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By Root 4753 0

Beside Peter in death, she had been mostly alone in life, owing perhaps to her newness to the plantation. No husband, though she had lain twice with a man from another plantation. That man’s master, a white man of five slaves to his name, allowed the slave to come to Sadie’s funeral, though he warned Andy that if the funeral went on too long, as nigger funerals sometimes did, Andy was to step away and come straight back home. He wrote Andy a pass that expired at two o’clock in the afternoon. There were ten infants in the slave cemetery, five girls, five boys, only two of them related; none had seen their second year of life. No two had died of the same thing. An inability to digest even mother’s milk, an infection from a burn from a flying ember, a silent, unexplained death during the night as if not to disturb her mother’s sleep. One had died strapped to his mother’s back as the woman worked in the fields, two days before the end of harvest, the day Loretta the maid and Caldonia the mistress were away and Zeddie the cook took sick and was unable to look after the baby. The only child over two years in the cemetery was twelve-year-old Luke, a gangly boy of a sweet nature, dead of hard work on a farm to which he had been rented for $2 a week. A boy Elias and Celeste had loved. Henry had Luke’s mother brought in for the funeral from two counties over, but no one could find his father. Both cemeteries were on a rise, both guarded by trees, some apple, some dogwoods, a stunning magnolia, and some trees no one could make head or tail of. The cemeteries were separated by a hop, skip and a jump.

Calvin, Caldonia’s twin, dug into the ground first, dug down more than a foot and came up and gave the shovel to Louis. He, like Calvin, was not a man used to hard labor, but that was not obvious from the way he worked. Louis handed the shovel over to Augustus, who worked until Calvin told him he had done real good and that he might want to give the shovel to Moses. Once Moses was in the hole, William Robbins came out of the house followed by Dora, his daughter. Robbins stood without words at the site for nearly half an hour and watched the men work and then he turned and went back into the house with Dora. After the funeral the next day, he would not see the plantation again until the day Louis married Caldonia. Up in the house, as the men worked on the grave, Henry Townsend had been washed and dressed and laid out on his cooling board in the parlor.

Elias was next and he dug down and then he gave the shovel to Stamford, forty years old. Stamford, in addition to chasing young women, could be a most disagreeable man if he was idle too long. When he was honest with himself, Stamford knew his days with Gloria were at an end. He was now studying on Cassandra, Alice’s cabin mate, but Cassandra had already told him once she wouldn’t go with an old dog full of fleas. Gloria, twenty-six, loved biscuits, loved to open them hot and soak them in molasses when she could get it. Stamford knew how to cook biscuits the way she liked, but that had not been enough. They had fought all the time; once it was an all-night battle and they, bruised and sore, were unfit for the fields the next day. After a week of the fighting, Henry had Moses separate them. It was a good thing, people said, because in another week Gloria would have killed him. Stamford had a plan to make Cassandra like him, the third plan that summer. That day weeks later when Stamford would see the crows fall dead from the tree, before he himself walked out toward death, he would say good-bye to Gloria and he would say good-bye to Cassandra, to all that good young stuff that the man had once advised him would allow him to survive slavery. “Without all that young stuff, Stamford, you will die a slave. And it will not be a pretty die.”

When Stamford was done, Calvin took the shovel back and before long six feet were finally ready for Henry. The men then collected the lumber from the wagon Augustus and Mildred came in and took it to the second barn, where they made Henry a coffin. The wood