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By Root 4798 0

the idea that the storms made him vulnerable and that abolitionists could insinuate themselves and cheat him out of all that he and his father and his father’s father had worked for. But the idea would take root and grow with the disappearance of Rita, the woman who became a kind of mother to Henry after Augustus Townsend bought his wife Mildred to freedom. Before the angel/man on the road and Rita’s disappearance, Manchester County, Virginia, had not had much problem with the disappearance of slaves since 1837. In that year, a man named Jesse and four other slaves took off one night and were found two days later by a posse headed by Sheriff Gilly Patterson. The escape and the chase had put such bile in Jesse’s master that he shot Jesse in the swamp where the posse found him. He had the four other escapees hobbled that night—sharp and swift knives back and forth through their Achilles’ tendons—right after he cut off Jesse’s head as a warning to his other fourteen slaves and stuck it on a post made from an apple-tree branch in front of the cabin Jesse had shared with three other men. The law ruled that Jesse’s murder was justifiable homicide—though the escaped slaves were headed in a different direction from a white widow and her two teenage daughters, the five men were less than a mile from those women when they were caught. No white person wanted to imagine what would have happened if those five slaves had doubled back, heading south and away from freedom, and got to the place with the widow and the girls. Jesse got what was coming to him, Sheriff Patterson theorized as he thought of the widow and her daughters. He did not put it in those words in a report he made to the circuit judge, a man known for opposing the abuse of slaves. But Sheriff Patterson did write that Jesse’s master was punished enough having to live with the knowledge that he had done away with property that was easily worth $500 in a seller’s market.

In truth, the man William Robbins met on the road was not an abolitionist or an angel, and Toby and his sister never saw the north. The man on the road sold the children for $527 to a man who chewed his food with his mouth open. He met the openmouthed man in a very fancy Petersburg bar that closed down at night to become a brothel, and that openmouthed man sold the children to a rice planter from South Carolina for $619. The children’s mother wasn’t good for doing her job very much after that, after her children were sold, even with the overseer flaying the skin on her back with whippings meant to make her do what was right and proper. The mother wasted away to skin and bones. Robbins sold her to a man in Tennessee for $257 and a three-year-old mule, a profitless sale, considering all the potential the mother had if she had pulled herself together and considering what Robbins had already spent for her upkeep, food and clothes and a leakproof roof over her head and whatnot. In his big book about the comings and goings of slaves, Robbins put a line through the name of the children’s mother, something he always did with people who died before old age or who were sold for no profit.

Robbins usually spent the night at Philomena’s, braving all her talk about wanting to go and live in Richmond. He would set out for his plantation just after dawn, weather permitting. There was almost always a storm in his head on the way back. He would have preferred to suffer one going into town, so as to enjoy Philomena and their children knowing the worst was behind him. No matter what weather God gave Manchester County, Henry would be waiting. That first winter after seeing the boy shivering in the rags he tied around his feet, Robbins had his slave shoemaker make the boy something good for his feet. He told the servants who ran his mansion that Henry was to eat in the kitchen with them and forever be clothed the right way just the same as they were clothed. Robbins came to depend on seeing the boy waving from his place in front of the mansion, came to know that the sight of Henry meant the storm was over and that he was safe