The Known World (2004 Pulitzer Prize)

by Edward P. Jones

  “I won’t be nothin but trouble,” Augustus said, looking around, getting his bearings.

  “We got a nigger just like evbody else, Pa?” the boy on Hillard’s right said.

  “Hush.”

  “I just wanna go home and then I’ll be outa your way.”

  Hillard raised his rifle, pointed it at Augustus. “Then you and me will have trouble.”

  “We gon have trouble, Pa,” the boy on the left said.

  “Hush,” Hillard said. He raised the rifle higher, up to Augustus’s face. “I just want you to work, like you suppose to.”

  “I done done all the work I suppose to do.”

  “I wanna feed my family and I’ll do anything to make that happen. I just wanna feed my family. Thas all there is to it.”

  “I know family. I know all about family. But, mister, you can’t raise your family on my back,” and Augustus, noting where the sun was, turned and headed north.

  “Our nigger goin, Pa?” the first boy said.

  “Hush.”

  Augustus was a few yards away when Hillard said, “You come back here. You better come here. I’m tellin you to come back here.” Augustus continued on.

  “Stop, you,” the second boy hollered. “You stop.”

  “Hilly?” Hope called from the porch. “Hilly, what is goin on?”

  Her husband raised the rifle and fired a shot into Augustus’s left shoulder. Augustus stopped, looked at the ground, and lifted his head again. The blood took its time spreading all over the top of the shirt, then spread down and all about, down some more to the top of his pants. Augustus lowered his head and fell to the ground. Hope screamed.

  Hillard and the boys ran to Augustus. The girls on the porch ran as well, and so did Hope, but with the baby in her arms she was not as fast as the girls were.

  “I told you to stop. All I wanted was for you to stop.”

  Augustus was on his back and he looked up at the man and at the boys. He didn’t look at the girls and the woman with the baby because by the time they got there his eyes were closed, which helped with the pain.

  “I told you to stop, dammit! Nigger, all I wanted was for you to stop.”

  Augustus heard him and he wanted to say that that was the biggest lie he had ever heard in his life, but he was dying and words were precious.

  Hope and her family—except for the baby, who was put for the moment on the ground where Augustus fell—managed to get him to the barn, which is where Hillard had intended for Augustus to live when he wasn’t working. Hope stayed with him most of the day and the evening and a good part of the night. Hillard did not come out to him, and the woman said to Augustus at one point, “I hope you won’t hold his not comin out against him.” There was a brave man in the neighborhood, a healer of sorts, a man not afraid of Morris Calhenny, and that man came out and tried to get the bullet out of Augustus, but the bullet was stubborn, having found a home.

  When Augustus Townsend died in Georgia near the Florida line, he rose up above the barn where he had died, up above the trees and the crumbling smokehouse and the little family house nearby, and he walked away quick-like, toward Virginia. He discovered that when people were above it all they walked faster, as much as a hundred times faster than when they were confined to the earth. And so he reached Virginia in little or no time. He came to the house he had built for his family, for Mildred his wife and Henry his son, and he opened and went through the door. He thought she might be at the kitchen table, unable to sleep and drinking something to ease her mind. But he did not find his wife there. Augustus went upstairs and found Mildred sleeping in their bed. He looked at her for a long time, certainly as long as it would have taken him, walking up above it all, to walk to Canada and beyond. Then he went to the bed, leaned over and kissed her left breast.

  The kiss went through the breast, through skin and bone, and came to the cage that protected the heart. Now the kiss, like so many kisses, had all manner of keys, but it, like so many kisses, was forgetful, and it could not find the right key to the cage. So in the end, frustrated, desperate, the kiss squeezed through the bars and kissed Mildred’s heart. She woke immediately and she knew her husband was gone forever. All breath went and she was seized with such a pain that she had to come to her feet. But the room and the house were not big enough to contain her pain and she stumbled out of the room, out and down the stairs, out through the door that Augustus, as usual, had left open. The dog watched her from the hearth. Only in the yard could she begin to breathe again. And breath brought tears. She fell to her knees, out in the open yard, in her nightclothes, something Augustus would not have approved of.

