The Known World - Edward P. Jones [61]
“Fern, good day.”
“Good day, Mr. Robbins.”
“I have someone who needs to be educated, starting with writing and whatnot. He can’t even write his own name. He should know how to do that and much else besides. He should know how to conduct himself in Virginia.”
“I see,” Fern said. She had not heard that he had any more children with Philomena Cartwright, so she thought that he had taken up with another colored woman and now the child of that coupling needed to be educated. She liked to take children at age four; the older they were after that, the more their heads had been filled with nonsense that her teaching could not extract.
“It’s Henry Townsend. I think you know him.”
She laughed, but when Robbins did not, she stopped. “The Henry I know is a man,” she said. “A man,” and she made sure that he was looking at her when she repeated herself.
“That be him,” Robbins said. “A far piece from being a boy. But he is coming into himself and I would not want to see him hurt by all that he does not know.”
“A man does not learn very well, Mr. Robbins. Women, yes, because they are used to bending with whatever wind comes along. A woman, no matter the age, is always learning, always becoming. But a man, if you will pardon me, stops learning at fourteen or so. He shuts it all down, Mr. Robbins. A log is capable of learning more than a man. To teach a man would be a battle, a war, and I would lose.”
“Not with Henry, Fern. He would be open to what you had to teach him. I would not come to you about any other Negro.” He had paid her $20 a month to educate Dora and Louis. He had been tempted to have her come to his house and give private lessons to his white daughter, so pleased with what she had done with his black children, but there were some things his wife could not abide and that would have been another door for the gods to come through. Patience, that other daughter, had been educated well enough but not as well as Dora had been taught by Fern. “He would not be as obstinate or as thick as a log.”
“The oldest child ever brought to me was ten years old,” Fern said. “It was a war, but I prevailed. I was also a younger woman.” She looked Robbins in the face, then looked to the side, beyond him out to the place where the gambler Jedediah Dickinson would camp. “So you send word to Henry Townsend to come by here at ten tomorrow morning. Any later than that and he will have failed the first lesson.” She did not say that he himself should tell Henry for she knew he would not go and take a message from a woman not his equal to a man who was not his equal.
“Good,” Robbins said. “Let us wait a week and see what price this will be.”
“It will not be a child’s price. I can practically teach children in my sleep.”
“Tell him nothing about this and I will pay the price of a man. Even the price of three children,” Robbins said. He put his hat back on his head. “Good day, Fern.” He still wanted Henry in any world his black children would have to inhabit, but the wrestling around with Moses had shown him how unprepared Henry was. Fern would see that and she would do what had to be done. That August day the Canadian pamphlet writer, Anderson Frazier, came to visit, Fern said, “No, Henry never lived to be completely handsome. Augustus did, but his son fell short.”
“Good day, Mr. Robbins,” Fern said.
She watched him ride out to the road and turn to the left. She had heard from Maude, Caldonia’s mother, that there might be something unnatural between him and Henry. Why else would a white man of his stature spend so much of his life with a young man he had once owned? Now she knew the unnatural was not it. Robbins had a fear in his eyes, the same fear a man would have sending his son out into the world to hunt for bear with only a favorite gun that had failed the father once too often.
She came down the steps of the verandah. Ramsey, her gambling husband, gone a week, had promised to return that day. Zeus, the slave she trusted most, came around the side of her house and asked what he could do for her. “The garden,” she said, pointing