Known World (2004 Pulitzer Prize), The - Edward P. Jones [28]
“Tell Celeste that Henry be dead,” she said.
“You stick a needle in him to make sure?” Elias said. “You poke him and poke him to make sure?”
At first, before remembering everything, she did not understand what he could mean by that and her mouth opened in a small O of surprise. Once upon a time he would have been a better man for her. Loretta looked down at the water, at the way it came right up to the lip of the bucket. There was none spilled behind him, which said something about the way he moved through the world, even with his head unbalanced with part of one ear gone. “He dead, thas all,” Loretta said. “I know dead when I see it, Elias. It don’t put on a face to make him look like nothin else but dead. Master dead.” It was said by many a slave that a servant’s feeling about a master could be discerned on any given day by whether the slave called him “Master,” “Marse,” or “Massa.” “Marse” could sound like a curse if the right woman said it in just the right way. Alice, for one, said “Massa,” but it came up out of her like a call from a tomb. “Master dead,” Loretta said again, and it struck Elias that he had never heard her say “Master” before. He felt compelled to repeat her words, as if to make it so once and for all. “Master dead.” She went around him and disappeared into the fog, which the sun was fast burning off. Back in the house, she stood at the kitchen window and watched the world come up out of the fog. There was no need to tell Zeddie, the cook, to fix breakfast or to tell Zeddie’s man Bennett to fix the fire. For the moment, death was giving all the orders. All was quiet. Loretta was thirty-two years old. When the day came when all the slaves were slaves no more and decided that they should choose a last name for themselves, she would not pick Townsend or Blueberry or Freeman or Godspeed or Badmemory, as many would. She would choose nothing, and she stayed with nothing even when she decided to marry.
Moses made to go down the lane of cabins, eight on one side of the lane and eight on the other side, laid out just the way Henry Townsend had seen them in a dream when he was twenty-one years old and without a slave to his name. Moses thought at first he might send his son or another child to tell all to gather in the yard of the house, but as he stepped out of his cabin and saw the sun-filled fog fraying away to nothing, he realized that this was one of the last things he would ever do for his master. Not knowing that Loretta had already told him, he went to Elias’s cabin first, the one next to his own, and Celeste, Elias’s wife, came to the door. Whether she sensed something or was about to take in some morning air, Celeste opened the door before he could knock. “Master dead,” Moses said. “So it is,” she said and stuck her head out the door just so and looked up toward the house, as if there might be a sign on the verandah announcing the news. “We gotta get up to the house,” Moses said. “Elias,” Celeste said to her husband, turning around to face him. “That Henry gone.” She could tell in his eyes that he knew already and had just not bothered to tell her. The smallest smudge of dirt on one of his children’s cheeks was important, but the death of his master was no more than the death of a fly in a foreign place he had never even heard of. Celeste had no love for Henry either, but death had taken all his power and now she could afford a little bit of charity. “That Henry be dead. Let God be kind,” she said and limped to Elias, to her three children playing on a pallet. The limp was a horrible one, and it pained most humans to see because they thought it must pain her to move. They shot animals for far less, Moses once thought after Henry brought her home. But she was a good worker, limp or no limp.
Moses went back and forth across the lane and told all. All of the cabins, save one, were occupied. A man, Peter, had died in that one and his widow, May, had abandoned it, to give Peter’s spirit time and space to prepare to go home. Before Moses had reached the last cabin on his side of the