  Augustus died on Wednesday.

  Skiffington had slept little since the day Bennett came to tell him about Moses. The Thursday after Augustus was killed had brought on a small toothache that became overwhelming by midday Friday. He lay in bed beside Winifred that Friday night only to avoid her pestering him about not getting enough sleep; he lay and listened to her quiet sleeping, thinking about where Moses could hide in his county and shifting now and again as the toothache hounded him into Saturday morning.

  He had been berating Counsel and the patrollers all week, and he had them all out most of the days and the nights to search for the man he began calling the murdering runaway. “Which is the worst,” Harvey Travis the patroller joked behind Skiffington’s back, “the murdering or the running away?” The bloodhounds in Manchester seemed most ineffectual, “couldn’t find stink on a skunk,” Oden Peoples complained, and more dogs were brought in from other counties. But they failed as well. The patrollers and the dogs concentrated on places to the east of the town, the places that were the closest to the north. By that Saturday they were searching not only for Moses but Gloria and Clement as well. “Somebody,” Travis said, “should close the gate at her place, or teach her how to own a slave. A man dies and a woman runs his place into the ground.”

  Skiffington spent the days chewing bark that a slave, a root worker down the street, said would give him some relief for his toothache. She had peered into his mouth on Tuesday and told him there wasn’t much she could do for his suffering. “I do believe,” she said looking from one tooth to another, “that that pain is bringin you down and you just gotta pull it out. Just take it by the root and yank and yank till there ain’t nothin left.” They hadn’t bothered going inside to where she lived and she used the dying sunlight to investigate his mouth. “Open just so, Mr. Sheriff.” She touched the bad tooth with the end of a piece of bark and he shrank away in pain. He thought all the talk of yanking was her way of saying she could perform the task. But she told him, after pulling him back to her and closing his mouth with both her hands, that the mouth wasn’t something she liked to spend time thinking about. “You got a back ache, you got a heart ache, you got a foot ache, I can help you. But I don’t like to go to the mouth. Too far away from what I know bout helpin people. Too near the brain.” He came on Wednesday and offered her a fifty-cent piece to pull out the tooth but she said no and put the money back in his hand. Her master allowed her to do extra work for people so she could buy her freedom. On that Wednesday she had saved up $113 after three years of work. The price her master had quoted for her freedom was $350. “I can’t touch your mouth, Mr. Sheriff. I might hurt you more than I can help you.”

  That Wednesday he went, again, with Counsel out to the farthest eastern edge of the county, out to where his cousin-in-law Clara Martin lived, then crossed into the neighboring county, knowing that the sheriff there would understand his encroachment. On the way back, Counsel complained about all the riding and said they should spend the night at Clara’s, but Skiffington wanted to get back to Winifred.

  Fern came with Dora and Louis on Thursday to see Caldonia. After Robbins heard about the escaping slaves, he sent them to Caldonia to see what help she might be. Robbins told no one except Louis that he no longer had faith in Skiffington. Along the way to Caldonia, the young people had paid a courtesy visit to Fern, an
d she had decided to accompany them. It would be good to be away from Jebediah Dickinson, the gambler. Weeks and weeks later, when he was on the road to Baltimore, she would send Zeus into Manchester every day to ask about the mail. She promised God that if she ever heard from Jebediah she would send him the remaining $450 he said her husband owed him.

  They had an early supper and Caldonia excused herself and rose from the table afterwards and told her guests that since the escape of the overseer she had been visiting the quarters each evening, “to ease my mind.” She did nothing during the visits but walk with Loretta from one end of the lane to the other, as if her presence might prevent still one more slave from running away. She had put the day-to-day running of the plantation in Elias’s hands. When she asked him Thursday morning in the parlor if he knew if others might escape, Elias looked first at Loretta and said that was a question for God. That morning, after Elias went to the fields, she sent word to Maude, her mother, to come to her, that she needed her near.

