counsel’s plantation had died, some twenty-one human beings, ranging in age from nine months to forty-nine years; that number included one-year-old Becky, who was teething but whose mother had nursed her as often as she could with the hope that the disease would pass on by her child; seventeen-year-old Nancy, who was days from marrying a man she thought she loved, a man with enough muscles for two men; thirty-nine-year-old-Essie, who had just committed adultery for the eighth time; and twenty-nine-year-old Torry, who had a harelip but who had four days before he died swallowed whole two raw chicken gizzards, having been told by a root worker that they would cure his “affliction.” Then, after those slaves perished, Darr’s wife died, and so did three of their children. Ten more slaves died, and that same day the first of Counsel’s children died, the oldest girl, freckle-faced Laura, who played the piano so well. In the three days that followed her death the disease swept up nearly all the rest of them, down to the youngest slave, ten-week-old Paula, whose mother had died in childbirth. Only Counsel remained, as healthy as the rainy evening his mother gave birth to him.

  The animals would live, too, managing somehow to get by even with all their caregivers dead. The creditors, weeks and weeks later, would not get much for livestock from a place God had turned his back on. A buyer’s place might be next if he bought a cow or a horse; if God could do that to Counsel Skiffington, one potential buyer noted, then what all would he do to poor me?

  In the end, after Counsel had tried to drive the animals away, there was not much more than the land, and even that, more than a year later when creditors and others were brave enough to go on it, would be sold for a little less than 45 percent of what it was worth. Belle was the penultimate person to die, just hours before a slave, fifty-three-year-old Alba, wandered in delirium away from his cabin and sat down to death in front of Carlyle’s airing-out cottage. With Belle’s death, Counsel burned down the mansion. From the first death he had buried no one and all the people in his family, including the bodies of nine servants, were burned along with the building. He then went to the cottage where Carlyle had stayed and Darr’s place, and he burned those structures down. The barns. The smokehouse. The blacksmith shop. Everything was burned to the ground. The cabins of the slaves, many with the bodies of the dead still in them, resisted the fire and most of them stayed up, scorched but ready for more tenants. The mud and cheap brick structures would be standing when the first creditor’s accountant arrived to see what he had to deal with. Eight months later, in Georgia, Counsel would take note of a two-door cabin built for two slave families, and it would come to him that the cabins on his land stayed up because they, like the two-door place, had close to nothing in them. Even God’s mansion would burn easily if there were a piano in the parlor and 300 books in the library from floor to ceiling and wooden furniture that came from England and France and worlds beyond.