The Known World - Edward P. Jones [160]
On one rainy day, Beau and Morris rode out to the eastern edge of Morris’s land and they sat their horses and looked down across the hill to the line where the white man’s land ended. On a back road not on his property, they saw a young white woman trying to get a white mule to stand up from the muddy road. The mule had been pulling a wagon in the rain, and it wasn’t clear to Beau or Morris whether the animal had sat down because it was tired of working or because it just liked sitting down in the rain.
The white woman was named Hope Martin, but only Beau knew that. Though white, she was not in Morris’s class.
“You want me to go down and help her?” Beau asked Morris.
“No,” Morris said, “give her a little time.”
The woman at first seemed to be talking to the mule, trying to convince it that it should get up so they could continue. The mule didn’t move. Finally, Hope went to the back of the wagon and took out several apples from a covered basket. She sat down in the road in front of the mule and ate an apple as she fed first one and then another to the mule. She got more apples several times from the wagon. The rain did not let up and the black man and the white man on the horses did not move.
After some thirty minutes of eating apples, the mule stood up but Hope still sat in the mud, taking her time as she ate her fourth apple. Seeing Hope sitting there, the animal became restless, its tail swishing and its head going up and down, first one front hoof stamping the mud, then the other. After fifteen or more minutes of this, Hope stood and stretched, the rain still coming on. She said something to the mule and pointed up the road to where they had to go. The mule started moving even before she got back on board.
“What’s her name?” Morris asked Beau as they watched the woman and the mule and the wagon go up the hill without any trouble.
Beau told him who she was, that she had come down from north Georgia to take care of her aunt and her ailing uncle. Both aunt and uncle were very old people, not long for the world. “She’d make some man a good wife,” Beau said, putting an end to the woman’s history.
He would not have said this if he didn’t think his master was already thinking it.
“You done had anough?” Beau said.
“I think I have,” Morris said.
Morris was father to a young man—the only white child he would ever have—with a wonderfully complicated mind. On the day they saw Hope and the mule in the rain, that child, Wilson, had been a year and some months in Washington, D.C., at the medical school of George Washington University. Wilson had learned a great deal at that university and his mind would have contained even more but well into his second year the cadavers began to talk to Wilson, and what they said made far more sense than what his professors were saying. The professors, being gods, did not like to share their heaven with anyone, dead or alive, and they sent the young man home in the middle of his second year.
Even before the professors had sent Wilson back home, his father had been thinking that he wanted Hope as his son’s wife. Though she came from a different place in life, Morris felt that she could be cleaned off, made wholesome, the way an apple fallen into mud could be cleaned up and eaten. Morris had an emissary go to her and her relatives and tell them he wanted to see her, but the woman never came to him, and in the end Hope married another young man, Hillard Uster, poor except for the nice parcel of land he had inherited from his parents. Hillard was not