The Known World - Edward P. Jones [130]
It was in South Carolina, at Kingstree, at the Black River, that Augustus decided that he would do as little as he could to help his kidnappers, but beyond that he was helpless. By then, way before Kingstree, Selby the baker was gone for $310 and Sara Marshall was gone for $277 and an early-nineteenth-century pistol that Darcy was to learn only worked when it wanted to. Sara’s buyer thought it amusing that she had a last name. “Shows her good breedin,” Stennis said to the buyer. And there at Kingstree, Willis began to lean forward all the time, his chest over his thighs and his face in his hands. “We gon get outa this,” Augustus kept telling him.
Darcy went up to a man in Kingstree as the man came out of his house. The house was on the only street in the place. “Might you be interested in some good nigger flesh,” Darcy said and took the man back down to the end of the road and around to an alley where the wagon of people was. Darcy had the man by the elbow the whole time and the man had not protested. Stennis brought Augustus down from the wagon. Willis did not raise his face from his hands.
The man had the look of someone who did not have anything better to do at that moment. He said to Augustus, “Open your mouth.” He himself did not own any slaves but had been to enough auctions to know that having a slave open his mouth was one of the first things a potential buyer did.
Augustus mumbled and put his open hand to the back of his ear. He mumbled some more.
“Why, hell, this nigger’s deaf and dumb.”
“The devil you say?” Darcy said.
“The devil he say, Marse?” Stennis said.
“I tell you he can’t hear and he can’t talk. Can you?” the man said to Augustus, who looked at him expressionless, his hand still to the back of his ear. “What kinda flesh you tryin to peddle, mister?”
“No no. He hear, he talk,” Darcy said. “He was talkin and hearin in Virginia. He was talkin and hearin in North Carolina. He can hear and he can talk, I’m tellin you.” Then, to Augustus, “Open your mouth and tell this white man howdy, tell him that it’s a good goddamn afternoon.”
Augustus mumbled and put the other hand to the back of his other ear. The white man looked from Augustus to Darcy and then to Stennis. “Well, it must not be a good goddamn afternoon cause he ain’t tellin me so.”
“He ain’t deaf and dumb. You got my word on that,” Darcy said. “Can’t he talk, Stennis?”
“Yes, Master. He can talk. He can talk clear as a bird singin in the tree, clear as—”
“All right, Stennis, thas anough of that. I wouldn’t lie to you, mister.”
“I don’t want a deaf-and-dumb nigger. I want a whole nigger, top to bottom.”
The man turned to go and Darcy pulled at his sleeve. The man said, “Unhand me, sir, or I will hand you to God.” Stennis grumbled loudly. Darcy stepped back and the man went away. Darcy said to Stennis, “You know better than to bark at a white man, even one thas an unwillin customer.”
He turned on Augustus and poked him in the chest with two of his fingers. “What is the gallumpin about you, nigger? You ain’t no more deaf and dumb than Stennis is. What is the gallumpin?” Augustus said nothing. “You done lost your hearin here in South Carolina, that it? Lost your tongue, too, huh? What did you lose in North Carolina? Your pecker? And Virginia, your brain, what little there is of it? And what it gonna be in Georgia? Your arms? And then your legs in Alabama and Mississippi, if we git that far? Just wastin away with every state we come to. That it?” Darcy looked at Stennis. “I bet if we got him to Texas, he’d be gone altogether, Stennis. Just a puff of nothin by the time we got to Texas. And wouldn’t that