The Known World - Edward P. Jones [137]
“The responsibilities are coming in on you now, it seems,” Calvin said when she returned.
“One by one,” she said.
“You could be happy with me in New York. New land, new air. We could be happy there. The burdens would fall off our shoulders, Caldonia.”
“Calvin, you have only yourself and whatever is on your back. I have the responsibility of so many people. Adults and children. I cannot choose not to have that. My husband has built something here, and now it is mine and I can’t abandon that for a foreign land.”
Calvin said nothing. He was in the chair Moses always sat in. He wanted to say that she could abandon all but by now he was losing faith in being able to persuade anyone of anything. She could not see any of those thirty or so human beings living as free people any more than he could see from Virginia all that the frozen dog in the New York photograph was seeing.
She did not want him to go the next day and she said so. She had found that with her people about—and she counted Fern and Dora and Louis in this—she was more capable of facing the world. He had business in Richmond, Calvin said, but when he returned, he would stay with her for a longer time.
She told Moses that evening she did not want to hear anything about the dull labors of the day and he sat trying to think up one more tale about Henry. She got up after a long time and sat on his lap, kissed him. She did not allow him to make love to her that evening, but when he came back the next evening, she did. “It has been hard without you,” she said to him. “It was hard for me, Missus,” he said. When he said that, they were done and partially clothed on the floor, and his words caused her to wonder if Virginia had a law forbidding such things between a colored woman and a colored man who was her slave. Was this a kind of miscegenation? she wondered. A white woman in Bristol had been whipped for such an offense, and her slave was hanged from a tree in what passed for the town square. Three hundred people had come to see it, the whipping and the hanging, the former in the morning and the latter in the afternoon. People brought their children, their infants, who slept through most of the activities. It had happened a year ago but the news had only recently arrived in Manchester.
“Are you going to come back tomorrow?” she asked after she had risen from the floor.
“Yes, ma’am. Yes, ma’am, I will.”
He left and she said to herself in the moment before Loretta entered, “I love Moses. I love Moses with his one name.” But when she saw Loretta, the words did not make as much sense. “I am ready for bed,” she said, and that made the greatest of sense. Before going to bed, she washed her insides with vinegar and the soap her slaves made for everyone. Hers, however, was made with a dash of perfume that Loretta supplied to the soap makers. In Bristol, the authorities claimed the white woman had been with child. No word of mouth or the newspaper account said what had become of the child.
That evening was the first time Moses would think that his wife and child could not live in the same world with him and Caldonia. Had they made love in silence, as before, he would not have begun to think beyond himself. But she had spoken of tomorrow, and that meant more tomorrows after that. Where did a slave wife and a slave son fit in with a man who was on his way to being freed and then marrying a free woman? On his way to becoming Mr. Townsend?
He came down from Caldonia’s house that evening and stood at the entrance to the lane. Where does a man put a family he does not need?
Alice came out of her cabin and if she was surprised to see him, she did not let on. But she did not chant, she did not dance.
“Where you goin?” he asked. He knew more about her than he knew even three weeks ago, and though she had acknowledged nothing, he felt that she was aware that she had less of the world than before. The night no longer just held her in her wanderings; it now held him following