The Known World - Edward P. Jones [52]
“Well, Mr. Frazier, it is not the same as owning people in your own family. It is not the same at all.” Fern smoothed down her dress though it didn’t need it. “You must not go away from this day and this place thinking that it is the same, because it is not.” Whenever she looked at him, and it was rare that she did, her wide-brimmed hat would obscure part of her face. From the side, with her looking out into the street, he had a much better view. “All of us do only what the law and God tell us we can do. No one of us who believes in the law and God does more than that. Do you, Mr. Frazier? Do you do more than what is allowed by God and the law?”
“I try not to, Mrs. Elston.”
“Well, there you are, Mr. Frazier. We are alike in that way. I did not own my family, and you must not tell people that I did. I did not. We did not. We owned . . .” She sighed, and her words seemed to come up through a throat much drier than only seconds before. “We owned slaves. It was what was done, and so that is what we did.” She told him her last name was Elston, but that was her first husband’s name. The world about her knew her by her third husband’s last name. That husband was a blacksmith, a former slave, a pecan-colored man by whom she had had two children at a time when she thought her body could not do that for her. Her husband called her “Mama” and she called him “Papa.” She said to Anderson, “We, not a single one of us Negroes, would have done what we were not allowed to do.”
Fern looked down into the palm of her hand. Had Anderson not been white and a man, had the day not started out hot and gotten hotter, had she and her husband not quarreled that morning about such a trifle it did not deserve the name trifle, had the gambler not gone away to Baltimore a long time ago with one leg missing, had all of this not been so, Fern might have opened up to Anderson. This is the truth as I know it in my heart. Had the gambler left with both of his legs, had he just lost some tiny, tiny finger there on the outer reaches of one of his hands.
The names of his family members stayed with Anderson as he sat with Fern and it was a strange comfort. “Have you ever been homesick, Mrs. Elston?” Negroes, all of whom said good morning to her, walked by her house, up and down the dusty street of a little Virginia town where the railroad tracks said very clearly to the natives: All Negroes over here and all the white people over there. Anderson, not being a native, on his way to being a pious Jew, had gotten lost at first.
“No, I have endeavored to live beyond the control of such a malady,” Fern said, waving away a fly. “Though I understand that it is not as debilitating and not as life-threatening as all the other illnesses. The ones they write about in books”—she turned to him—“and in pamphlets.” She turned away again.
“No,” Anderson said. “No, it is not as life-threatening. Indeed, it can be quite pleasant.” He looked out at the ground before them, the grass, the trees on either side of the winding path that led up to her porch, the sunlight blanketing everything, and then he saw his brothers and sisters standing there side by side. He had heard three months before his visit to Canada that one of his sisters, Sheila, second from the left there in Fern’s yard, had died. All his siblings now stood in Fern’s summer yard in the heaviest of winter clothes, coats, boots, fur hats. It was snowing. His sisters and brothers were waving at him, one hand from each of them, and aside from the waving, they were very still, the way they would have been had they been posing for a photographer. “Yes, quite pleasant.”
Fern turned to him, a man perhaps done in by the unsparing heat of the South. “I see,” and she looked away. “I will have to take the word of a journalist.”
A man passed the house and told Fern good morning, that it looked like another hot one.
“Did you get to taste those okras I sent over, Herbert?” she asked the man.
“Yessum,” he said, raising his hat, “and I do preciate