The Known World - Edward P. Jones [135]
“Why don’t you sell him off?” Dora asked.
“I am afraid that all of Virginia knows him the way I know him and selling him would cost me more than I have already paid.” That made no sense to the rest of them, and they blamed it on the fact that Fern had had a glass of port, which was also not like her.
“Sell him off down the river, as they say,” Louis said.
“He would return,” Fern said, “repeat himself like a bad meal. That is just my poor metaphor for the evening, dear Caldonia. It is not a statement about our grand evening this night. I trust you understand my state of mind, dear Caldonia.”
“I do,” Caldonia said. “Zeddie could not do wrong with food if she were blind and without hands.”
“Precisely,” Fern said.
“Mrs. Elston,” Calvin said, “why not free him and send him on his way? Might that not be cheaper in the long run?”
“I have considered that. But I believe he has become a kind of debt inherited from my beloved husband. He is mine now and freeing him seems out of the question.” She did not say that freeing a slave was not in her nature. Someone had once told her of a white woman in South Carolina who had freed her slaves after the death of her husband, and one of them had returned and killed the woman.
“Fern, it will sort itself out,” Caldonia said. The oldest of the students, she had become a confidante of Fern’s and she alone was allowed to call her by her first name. It was not a privilege the others coveted.
“I fear it will,” Fern said and drank the last drop in her glass. “Have I had more port than I am allowed, dear Caldonia? Have I had my share?”
“In this house you are allowed all the port your soul can hold. You know that.”
“One forgets when the mind becomes cluttered.”
“Bennett?” Caldonia said.
Bennett appeared and filled Fern’s glass. He went to Caldonia’s side and whispered to her that Moses had been waiting in the kitchen “to tell you bout this and this.”
She thought she might go to him and tell him she would see him tomorrow, but what Fern had been saying about the slave with two names entered her mind, and she told Bennett to tell Moses that the news of the day could wait unless there was something requiring her attention. She added that she was entertaining guests. Bennett delivered this in his own way, and Moses left for his cabin. Priscilla, his wife, said she had something for him to eat but he told her in as gentle a way as he could that he was not hungry and hoped that would be the end of it. She knew enough to read his mind, and she and her son sat before the hearth and played jack-a-rocks with their collection of pebbles. The boy had been improving, having found that if he threw the pebbles so that they bunched, he had a better chance of beating his mother. Moses, hearing them at play, was close to going out to the woods but he feared he was now sharing the place with Alice. Instead, he went to the equipment shed and sharpened hoes until the lantern light began to fail and his arms ached.
Fern’s mood seemed to improve with the second glass of port, and there was no more talk of the slave Jebediah Dickinson. “I have,” she began not long after Bennett had replaced the candles, “been receiving so many pamphlets about this abolition business. Where they get my name, I will never know.”
“What do you think, Mrs. Elston?” Dora said.
“I realized all over again that if I were in bondage I would slash my master’s throat on the first day. I wonder why they all have not risen up and done that.” She sipped.
“The power of the state would crush them to dust,” Louis said. He spoke, as always, not because he had any well-considered views on an issue, but to impress the women around him, and he was now at a point where the woman he most wanted to impress was Caldonia. He had come to Fern’s classes after Caldonia had completed several years of her education, so