  Her guests, including Fern, decided to come with her late that Thursday afternoon. Carrying a lantern even though there was still sufficient sunlight, Loretta walked two paces behind the group. Elias had freed the slaves early from the fields and most everyone was home eating their supper. So the lane was empty when they first entered, but Elias came out and then Delphie and Cassandra came out of their cabin. Celeste came to the door but did not cross her threshold. “Howdy, Tessie. Howdy, Celeste,” Caldonia said. Celeste only nodded.

  “Hi you, Missus?” Tessie said. She was carrying her doll because her brothers had been playing with it more than she was comfortable with.

  “I am well,” Caldonia said. “And you, Celeste?”

  “Fine, Missus.”

  “That’s such a pretty doll,” Fern said.

  “My daddy made it for me,” Tessie said. She would repeat those words just before she died, a little less than ninety years later. Her father had been on her mind all that dying morning, and she asked one of her great-grandchildren to go to the attic and find the doll.

  “Your daddy got the touch,” Louis said.

  “Yes, Marse, he do.”

  Elias was in the lane and said good evening to everyone, nodding finally to Loretta. Ellwood, Elias’s youngest, crawled up behind Celeste in the doorway and she picked him up. She heard Louis say that he was going out to search for Moses and the others and Elias said that if Moses was still gone come Sunday, he would join the search. Elias had asked Delphie to cut a lock of the dead baby’s hair before she put her into the ground, and he carried that hair in a piece of cloth pinned inside his shirt. Celeste then heard Elias say to Louis that Moses was world-stupid, the same words he had spoken to Skiffington, and that Moses did not know north from south unless somebody told him and even then he wasn’t real sure. The two men laughed. Caldonia said nothing and felt Loretta at her back.

  Celeste shifted Ellwood in her arms. Tessie and Grant were on either side of her, clinging to her frock, and the four of them watched together. A bloodhound from another county, who had wandered into the neighborhood of the lane three days ago, rested beside Grant. Celeste did not know what she was going to do with Elias. She loved him, and no matter what there would be no way to get around that. Everything else that came their way—even his hatred of Moses—would have to do battle with her love for him. She could only hope that Elias would find his way back to what he had been.

  She saw Elias say something she could not hear, but she noted Louis and Fern laughing in response. Dora and Caldonia were holding hands, the way she and Cassandra often did, the way she did with May, the way she used to do with Gloria. How so very different the world would be if Elias did not love her, too. But she knew that he did love her, even if some things in their days and nights blinded him to it.

  Elias turned and looked for a very long time at his wife. Wife, trust me, his eyes said, and I will get us, yours and mine, out of this. Then Elias looked at his two oldest children, at Tessie and Grant. They looked at their father. He held his hand out and they flowed to him. Ellwood the baby clung to Celeste and then he began to wiggle, wanting to be let down to the ground. Elias looked once more at Celeste. Wife, wife . . . She lowered her eyes from him and then took them away from him, took them off down the lane that was now becoming crowded with people, then out down to where the sun tended to come up in the morning. The generations of Celeste and Elias Freemen would be legion in Virginia.

  Ellwood continued to wiggle and when his mother put him down, he soon began to pull on her frock, wanting her to pick him up again. “See, see,” she said. “See, you don’t always want what you think you want. See. Why don’t you listen to me sometime?” The baby looked up, pleading: I done learned my lesson. Pick me up again. His mother tapped the foot of her good leg. No, the foot said. No lesson could stick in the head if it was only a few seconds long. She tapped on. The bloodhound beside them was gnawing on a bone that he would keep even when a child came along later and offered something bigger and better. Ellwood extended both hands up to Celeste and she relented. Once up again, Ellwood put his arms around her neck. “Mr. Blueberry,” Ellwood Freemen would say more than twenty years later to Stamford Crow Blueberry in Richmond, “I have come to fulfill my duty, just as I gave you my word that I would. I have come to teach for you and the chaps.” Ellwood the baby, back in his mother’s arms, looked around and sighed. His mother kissed his neck and said, “Maybe next time you’ll listen to me.” In 1993 the University of Virginia Press would publish a 415-page book by a white woman, Marcia H. Shia, documenting that every ninety-seventh person in the Commonwealth of Virginia was kin, by blood or by marriage, to the line that started with Celeste and Elias Freemen.

