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By Root 4841 0

generations, Fern’s family had managed to produce people who could easily pass for white. “Marry nothing beneath you,” her mother always said, meaning no one darker than herself, and Fern had not. Her mother would not have approved of the gambler who lost a leg. “Human beings should never go back. They should always go forward.” Some of Fern’s people had gone white, disappearing across the color line and never looking back. She saw some of her kin now and again, a sister, cousins, in Richmond, in Petersburg, carriaging away with fine horses down the street, and she would nod to them and they would nod to her and go on about their business. Fern’s husband was also a gambler and he was slowly gambling away their little fortune but there was nothing she could do about it. The gambler with the one leg was gone. She had never known anyone to go to Baltimore and return to tell her about it. I have been a dutiful wife.

The lane quieted after they returned to the house. Moses and Priscilla went into their cabin and shut the door for the night. Alice the wanderer came back to the lane, walking up and down. In their cabin, Augustus and Mildred lay down and held each other. One of them started talking—they would not remember which one it was—all about Henry, from his birth to his death, starting a weeks-long project of recalling all that they could about their son. If they had known how to read and write, they could have put it all in a book of two thousand pages. Up in the house, Calvin lit another set of candles, preparing to sit the night with Henry. As Calvin lit the candles, Loretta covered Henry’s face with a black silk cloth—she felt he had best rest before the trip in the morning.

Alice set off and she was no sooner out in the road than she began chanting again. Loud, as if she were trying to reach the rafters of heaven. In a little more than a mile from the Townsend plantation Sheriff John Skiffington’s patrollers came upon her. “Master dead master dead master be dead.”

”What you doin out here?” asked Harvey Travis, the man with the Cherokee wife. He knew Alice was crazy but he thought his job required asking a question even if there was no logical answer. There were three of them, the patrollers, the same number as always for that section of the county.

Alice went on chanting and then she did a dance.

“Oh, let her alone,” Barnum Kinsey said. “She just that crazy woman from Nigger Henry’s place.”

“I’ll do what the hell I want!” Travis said. He liked Barnum better when Barnum had been drinking, when he was liable to be quiet.

“I’m just sayin, Harvey, that you know by now she ain’t no more harm. Probably even more crazy than usual since Henry died.”

“Master dead master dead master died.”

“I’m gettin plenty tired of seein you out here like this,” Travis said. “I never sleep good after I see this thing dancin in the road. My skin start crawlin.” The third patroller started laughing, but Barnum was silent. There was a weak moon and the third patroller was holding a lantern. Skiffington had been rotating the patrollers again and the man with the lantern was new to this part of the county, and though the others had assured him there was nothing to worry about, his wife, pregnant with their second child, had sent him out with a lantern. “We should start chargin Nigger Henry every time we see one a his niggers in the road.”

“Henry dead. I told you,” Barnum said, and the patroller with the lantern laughed again. He was very young. “Ain’t you listened to a word she been sayin.” Barnum, that morning, had promised his wife that he would not drink anymore. They had cried together and ended up on their knees, praying. Their children came in and seeing their parents praying, the children had gone to their knees as well. This was Barnum’s second set of children, the first set having grown up and went far out into the world to forget a father who loved them but who was, in the eyes of that world, little more than a nigger.

Alice danced past the man in front with the lantern. She pointed at Travis. “Hey, now!” he said, frightened