The Known World - Edward P. Jones [131]
“What we gon do?” Stennis said.
“We gon carry on, Stennis. We gon carry on till all the birds fall from the trees.” He spat, then picked up the foot of one of the dead beavers hanging from his chest and inhaled it deeply. “Tennessee is a good place to be this time of the year, Stennis. The air will carry you along, wherever you wanna go.” He dropped the beaver’s foot and poked Augustus again. “And we gon sell this here nigger if I have to throw in my father and grandfather and his father with the bargain. Les go.” Stennis yanked on Augustus’s chain, picked him up and tossed him into the wagon. Darcy picked up another beaver foot and most of the leg and inhaled deeply again. “The air of Tennessee will cure all that ails you, Stennis.”
“I can smell it from here, boss.”
In Charleston they sold Willis for $325. Darcy would have gotten $400 but the white man and his wife, both schoolteachers, were suspicious of the papers Darcy had on Willis. Holding the papers, the woman said that her father had been in the slave business and so she knew that no price was eternal. “Three hundred and twenty-five,” she said, and her husband repeated what she said. “I was a free man in Virginia,” Willis said quietly to the teachers after the price had been agreed upon. Darcy laughed. “He keep saying that,” Darcy said, snickering. “Virginia a beautiful place. We all feel free there. It’s God’s parlor, but he forgets this ain’t Virginia.” He was implying something unkind about South Carolina, but the teachers did not seem to notice. As Darcy and the teachers stood outside the bank and Darcy counted the money, Willis said to Augustus, “I be seein you. I be seein you in the bye and bye.” Augustus said, “And I’ll see you, Willis. I’ll see you in the bye and bye. I promise.”
In Winifred and John Skiffington’s parlor there was a wondrous-looking bookcase, lovely oak, a lion’s growling face at each edge of the top ends, three shelves, a secondhand item made by Augustus Townsend not long after Augustus bought his freedom. He had first thought he would keep it for himself and the family he would buy out of slavery, though none of them could read then. (He and Mildred would never learn to read.) He would keep it as a kind of symbol for his determination to get them. But then he realized that what he could get for the bookcase would bring his wife and child closer to him, so he put a price on it. Fifteen dollars. It had been originally sold to a man of two slaves who lost his sight and so, as he told Skiffington, lost his hunger and thirst for books. Skiffington bought it for five dollars.
Aside from the Bible, Skiffington was not much of a reader, which was not the case with Winifred. She had read so much, her husband once said, she could be a schoolteacher. All the shelves of that secondhand bookcase were full, primarily with books she had brought down from Philadelphia. Skiffington had asked that she not teach Minerva to read, but she had not been able to help herself. She had asked only that Minerva not let anyone see her reading.
Among Winifred’s treasures on the first shelf of the bookcase were Shakespeare’s complete plays in two volumes, a present from her parents, and Washington Irving’s Sketch Book, a present from Skiffington when he asked her to marry him. Irving’s book was in red leather, a beautiful second edition published in London in 1821. After supper the Skiffingtons, including John’s father, would gather in the parlor and Winifred would pick something from the bookcase and read. Skiffington himself was partial to Irving’s “Rip Van Winkle.” “You’ll wear it out, John,” Winifred would say. “You will drain all the freshness out of it.” To coax her, he would begin, “Rip Van Winkle, a posthumous writing of Diedrich Knickerbocker.”
Skiffington thought of “old Rip” when he saw the man on the steps leading up from the street to the jail. The hair on the man’s face was wild and quite abundant, and as Skiffington got closer he made