The Known World - Edward P. Jones [88]
Calvin stood at the beginning of the lane and watched the slaves return in twos and threes, the children skipping ahead. He had worked hard to get to know all their names, as he knew the names of all the slaves at places he visited often. He called to people as they came his way, and most of them called or nodded or called him Mister Calvin. The children were always shy around him and he wondered, again, what they might have been told about him and people like him.
“Now you tell Mistress not to worry,” Stamford, the man who lived for young stuff, the man Gloria had turned away, was telling Calvin. “You tell Mistress Stamford said not to worry.”
“No, don’t let her worry, Massa,” said Priscilla, Moses’s wife. “It wouldn’t do to have her worry her po self to death.” The other slaves moved around the three; they knew how Stamford and Priscilla could be.
“You tell Mistress,” Stamford said, “that Massa Henry went straight to heaven. He got to them gates and the Lord just opened em right up, said, ‘Massa Henry, I been waitin so long for you. Just come right in. I got a special place for you, Massa Henry, right here sida me.’ You tell Mistress that Stamford say that, Massa Calvin.”
“I’ll tell her,” Calvin said, trying to remember if Caldonia knew all their names. Once, at twenty, he had gone to spend a week or so with a friend near Fredericksburg and they had met a man, a slave of a white man, on his way home as the evening came on. The slave knew Calvin’s friend, a freed man whose family had had a slave but sold him because they could not afford to keep him. Calvin and his friend were drunk.
Alice came up and stuck her head between Priscilla and Stamford and chanted to Calvin, “Massa be dead. Massa be dead. Massa be dyin in the grave.”
“How are you, Alice?” Calvin said. There had been something about the way the slave on the Fredericksburg road had so very readily taken off his hat for Calvin’s friend and then for Calvin. “Hi you this evenin, Mister Ted?” the man had said to Calvin’s friend before putting the hat back on. Calvin, as the friend and the man talked about nothing as the bats took off for the evening, had finally reached around and knocked the man’s hat off his head. He did not know what had gotten into him. The drinking, he told himself later. He had always become meaner when he drank. He never saw the slave again, and the best Calvin could offer as an apology was to never drink again.
“Oh, gon way from here now, you. Take that mess on way from here,” Priscilla said to Alice, who drifted back and began hopping away. “When that moon come?” she chanted. “When that moon come? The sun wanna know when that moon come.”
Calvin went back to the house. It was far from twelve o’clock and he thought that there was a good bit of Sunday left for all of them to enjoy. The man on the Fredericksburg road had been stunned, as had Calvin’s friend. “Just go on and hit me for doing that to you,” Calvin had said, his hands hard at his sides. “Hit me. Hit me with a good lick for doing that to you.” He knew the man would never have done that and he hated himself for knowing why the man couldn’t. If the man had hit him a good one, Calvin would not have responded, would have just let him beat him to the ground.
Calvin turned around from the walk to the house and looked at the slaves disperse among the cabins and thought aloud so that anyone within feet of him could have heard, “Our Henry is dead.” He wished that Louis was with him, though he knew nothing would have been said or done. There was no solution for caring about the man with the traveling eye. Maybe New York could help take away the love, along with everything else. He got to the steps of the house and stopped, counted each step for the first time. The feelings for Louis had been