Known World (2004 Pulitzer Prize), The - Edward P. Jones [3]
“Shall I sing?” Caldonia said and reached over and touched his hand resting at the side of the bed. “Shall I sing till the birds wake up?” She had been educated by a freed black woman who herself had been educated in Washington, D.C., and Richmond. That woman, Fern Elston, had returned to her own plantation after visiting the Townsends three days ago to continue making part of her living teaching the freed black children in Manchester County whose parents could afford her. Caldonia said, “You think you’ve heard all my songs, Henry Townsend, but you haven’t. You really haven’t.” Fern Elston had married a man who was supposed to be a farmer, but he lived to gamble, and as Fern told herself in those moments when she was able to put love aside and see her husband for what he was, he seemed to be driving them the long way around to the poorhouse. Fern and her husband had twelve slaves to their names. In 1855 in Manchester County, Virginia, there were thirty-four free black families, with a mother and father and one child or more, and eight of those free families owned slaves, and all eight knew each other’s business. When the War between the States came, the number of slave-owning blacks in Manchester would be down to five, and one of those included an extremely morose man who, according to the U.S. census of 1860, legally owned his own wife and five children and three grandchildren. The census of 1860 said there were 2,670 slaves in Manchester County, but the census taker, a U.S. marshal who feared God, had argued with his wife the day he sent his report to Washington, D.C., and all his arithmetic was wrong because he had failed to carry a one.
Henry said, “No. Best save the singin for some other time, darlin.” What he wanted was to love her, to get up from the sickbed and walk under his own power and take his wife to the bed they had been happy in all their married days. When he died, late the evening of the seventh day, Fern Elston would be with Caldonia in his death room. “I always thought you did right in marrying him,” Fern would say, in the first stages of grief for Henry, a former student. After the War between the States, Fern would tell a pamphlet writer, a white immigrant from Canada, that Henry had been the brightest of her students, someone she would have taught for free. Loretta, Caldonia’s maid, would be there as well when Henry died, but she would be silent. She merely closed her master’s eyes after a time and covered his face with a quilt, a Christmas present from three slave women who had made it in fourteen days.
Moses walked the lane of the quarters down to his cabin, the one nearest the house where his master and mistress lived. Next to Moses’s cabin, Elias sat on a damp tree stump before his own cabin, whittling a piece of pinewood that would be the body of a doll he was making for his daughter. It was the first thing he had ever given her. He had a lamp hanging from a nail beside his door but the light had been failing and he was as close to working blind as a body could get. But his daughter and his two sons, one only thirteen months old, were heaven and earth to him and somehow the knife cut into the pinewood in just the right way and began what would be the doll’s right eye.
Moses, a few feet before passing Elias, said, “You gotta meet that mule in the mornin.”
“I know,” Elias said. Moses had not stopped walking. “I ain’t hurtin a soul here,” Elias said. “Just fixin on some wood.” Now Moses stopped and said, “I ain’t carin if you fixin