Free The Known World by Edward P. Jones

father into town to the shipping agent, talking to Rita the whole trip, and by two o’clock the box was gone. The father and the son watched the train go away, waiting for it to stop on the tracks and back up and have all the world come up to pay witness to the crime of stealing a white man’s property. But the train did not stop. “How she gon do her business?” Henry asked when the train and the people and the engine smoke were all gone. “A little bit at a time,” Augustus said.
    About halfway the trip home, the man realized that these had been his son’s first days of freedom. He and Mildred had planned a week of celebration, culminating with neighbors coming by the next Sunday. Augustus said, “You feelin any different?”
    “Bout what?” Henry said. He was holding the reins to the mules.
    “Bout bein free? Bout not bein nobody’s slave?”
    “No, sir, I don’t reckon I do.” He wanted to know if he was supposed to, but he did not know how to ask that. He wondered who was waiting now for Robbins to come riding up on Sir Guilderham.
    “Not that you need to feel any different. You can just feel whatever you want to feel.” Augustus remembered now that Henry had told on him to Robbins about pushing him some years ago, and it occurred to him that if Robbins were ever to learn about Rita, Henry would be the one to tell him. He wondered if all would have been different if he had bought the boy’s freedom first, before Mildred’s. “You don’t have to ask anybody how to feel. You can just go on and do whatever it is you want to feel. Feel sad, go on and feel sad. Feel happy, you go on and feel happy.”
    “I reckon,” Henry said.
    “Oh, yes,” Augustus said. “I know so. I’ve had a little experience with this freedom situation. It’s big and little, yes and no, up and down, all at the same time.”
    “I reckon,” Henry said again. The strange thing was that it would be the second black person Henry Townsend bought—not the first, not Moses who became his overseer—that would trouble him after the purchase. He knew by then what Augustus and Mildred felt about what he was doing. That second person was Zeddie, the cook, and he purchased her from a man down from Fredericksburg who had a lot of five slaves to sell and had the most informative leaflet full of the history of those slaves. Much of what he had written was just fiction, because that was the kind of slave sellers Fredericksburg, Virginia, produced. Being black, Henry could not in those days purchase a slave outright in Manchester County. He got his second slave through Robbins. It might well be that—in addition to thinking about his parents—Henry didn’t feel Zeddie was worth the money Robbins paid for her; Robbins had been trying to teach him after he sold Moses to Henry that every man felt he had been snookered after buying or selling a slave. She a good cook, the Fredericksburg man—patting his watermelon-sized stomach—said to Robbins about Zeddie, her handkerchief-covered head down, her hands clasped before her, her feet in mere wisps of shoes that would have blown away had she not been standing in them. Henry stood at the very back of the market, and a stranger seeing him might have thought he was someone’s servant waiting for the market to close and have his master take him back home. Using Henry’s money, Robbins did all Henry’s purchases of slaves before 1850 when a delegate from Manchester had the law changed. Most white men knew that when they sold a slave to Robbins, they were really selling to Henry Townsend. Some refused to do it. Henry was, after all, only a nigger who got big by making boots and shoes. Who knew what kind of ideas he had in his head? Who knew what a nigger really planned to do with other niggers?
    “You just think any way you want,” Augustus said to Henry as the wagon neared home, “and it’ll be fine.”
    It was forty-one hours before Rita in the box got to New York. The box was opened with