Known World (2004 Pulitzer Prize), The - Edward P. Jones [38]
Two days after Henry bought Elias in 1847 from the white newlyweds passing through from Bath County, Elias found Celeste sitting on the ground. He knew only Moses and the men in his cabin, but had seen her from afar, limping here and there. She seemed to have been playing with or helping two children who were now skipping away. “Come on, Celeste,” the children said. “I be there directly,” she said. She struggled to get to her feet and after many tries she was standing. She stood quietly and unmoving for some time, looking down at her feet covered by her long green frock. The children called to her but she did not move. Finally she went off, taking one lumbering step after another. He watched the whole time but had not moved to help her. Escaping had been his only thought since he had come from Bath with the newlyweds who had argued with each other the whole way, and he didn’t want to be touched by any other notion. He turned and thought he was getting away before she noticed him, but she had first sensed and then seen him and she would not forget it. She had not wanted his help, but she felt he was watching a show with a cripple woman and had enjoyed it and that was not right.
She had been bought for $387 a year or so before him, but as long as she had been on the plantation, Celeste had not been known by anyone to be a hurtful woman. She never said “Master” or “Mistress” to Henry or Caldonia; just “Mr.” and “Ma’am,” her small way of saying no to everything. She had the best heart, people said of Celeste. But over the next weeks she came to resent Elias for being a cripple woman watcher and could not stop herself from being mean to him whenever she could. He would be eating his dinner at the edge of a field off to himself and she would go out of her way to limp by him and work up as much dust as she could, dirtying his food. She liked to work a row opposite one he was on just to show others how slow he was. She told people he was a lazy somebody and she didn’t mind if he heard her. When she walked down the lane and he was standing in her way, she limped faster and dared him not to move. “What you do to that woman,” someone funned him after seeing Elias nearly run over, “for her to rue the day you was ever born?”
Toward the end of his second week on the Townsend plantation, Elias became ill, suffering headaches that hammered him senseless. He could not keep food in his stomach, and there were unaccountable blisters on the soles of his feet. At times, he had to lean over in a furrow to collect himself, as some rush of pain overwhelmed and seemed to want to tear him apart right where he stood. He knew that in order to slip away one night he had to be seen as reliable, but his work suffered with his sickness and Moses also took to calling him a lazy man. “You mighta bought a pig in a poke, Master,” he told Henry one day. Elias would wake in the night and hear the wind counting off the days he had to live. “Better play. Better play,” the wind told him, “cause ain’t no more after today.”
He had never been one to believe in root work, but he began to feel that Celeste was doing something to him and that it would lead to his death, a long way from freedom. He dreamed she had gotten her limp by wrestling with the devil. But she wasn’t one for root work, and because she was the kind of woman she was, her resentment against him had actually dissipated after the third week. To her he had become just another man who couldn’t stand to be around a cripple woman. By the fourth week, she would see him bent over in a furrow and feel sorry for him.
Then, toward the middle of the fifth week, he began to improve and the wind stopped talking to him. He had been weakened by the illness, however, and tried to restore himself by working harder and longer in the fields, often staying there long after Moses told him he was finished for the day. But even by the ninth and tenth weeks his body was not what it had been, and