The Known World - Edward P. Jones [86]
“Mama, give me a little peace. My husband is not even cold. Just a little peace before you close me in with this. Moses is taking care of so much. And Calvin is here. I can mourn for just a bit more. Calvin is here.”
“Calvin, Calvin,” Maude said. “His blood has even more melancholy than yours. Leave it to him and your legacy will be out the door before morning.” Caldonia slid down even more in the bed, withdrawing her hand from her mother’s. “Don’t be some little girl, Caldonia.”
“I’m not being a little girl, Mama. I’m just being a poor widow child.”
“I won’t stand for any foolishness from you, Caldonia.” Loretta stood where Caldonia and Maude could not see her but where she could see anyone coming up the stairs. “I won’t go through this again.” Tilmon Newman, like Augustus Townsend, had worked to purchase his own freedom. His plan had been to buy the freedom of all in his family, some four people, including his parents. But in the early days of his freedom, the young man had met Maude and married and they had started to build a life for themselves, a little land here, one or two slaves there. A child. Maude kept reminding him what a kind man his parents’ master was and so his family’s bondage was not the burden it was for many other slaves. “You were there,” she said. “You know what kind of man Horace Green was. Your parents and your brothers will wait until we are good and set on our feet, until we have enough of everything so they can come into freedom and not want for anything.” But in less than three years they all perished before he could buy them away: his mother drowned, his father was killed in a fight with another slave, his oldest brother died of food poisoning from a pig stolen from a neighboring farm, and his youngest brother, sent by his master to find a lost cow in a snowstorm, was discovered four days later, boy and cow huddled and frozen together. The boy and the beast had to be thawed out before they could be buried separately.
Caldonia sat up in bed again. “Mother, Henry worked too hard to give me all of this. I would not squander it away, not in any way you could imagine. I know my duty to what he left me. However much I am Papa’s daughter, I am just as much your daughter.”
“You must remember that it is so easy to go down into destitution.” Her own family had been free for generations but they had never had enough to buy even one slave. “I would not want that for you. A destitution brought on by grief.” They looked at each other. “You should eat something, Caldonia.”
“My heart is not in food, Mama.”
“Put your heart into it, Caldonia. A little milk. A little bread. Try and put your heart into a little something.” Tilmon Newman had planned to find a way to get all his slaves to freedom, had been in touch with a white man from South Carolina who thought they could load them all up and drive up to freedom. “We must go before God with no more than what babies come into the world with,” Tilmon told Maude. But she had poisoned Tilmon before anything like that could happen. Arsenic pie. Arsenic coffee. Arsenic meat. The servants had thought she had gone mad wanting to do all the cooking for her husband. “He has done so much for me, so why shouldn’t I tend to my husband from time to time?” she said to them. The arsenic devoured Tilmon, ate