The Known World Read Free

failing and he was as close to working blind as a body could get. But his daughter and his two sons, one only thirteen months old, were heaven and earth to him and somehow the knife cut into the pinewood in just the right way and began what would be the doll’s right eye.
    Moses, a few feet before passing Elias, said, “You gotta meet that mule in the mornin.”
    “I know,” Elias said. Moses had not stopped walking. “I ain’t hurtin a soul here,” Elias said. “Just fixin on some wood.” Now Moses stopped and said, “I ain’t carin if you fixin God’s throne. I said you gotta meet that mule in the mornin. That mule sleepin right now, so maybe you should follow after him.” Elias said nothing and he did not move. Moses said, “I ain’t but two minutes off you, fella, and you seem to wanna keep forgettin that.” Moses had found Elias a great bother in the mind from the day Henry Townsend drove up with Elias from the slave market, a one-day affair held out in the open twice a year at the eastern edge of the town of Manchester, in the spring and in the fall after harvest. The very day Elias was bought by Henry some white people had talked about building a permanent structure for the slave market—that was the year it rained every spring day the market was held, and many white people caught colds as a result. One woman died of pneumonia. But God was generous with his blessings the following fall and each day was perfect for buying and selling slaves and not a soul said anything about constructing a permanent place, so fine was the roof God himself had provided for the market.
    Now Moses said to Elias, “If you ain’t waitin for me here when the sun come up, not even Massa Henry will save you.” Moses continued on to his cabin. Moses was the first slave Henry Townsend had bought: $325 and a bill of sale from William Robbins, a white man. It took Moses more than two weeks to come to understand that someone wasn’t fiddling with him and that indeed a black man, two shades darker than himself, owned him and any shadow he made. Sleeping in a cabin beside Henry in the first weeks after the sale, Moses had thought that it was already a strange world that made him a slave to a white man, but God had indeed set it twirling and twisting every which way when he put black people to owning their own kind. Was God even up there attending to business anymore?
    With one foot Elias swept the shavings from his other foot and started whittling again. The right leg of the doll was giving him trouble: he wanted the figure to be running but he had not been able to get the knee to bend just right. Someone seeing it might think it was just a doll standing still, and he didn’t want that. He was afraid that if the knee did not bend soon he would have to start again with a new piece of wood. Finding a good piece would be hard. But then the right leg of his own wife, Celeste, did not bend the way it should either, so maybe in the long run it might not matter with the doll. Celeste had been limping from the first step she took into the world.
    Moses went into his cabin and met the darkness and a dead hearth. Outside, the light of Elias’s lamp leaned this way and that and then it dimmed even more. Elias had never believed in a sane God and so had never questioned a world where colored people could be the owners of slaves, and if at that moment, in the near dark, he had sprouted wings, he would not have questioned that either. He would simply have gone on making the doll. Inside Elias’s cabin his crippled wife and three children slept and the hearth had enough embers to last the night, which promised to be cold again. Elias left the doll’s right leg alone and returned to the head, which he already thought was as perfect as anything he had seen made by a man. He had gotten better since carving the first comb for his wife Celeste. He wanted to attach corn silk to the doll’s head but the kind of dark silk he wanted would not be