  Stamford now came from behind Celeste and tickled her shoulder. The baby Ellwood and Celeste and Stamford looked at the gathering of people just beyond them in the lane. People came out of their cabins to Caldonia not so much because she was the mistress but because she had not long ago suffered a death. They all knew death, even the very young who had yet to lose someone. Ellwood the baby saw Stamford and reached for him. Only weeks ago the man and the baby did not even know the other existed, but then Stamford had seen the cabin in the sky. Ellwood grabbed for him, needing him, and Stamford took him in his arms. The baby studied Stamford and as his hands reached for the man’s face, Stamford teased and pulled it back, his mouth beginning to open to say the words the baby wanted. Stamford was still a year away from first kissing Delphie.

  “Lord, I wish we could get some better days,” Celeste said to Stamford. “I’m tired a this mess of a weather. I really am. I wish the Lord would reach down in that big bag a days of his and pull us out some good-weather days that would last and last. Some nice and plump days layin over there in the corner right next to day fore yesterday. God could give us some nice days, Stamford, if he had a mind to. He could even lend em to us. By now he should know we a people that take care a things and we’d hand em back just the way he give em to us.”

  Celeste was practically talking to herself now because Stamford and the baby were in a world of their own. The baby’s hands had reached the man’s face and he was tapping every feature of it, doing everything that was necessary for the man to say the words the baby had come to expect in their brief history together. Stamford’s mouth opened more and more. “You here early this mornin,” Stamford Crow Blueberry would say to Ellwood Freemen that day some twenty years later in Richmond. Ellwood would be walking up the street with the reins of his horse in his hand, and Stamford would be walking with a baby resting on his shoulder, the newest member of the Richmond Home for Colored Orphans. Mother and father killed in a fire. Walking and singing to the baby in the morning seemed to calm the infant for the rest of the day. Ellwood Freemen would say, “I have come to fulfill my duty, just as I promised, Mr. Blueberry. Is that to be one of my pupils?” Stamford would shake his hand, nodding. Ellwood said, “You look as if you didn’t believe I would keep my word.” “Oh,” Stamford said, “I
whatn’t worried. I know where your mama and papa live. I know where I could find them to tell em that their boy didn’t keep his word.” Ellwood told him he had to tend to some business elsewhere in Richmond and would return shortly to settle in at the home for orphans. He got on his horse and rode slowly out to the main street, the street that would be named for Stamford Blueberry and his wife Delphie. Blueberry, with the new orphan on his shoulder, followed. He watched Ellwood take his time going off and Stamford that day would realize for the first time just how far they had come. He would have cried as he had that day after the ground opened up and took the dead crows, but he had in his arms a baby new to being an orphan. Stamford, it don’t matter now, he told himself, watching Ellwood and the horse saunter away. It don’t matter now. The day and the sun all about him told that was true. It mattered not how long he had wandered in the wilderness, how long they had kept him in chains, how long he had helped them and kept himself in his own chains; none of that mattered now. He patted the baby’s back, turned around and went back to the Richmond Home for Colored Orphans. No, it did not matter. It mattered only that those kind of chains were gone and that he had crawled out into the clearing and was able to stand up on his hind legs and look around and appreciate the difference between then and now, even on the awful Richmond days when the now came dressed as the then. Behind him, as he walked back, was the very corner where more than a hundred years later they would put that first street sign—STAMFORD AND DELPHIE CROW BLUEBERRY STREET.

  The baby Ellwood had now finished the ritual of touching every feature of Stamford’s face. Celeste said, “Maybe a lotta days is too much to wish for. Maybe just two or three in a row.” The baby Ellwood now waited and the reward came and Stamford opened his mouth and sang the way he would just before Ellwood came up the street that Richmond day with his horse trailing behind—