Free The Known World by Edward P. Jones Page B

expression when she first heard and then saw the black woman through the first good opening. Rita, once the box was open all the way, covered her eyes because even that weak light in the storeroom was too much for her to bear. “Don’t send me back. Don’t send me back.” Rita did not know if she was in New York or merely in a house only a plantation away from William Robbins. She could barely move and her mouth was dry because she had allowed herself only five sips of water during the entire trip. A journey into possible death could take a long time and so water shouldn’t be wasted. Her body was too dry to even produce tears, and her words came out as if her mouth were stuffed with rags. Slowly, she opened her eyes and saw Mary. “Don’t send me back.” And then, seeing the boy Timothy for the first time, Rita’s stiffened arms managed to offer the stick of Adam and Eve and their descendants to him. The boy, who was as expressionless as his mother, took the walking stick as if that was what he had been waiting for all along.
    3
    A D eath in the F amily. W here G od S tands. T en T housand C ombs.
    Loretta, Caldonia Townsend’s maid, came down from the house about sunrise the next morning and opened Moses’s cabin door after one knock and told him their master Henry was dead. He scratched at his whiskers. “How long?” he said. “Last night,” she answered. Priscilla, Moses’s wife, came up behind him, her hand to her mouth. “Oh, Lord,” she said. “Massa dead.” She turned to her son who was sitting before the hearth, eating cornbread and gravy. “There been death in the family,” she said to the boy. He considered his mother for a second or so then went back to eating. Something told the boy that his mother, with the dead master on her mind, might not eat her portion, so he took her food as well.
    ”Loretta, whas gonna happen to all us now?” Moses said, thinking that her being up in the house gave her more to know. Priscilla came up closer behind her husband and Loretta could see the third of her body that wasn’t obscured by the man.
    “I don’t know, Moses. We just have to wait and see.” The three of them were thinking of the six slaves of the white family just down the road apiece, the six slaves who were so close by they were like family to the slaves at Henry’s place. Those six were good workers and had made their owner quite wealthy in a small Manchester County kind of way. Loretta said, “We just gon have to wait and see which way the wind gon blow.” The white man down the road had died four months ago, and at first the widow, his third wife and mother to his two children from his second marriage, told the slaves they would not be sold off. But before the white man could even get settled in his grave, his widow had sold them to finance a new life in Europe, which she knew about from two fanciful picture books she had treasured and hidden for years in the chimney from her husband. One of the books showed what an artist claimed were the Paris fashions of 1825. There were nearly thirty years separating the year of the fashion picture book and the year the widow finally got to France, so all the material of her dreams, the fashions of 1825, was no doubt out of style by the time she arrived. White people said she took the dead white man’s two children with her to the new life in Paris, but colored people, slave and free, said that didn’t happen, that the woman had sold the children once she was safely out of Virginia. Negroes said that somewhere in the world, known or unknown, someone might not think twice about buying two happy white children with plump cheeks and able to write and sing like angels and do basic ciphering.
    Priscilla now stepped even closer to her husband, and most of the third of her that Loretta could see disappeared. Priscilla said, “I would hate to go from Massa Henry’s place. I would hate all that not knowin again where in the world I was.” The six slaves