The Known World - Edward P. Jones [54]
Henry began to accumulate money, which, along with some real estate he would eventually get from Robbins, would be the foundation of what he was and what he had the evening he died. It was Robbins who taught him the value of money, the value of his labors, and never to blink when he gave a price for his product. Many times he traveled with Robbins as the white man worked to create what he had once hoped to be an empire, “a little Virginia in big Virginia.” In Clarksburg once, Robbins was conversing with the master of the house as Henry measured the man for a pair of riding boots. The man became restless and kicked at Henry, saying the nigger was hurting his feet. Robbins, a man with five pairs of Henry’s boots by that time, told Henry to go outside, and when he returned, the man, face reddened, was far more agreeable, but he never bought another thing from Henry.
Augustus Townsend would have preferred that his son have nothing to do with the past, aside from visiting his slave friends at the Robbins plantation, and he certainly would have preferred he have nothing to do with the white man who had once owned him. But Mildred made him see that the bigger Henry could make the world he lived in, the freer he would be. “Them free papers he carry with him all over the place don’t carry anough freedom,” she said to her husband. With slavery behind him, she wanted her son to go about and see what had always been denied him. That it was often Robbins who took him about was a small price for them, and, besides, he was the one who had limited his world in the first place. “All this takin him about is just redeemin hisself in God’s eyes,” Mildred said.
At the end of two weeks or so of being with Robbins, Henry would come back to his parents, his eyes gleaming and his heart eager to share whatever part of Virginia he had been to. Mildred and Augustus, hearing their son’s horse approach, would go out into the road and wait for him to appear, as patient as Henry waiting for Robbins to come up the lane to the mansion. Robbins had told him to trust the Manchester National Bank and Henry would put part of what he earned there. The rest he and his father would, as soon as he was off his horse, bury in the backyard, covering it all with stones so the dog would not dig there. Their neighbors were all good and honest people but the world had strangers, too, and some of them had strayed from being good and honest. Then the three would walk the horse into the barn, settle it down and come into the house, holding close to each other.
Henry went through his late teens that way.
The desire to live in Richmond had seized Philomena Cartwright when she was small, long before she became free. She was born on Robert Colfax’s plantation, which was where Robbins first saw her when she was fourteen. When she was eight, Colfax purchased two slaves from a man traveling about the countryside selling off his property, human and otherwise, because he was going bankrupt. He aimed to make a new start in a new life, the man told Colfax, and he started that new life by giving Colfax a good price for the slaves. One of them was Sophie, a thirty-five-year-old woman who liked to tell the young Philomena what a grand place Richmond was, though in fact she had gotten no closer to Richmond than a dot called Goochland. In Richmond, Sophie said, the masters and their wives lived like kings and queens and had so much that their slaves lived like the everyday white masters and wives they saw around Manchester. The Richmond slaves had so much to eat that they were forever having to get