Known World (2004 Pulitzer Prize), The - Edward P. Jones [35]
Sometime after two o’clock William Robbins left with Dora and Louis, he off to his plantation and they off to the house they shared with their mother outside the town. The rest of the day wore itself away and nothing good and nothing bad happened.
Alice, the woman who wandered in the night, had started being restless way long before bedtime. “Just leave her be,” Cassandra kept telling her mother, Delphie, who wanted some way to calm Alice. The three shared their cabin with an orphaned teenage girl. In the end, leaving her alone was just what Delphie had to do and she shook her head as Alice went out the door. Alice had a minor cut on her foot from walking all about the night before, the night her master died. But the cut did not prevent her now from strolling up and down the lane, chanting, “Master dead master dead master be dead.” Moses did not go out that evening to be alone with himself in the woods, but before he went to bed he did go about the plantation to make certain all was well. He told Alice to hush three times and that last time she did, choosing then to only pace up and down the lane. If Augustus and Mildred in May’s cabin heard Alice chanting about their dead son they made nothing of it. Finally, Alice sauntered off toward the smokehouse.
Caldonia and Calvin and their mother came down to the lane once that evening to ask Augustus and Mildred to please come and stay in the house. They declined, as they had twice before that day. Mildred might have gone up, had she not been with Augustus. Fern Elston came down to the lane as well, the first time she had ever done so. Before now, before she had seen off the gambler with one leg weeks earlier, she had always stayed in the house on her visits, preferring not to mingle with “any slave that was not house broken,” as she put it. But the gambler who lost his leg would change everything and she was never to see the world the same way again. That evening, as she walked behind Caldonia, Maude and Calvin, she thought that the gambler, Jebediah Dickinson, should have been more than halfway to Baltimore by now, if he made it, if the horse and wagon she gave him held up. In a different world, she had been thinking since two mornings after he left, she might have found something with him, one leg or not, dark skin or not. She would not even have had to teach him how to read and write, because he came knowing that already. I have been a dutiful wife.
Moses and Priscilla came out of their cabin and joined the small group as they went down the lane. The evening smoke of supper fires hung thick all about them. Caldonia, still veiled, knocked at a few doors and poked her head inside one or two cabins to ask if there was anything anyone needed. All the children liked her, Mistress Caldonia. Her mother Maude had been saying all day that she had to take care of her “legacy,” but as Caldonia went about what Henry, following William Robbins, had called “the business of mastering,” she did not think she was doing anything more than escaping for a spell from a house that was twice as large as it had been the day before. Moses spoke to her all the while as she walked, letting her know what he and the slaves would be doing when they returned to work, what his tasting of the soil had told him about the crops. His droning on and on was a bit soothing, far more than Calvin’s hand on her arm or the children’s smiling up at her. His talking told her in some odd way that one day the pain would at least be cut in half.
At the end of the lane, they turned around. Fern stopped and stood alone and looked out beyond the lane, to the fields. When she turned back, Alice was in front of her, telling Fern that the master was dead. “I know,” Fern said. “We know that.” “Then why ain’t you ready?” Alice said. Fern looked back toward the fields and when she turned around again, Alice had gone away. In four