The Known World - Edward P. Jones [85]
“I learned from Henry not to let something like grief turn me from right to wrong, Mama.” With those words she could see him, in her mother’s garden saturated with the smell of honeysuckle, still wearing clothes too heavy for the season, talking about how he would be a master different from any other, the kind of shepherd master God had intended. He had been vague, talking of good food for his slaves, no whippings, short and happy days in the fields. A master looking down on them all like God on his throne looked down on him. He was a young shoemaker, a bootmaker, who more than a year before had completed the generous deal for Moses with William Robbins. But the words did not matter to Caldonia; she was young, unhappy with the courtship prospects all about her, and so even had he talked all afternoon of planting and harvesting tobacco, it would have been a serenade. This was more than a year after Augustus had broken his shoulder with the walking stick of an acorn and squirrels.
Caldonia considered her mother. Henry had been a good master, his widow decided, as good as they come. Yes, he sometimes had to ration the food he gave them. But that was not his fault—had God sent down more food, Henry would certainly have given it to them. Henry was only the middleman in that particular transaction. Yes, he had to have some slaves beaten, but those were the ones who would not do what was right and proper. Spare the rod . . . , the Bible warned. Her husband had done the best he could, and on Judgment Day his slaves would stand before God and testify to that fact.
“Henry taught me well,” Caldonia said to her mother.
Caldonia lay back down in the bed and closed her eyes. What would his slaves have said that very day about the kind of master Henry had been? Would they be as generous as they would be on Judgment Day when it was all over and they could afford to be generous? She opened her eyes and Maude was smiling at her. In Fern Elston’s class one day when Caldonia was ten, Calvin, her brother, had punched another child on the arm and the boy cried. “I didn’t hit him all that hard, Mrs. Elston. I hit him with a soft lick, a baby lick. I didn’t hurt him.” Fern had come up to Calvin and slapped him and shook him by the shoulders until Calvin cried. “Why are you crying, Calvin? I just gave you a baby lick.” When both boys had stopped crying, Fern said gently to Calvin, “The hitter can never be the judge. Only the receiver of the blow can tell you how hard it was, whether it would kill a man or make a baby just yawn.”
“I have no doubt that Henry taught you all you need to know,” Maude said and squeezed Caldonia’s hand. “But like your father, you have too much melancholy in your blood for your own good.” The death of his youngest child some thirteen years before had led Tilmon Newman to believe God wanted him to free his slaves, which numbered twelve at the time of the child’s death. God, Tilmon told Maude, had failed to get his meaning across with the deaths of Tilmon’s parents and his brothers—all of them in captivity—so he had started in on Tilmon’s children to bring the lesson closer to home. “Ain’t none a yall safe from God,” Tilmon said, days after he buried his child, who had been four years old. “Not even you, Maude. He will come through every mountain to get at you.”
Loretta now stepped back until her back was touching a bedroom wall. Then she edged herself so that she was all but enveloped by the shadow in the corner. She had to be near if Caldonia wanted her, but it would not do to have Maude think she was taking in every single word of the whatfors and whynots of their lives and making some strange sense of what was overheard. Some white mistresses did not care what their servants heard; they felt the servants had no more ability to hear and judge than the cups and saucers. And some, like Caldonia, saw some servants as confidants. But others,