The Known World - Edward P. Jones [50]
The boy Luke was happy. When Shavis Merle, a white man with three slaves to his name, sought to hire Luke during the harvest, Elias told Henry he would go instead, for all the world knew how hard Merle could be. But Henry did not want to grant Elias two wishes in one year and he hired Luke out for $2 a week. Merle believed in feeding his workers plenty of food, but they gave it all back in the field, from sunup to sundown, and no one that year gave up more than Luke did. After Luke died in the field, Merle protested up and down about paying compensation, but William Robbins got him to pay Henry $100 for the boy. “Fair business is fair business,” Robbins had to keep telling Merle. Moffett was early to the boy’s funeral, which Merle attended, and Moffett said some words at the gravesite, but no one said more than Elias and at the last his new wife had to put her arms around him to bring an end to all the words.
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Curiosities South of the Border. A Child Departs from the Way. The Education of Henry Townsend.
Beginning in the mid-1870s and continuing throughout most of the 1880s, a white man from Canada, Anderson Frazier, made a good living in Boston publishing two-cent pamphlets about America and its people, especially what he called their “peculiarities.” Most of what he published was gleaned from newspapers and magazines, but he rehashed everything in his pamphlets in a most colorful way, delighting thousands of readers. He had come to America in 1872, having grown frustrated with what little he had in Canada. He was the middle of seven children and did not want to go into the trading business that his father and his grandfather had established and that his older brothers were so comfortable with. He was also tired of what he saw as a certain Canadian ruggedness that had served the country well in the days when Europeans set out to make the place safe for white people; but he had come to believe that that once-necessary ruggedness, most evident in his brothers, was becoming the defining quality of the country. And he wished to be free of it. He did not see Canada again until 1881. The country would be more or less the way he had left it, but his family would be different, for the worse, and there was a part of himself—as he sat in a kitchen full of nieces and nephews talking to one of his sisters—that felt had he not gone away, most of his family would have remained going down the fairly good path on which he last saw them.
Once he went into pamphlet publishing in Boston, he began traveling up and down the east coast of America, down to Washington, D.C., and all the way out to the middle of the country, gathering additional material for The Canadian Publishing Company. In 1879, he met in New York a young woman named Esther Sokoloff, who returned with him to Boston but who refused to marry him though she would never say why. He loved Esther more than he thought he could ever love an American, he wrote to a friend in Canada who could not read and had to get someone else to read Anderson’s letters. During their first year and a half together she would leave him from time to time without a word and go back to her people in New York, refusing to see him when he came to that city. He once had a female intermediary go to her house to ask that she meet with him, and when Esther refused, Anderson decided to visit the America below Washington, D.C., an area of the country he had not been curious about before the pain that came with Esther.
It was in the South that Anderson came upon material he would later put in a new series of pamphlets he called Curiosities and Oddities about Our Southern Neighbors. The Economy of Cotton. Good Food Made from Next to Nothing. The Flora and Fauna. The Need for Storytelling. This series was Anderson’s most successful, and nothing was more successful within that series than the 1883 pamphlet on free Negroes who had owned other