The Known World Read Free Page A

ready until early fall. Immature silk would have to do.
    Moses was not hungry and so did not complain to his wife or the boy about the darkness. He lay down on the straw pallet beside his wife, Priscilla. Their son was on the other side of her, snoring. Priscilla watched her husband as he slowly drifted into sleep, and once he was asleep, she took hold of his hand and put it to her face and smelled all of the outside world that he had brought in with him and then she tried to find sleep herself.
    That last day, the day Henry Townsend died, Fern Elston returned early in a buggy driven by a sixty-five-year-old slave her husband had inherited from his father.
    Fern and Caldonia spent a few hours in the parlor, drinking a milk-and-honey brew Caldonia’s mother was fond of making. Upstairs during that time, Zeddie, the cook, and then Loretta, Caldonia’s maid, sat with Henry. About seven in the evening, Caldonia told Fern she had best go on to bed, but Fern had not been sleeping well and she told Caldonia they might as well sit together with Henry. Fern had been a teacher not only to Caldonia but to her twin brother as well. There were not that many free educated women in Manchester County to pass her time with and so Fern had made a friend of a woman who, as a girl, had found too much to giggle about in the words of William Shakespeare.
    The two women went up about eight and Caldonia told Loretta she would call her if she needed her and Loretta nodded and went out and down to her small room at the end of the hall. The three, Fern and Henry and Caldonia, started in talking about the Virginia heat and the way it wore away a body. Henry had seen North Carolina once and thought Virginia’s heat could not compare. That last evening was relatively cool again. Henry had not had to change the nightclothes he had put on at six. About nine he fell asleep and woke not long after. His wife and Fern were discussing a Thomas Gray poem. He thought he knew the one they were talking about but as he formed some words to join the conversation, death stepped into the room and came to him: Henry walked up the steps and into the tiniest of houses, knowing with each step that he did not own it, that he was only renting. He was ever so disappointed; he heard footsteps behind him and death told him it was Caldonia, coming to register her own disappointment. Whoever was renting the house to him had promised a thousand rooms, but as he traveled through the house he found less than four rooms, and all the rooms were identical and his head touched their ceilings. “This will not do,” Henry kept saying to himself, and he turned to share that thought with his wife, to say, “Wife, wife, look what they done done,” and God told him right then, “Not a wife, Henry, but a widow.”
    It was several minutes before Caldonia and Fern knew Henry was no more and they went on talking about a widowed white woman with two slaves to her name on a farm in some distant part of Virginia, in a place near Montross where her nearest white neighbors were miles and miles away. The news of the young woman, Elizabeth Marson, was more than one year old but it was only now reaching the people of Manchester County, so the women in the room with dead Henry spoke as if it had all happened to Elizabeth just that morning. After the white woman’s husband died, her slaves, Mirtha and Destiny, had taken over and kept the woman prisoner for months, working her ragged with only a few hours rest each day until her hair turned white and her pores sweated blood. Caldonia said she understood that Mirtha and Destiny had been sold to try to compensate Elizabeth, to settle her away from that farm with its memories, but Fern said she understood that the slave women had been killed by the law. When Elizabeth was finally rescued, she did not remember that she was supposed to be the owner, and it was a long time before she could be taught that again. Caldonia, noticing her husband’s stillness,