The Known World - Edward P. Jones [122]
But the worst of it was that he started calling out whenever he was near the house that he wanted his money. “I ain’t forget yall got my money. I ain’t forgot what yall owe me. I want my five hundred dollars.” In the night, before they took his passes away, he would say it. He said it on the way to the blueberries and he said it on the way to a nap. “I ain’t forgot yall got my money.” Ramsey came out one morning and shot his pistol over Jebediah’s head, but that didn’t stop him.
Then, three days after Ramsey returned to gambling, Fern came out and told him she wanted him to turn over a new leaf. She had Colley and two other men grab hold of Jebediah in front of the cabin he shared with one other unattached man. “This will all end today,” Fern said. “I have been patient, but my patience is at an end. If you do not do right, I will have you in chains again.”
Jebediah said, as she walked away, “If you was my woman you wouldn’t be sleepin in that bed alone every night.” She stopped but she didn’t turn around. “Do you know how long it would take me to undo your hair and get them things off you? You know how long?” He must have known, with that heart and mind born in slavery, that he had gone way too far and he bowed his head. Without a word from Fern, the men released him and Jebediah took off his shirt and lay on his stomach on the ground. Fern never like to flog slaves; for every whip mark on one slave’s back, she estimated that his value came down $5. But there were some unforgivable matters in the world.
They whipped him fifteen times, the last five having little effect because he had passed out at ten. He took a week to recover, was silent as he went about his work. And he didn’t stray. A week after he went back to work he stepped on a plank with a rusty nail in the barn. He thought nothing of it at first, just doctored the wound with a little mud and some spiderwebs. But the wound festered, and in the end, they had to saw off Jebediah’s right foot to save his life, or so the white doctor said.
He didn’t move from the front of his cabin after that, except to go to the privy or to go in to eat and sleep. A little less than two weeks after they cut off his foot Fern came down and told him she would set him free. He said nothing, just went on listening to his phantom foot talking loud to him.
He came up with Colley to the house the next day, up and into the kitchen. He was on the crutches someone had fashioned for him. Fern was at the table, writing. When she was done, she blotted the paper and handed it to him. He read it and handed it back to her. “Ain’t but one ‘T’ in manumit,” he told her, “cept when you usin the pas tense.” She had never written the word before. She wrote the paper again, then wrote another. Men were notorious for losing things. With all the human beings she would ever know in her life, he would be the only one she would come close to saying “I am sorry” to. She told none of this to Anderson Frazier, the pamphlet writer.
She offered him a place and a job on the estate, but he told her he had come to see Virginia as a demon state and he wanted no part of it. “If there was ocean water right out there,” he said, “I’d jump in and swim all the way up to Baltimore just so I wouldn’t have to walk on damn Virginia land.”
She gave him a wagon and an old horse to travel on. And she gave him $50. “You and your no-good husband owe me $450 more and there ain’t no way round it. I give yall the work I done and my foot for free.”
He left, him and the wagon and the horse with all its years behind it. He met a lot of kindness on his way north because he had only that one foot, but no matter how many warm beds and full plates black and white people gave him and no matter how well they treated his horse, he never stopped thinking that he was moving through a demon state. He came to Washington, D.C., and settled for