The Known World - Edward P. Jones [98]
After he had given the bucket to Delores and Patrick, Stamford stood in the lane in the mud and the rain and counted the doors to the cabins where children lived. He left out the ones with infants because he knew they weren’t old enough to bite down and enjoy blueberries. And he had never heard of a sugar tit laced with blueberries. He kept counting wrong and he had to do it over several times. Once that was done, he knew he had a new problem—how to find enough buckets for all those damn blueberries.
The rain stopped the next day, but it came back three days later. It was far worse and anyone walking in it felt the sting. “It was a very painful rain,” K. Woodford, a historian from Lynchburg College, wrote in 1952. The rain led to great flooding, and the Lynchburg historian noted, without hyperbole, that it may well have been the worst any county had suffered since Virginia became a state. Twenty-one human beings lost their lives, including eight adult slaves, five men and three women. All the children, whether white or black or Indian, free or in bondage, were spared. No one counted the livestock and the dogs and the cats that were killed because there were so many. The land was covered with animal bodies for weeks and weeks.
Three weeks to the day after Clement beat Stamford, the man from Atlas Life, Casualty and Assurance came back for the third time in his rented buggy and was told by Caldonia that she wanted no insurance. Maude was looking over her shoulder, sighing with displeasure.
”Good morning, Mrs. Townsend,” the white man said to Caldonia before she sent him away, the big book in one hand and his hat in the other hand. It was his first chance to speak to her directly. “We are pained at your unfortunate loss. My company, Atlas Life, Casualty and Assurance, and all its employees send their everlasting condolences.”
Caring for Stamford after he was beaten convinced Caldonia to try to put her grief aside as much as she could and get to the business of the plantation. She decided, after hearing from Celeste and Gloria and Clement, that Clement would not be punished. She sent word by Moses to Stamford that he was to mind what he was doing from now on. “No more fighting, from anyone,” she told Moses, though it was many days before Stamford obeyed, after the crows, after the blueberries and the cabin.
Moses did, on his own, require that Stamford and Clement work a few hours on three Sundays. They could have appealed to Caldonia, but they thought everything he did came on orders from her. The first Sunday was one not long after Stamford had gone back to the fields after the beating, and Elias worked for him after Celeste said she did not think Stamford could do seven days in a row.
In the wake of the beating, Caldonia now had Moses come and report to her each evening after all work was done. He stood in the parlor and told her all that had happened during the day, from the moment just after breakfast when he met the slaves in the lane until the moment in the evening when he told them their day was done. At first, the report was over and done with in a matter of minutes. But as the days since Henry’s death piled up, he would talk longer and longer, for he had come to sense that Caldonia wanted his words. Maude, and sometimes Fern, would peel away before he was done, but Caldonia and Calvin listened to every word. And when Caldonia was finally alone in the house and her mother and brother and Fern had gone away, she continued to listen and his report became even longer, sometimes as much as an hour. Soon, he began to leave off from talking about the work of the day and create stories out of nothing about the slaves. Loretta sat in a chair in a corner, knowing what was true and