Known World (2004 Pulitzer Prize), The - Edward P. Jones [39]
In his fourth month there, he got up off his pallet about midnight and walked away, following the stars that pointed north. This was in the time when Sheriff John Skiffington’s patrollers were getting used to their new jobs. Elias got about five miles from the Townsend place when he began losing his strength. He ate most of the hoe cakes he brought with him, thinking the problem was a body rebellious due to hunger. He stopped as often as he could to collect himself but each time he started up again, he was weaker than before. At about seven miles he was nearly reduced to crawling, and at the eighth mile he collapsed. He awoke, stretched out in the road, to hear a slow horse coming his way. Uncertain which way the horse was coming from, he began crawling toward the side of the road where tall grass waited. He parted the grass and made a place for himself and heard the horse come up and stop. It was William Robbins on Sir Guilderham. “Whatever you are, I know you are there,” Robbins said. “Come out if you’re nigger, and if you are white, tell me your name and I’ll leave you to it.”
Robbins waited for several minutes and then opened his coat and took out his single-shot pistol. “Then you are nigger and not white,” he said. He fired once into the grass, grazing Elias’s left thigh. Elias did not move and after a short while Robbins said, taking out another pistol, “I smell your blood all the way over here. If you don’t want me to draw more of it, rise up and come to me.” Robbins aimed and as he did, Elias got to his feet, his arms high in the air, his fingers spread out. It was not a full moon but it was bright enough for Robbins to see Elias’s fingers wiggling nervously. The blood was flowing slowly down his leg.
“You free or slave?”
“Slave.”
“And no pass. I can tell that just from the smell of fear in your blood. Who do you belong to?”
“Master Henry Townsend, sir.” The “sir” was so he would not be shot again just out of pure meanness.
“Come here. What you out here cattin around for?”
“No, sir.” Elias started to move but found his left leg mired in a puddle of blood and he had to pick his leg up to go forward. When he reached Robbins, the white man leaned down and punched him as hard as he could in the jaw and Elias fell back. Then he took two quick steps toward Robbins, thinking that if he killed the white man, there was no witness except the horse. But Robbins cocked the second gun and held it out. Elias stopped.
“I know Henry Townsend,” Robbins said, “and if I have to pay for a dead one, then that is what I will do. Come here.” He held the gun an inch from Elias’s face and punched him again. Elias fell. “If you live to be a hundred, know not to run up on a white man.”
The word seemed to go out among the slaves at Henry’s place even before most of them had come out of their cabins: Somebody done got away. It was Sunday and Moses slept late and got the word last. People were happy for Elias. “Somebody’s soul done flew away. Whooossh . . . Feel that breeze from them wings. Lord almighty.” Stamford could not place Elias’s face and thought he was the dark-skinned fellow with a June-bug-sized mole on his left cheek until Delphie reminded him that Henry sold that man away because the man with the mole liked to fight everybody. “Was fightin from the time he got up till the time he shut his eyes. Would see his shadow pesterin after him and started hittin that. Po thing. Lord . . . Was fightin even you, Stamford,” Delphie said. “Hmmp!” Stamford said. “He musta lost that fight then. Musta got his head knocked off and thas why he was sold off. Didn’t have no head and couldn’t work. Had to sell that fool for scrapple meat.” Delphie said, “That ain’t the way I member it.” “Then you memberin wrong,” Stamford said and held his fists out to her to show what the man with the mole had had to contend with. This was in