The Known World Read online

  He was growing quickly, anxious to show them the little things he had carved. The horses in full stride, the mules loaded down, the bull with his head turned just so to look behind him. The three would settle on a quilt on a piece of no-man’s-land across from Robbins’s plantation. Behind them and way off to the left, there was a creek that had never seen a fish, but slaves fished in it nevertheless, practicing for the day when there would be better water. When the three had eaten, Mildred would sit between them as Augustus and Henry fished. She always wanted to know how he was treated and his answer was almost always the same-that Massa Robbins and his overseer were treating him well, that Rita was always good to him.

  The fall that year, 1834, just dropped away one day and suddenly it was winter. Mildred and Augustus came every Sunday even when it turned cold and then even colder than that. They built a fire on no-man’s-land and ate with few words. Robbins had told them not to take the boy beyond where his overseer could see them from the entrance to his property. The winter visits were short ones because the boy often complained of the cold. Sometimes Henry did not show up, even if the cold was bearable for a visit of a few minutes. Mildred and Augustus would wait hour after hour, huddled in the wagon under quilts and blankets, or walking hopefully up and down the road, for Robbins had forbidden them to come onto his land except when Augustus was making a payment on the second and fourth Tuesdays of the month. They would hope some slave would venture out, going to or from the mansion, so they could holler to him or her to go get their boy Henry. But even when they managed to see someone and tell them about Henry, they would wait in vain for the boy to show up.

  “I just forgot,” Henry would say the next time they saw him. Augustus had often been chastised as a boy but though Henry was his son, he was not yet his property and so beyond his reach.

  “Try harder to remember, son. To know the right way,” Augustus said, only to have Henry do right the next Sunday or two and then not show up the one after that.

  Then, in mid-February, after they had waited two hours beyond when he was supposed to appear on the road, Augustus grabbed the boy when he shuffled up and shook him, then he pushed him to the ground. Henry covered his face and began to cry. “Augustus!” Mildred shouted and helped her son up. “Everything’s good,” she said to him as she cradled him in her arms. “Everything’s good.”

  Augustus turned and walked across the road to the wagon. The wagon had a thick burlap covering, something he had come up with not long after the first cold visit. The mother and her child soon followed him across the road and the three settled into the wagon under the covering and around the stones Augustus and Mildred had boiled. They were quite large stones, which they would boil for many hours at home on Sunday mornings before setting out to see Henry. Then, just before they left home, the stones were wrapped in blankets and placed in the center of the wagon. When the stones stopped giving warmth and the boy began complaining of the cold, they knew it was time to go.

  That Sunday Augustus pushed Henry, the three of them ate, once again, in silence.

  The next Sunday Robbins was waiting. “I heard you did something to my boy, to my property,” he said before Augustus and Mildred were down from the wagon.

  “No, Mr. Robbins. I did nothin,” Augustus said, having forgotten the push.

  “We wouldn’t,” Mildred said. “We wouldn’t hurt him for the world. He our son.”

  Robbins looked at her as if she had told him the day was Wednesday. “I won’t have you touching my boy, my property.” His horse, Sir Guilderham, was idling two or so paces behind his master. And just as the horse began to wander away, Robbins turned and picked up the reins, mounted. “No more visits for a month,” he said, picking one piece of lint from the horse’s ear.

  “Please, Mr. Robbins,” Mildred said. Freedom had allowed her not to call him master anymore. “We come all this way.”

  “I don’t care,” Robbins said. “It’ll take all of a month for him to heal from what you did, Augustus.”

  Robbins set off. Henry had not told his parents that he had become Robbins’s groom. An older boy, Toby, had been the groom but Henry had bribed the boy with Mildred’s food and the boy had commenced telling the overseer that he was not up to the task of grooming. “Henry be better,” Toby said to the overseer so many times that it became a truth in the white man’s head. Now, all the food Mildred brought for her son each Sunday had already been promised to Toby.

  “We wouldn’t hurt him to save the world,” Mildred said to Robbins’s back. She began crying because she saw a month of days spread out before her and they added up to more than a thousand. Augustus held her and kissed her bonneted head and then helped her up on to the wagon. The journey home to southwest Manchester County always took about an hour or so, depending upon the bitterness or kindness of the weather.

  Henry was indeed better as a groom, far more eager than Toby had been, not at all afraid to rise long before the sun to do his duties. He was always waiting for Robbins when he returned from town, from Philomena, a black woman, and the two children he had with her. Henry would, in those early days when he was trying to prove himself to Robbins, stand in front of the mansion and watch as Robbins and Sir Guilderham emerged from the winter fog of the road, the boy’s heart beating faster and faster as the man and the horse became larger and larger. “Mornin, Massa,” he would say and raise both hands to take the reins. “Good morning, Henry. Are you well?” “Yes, Massa.” “Then stay that way.” “Yes, Massa, I plan to.”

  Robbins would go into his mansion, to face a white wife who had not yet resigned herself to having lost her place in his heart to Philomena. The wife knew about the first child her husband had with Philomena, about Dora, but she would not know about the second, Louis, until the boy was three years old. This was in the days before Robbins’s wife turned beastly sour and began to spend most of her time in a part of the mansion her daughter had named the East when the daughter was very young and didn’t know what she was doing. When the wife did turn beastly sour, she took it out on the people nearest her that she could not love. It got to be, the slaves said, as if she hated the very ground they had to walk on.

  Henry would take Sir Guilderham to the stable, the one reserved for the animals Robbins thought the most of, and rub him down until the animal was at peace and the sweat was gone, until he began to close his eyes and wanted to be left alone. Then Henry made sure the horse had enough hay and water. Sometimes, if he thought he could escape the other tasks of the day, he would stand on a stool and comb the mane until his hands tired. If the horse recognized the boy from all the work he did, it never showed.

  Henry waited eagerly at one end of the road Robbins took at least three times a week, and at the other end of the road, at the very edge of the town of Manchester, the county seat, was another boy, Louis, who was eight in 1840 when Henry was sixteen and an accomplished groom. Louis, the son, was also Robbins’s slave, which was how the U.S. census that year listed him. The census noted that the house on Shenandoah Road where the boy lived in Manchester was headed by Philomena, his mother, and that the boy had a sister, Dora, three years his senior. The census did not say that the children were Robbins’s flesh and blood and that he traveled into Manchester because he loved their mother far more than anything he could name and that, in his quieter moments, after the storms in his head, he feared that he was losing his mind because of that love. Robbins’s grandfather, who had stowed away as a boy on the HMS Claxton’s maiden voyage to America, would not have not approved-not of Robbins’s having lost himself to a black but of having lost himself at all. Having given away so much to love, the grandfather would have told his grandson, where would Robbins get the fortitude to make his way back to Bristol, England, back to their home?

  The 1840 U.S. census contained an enormous amount of facts, far more than the one done by the alcoholic state delegate in 1830, and all of the 1840 facts pointed to the one big fact that Manchester was then the largest county in Virgi
nia, a place of 2,191 slaves, 142 free Negroes, 939 whites, and 136 Indians, most of them Cherokee but with a sprinkling of Choctaw. A well-liked and fastidious tanner, who doubled as the U.S. marshal and who had lost three fingers to frostbite, carried out the 1840 census in seven and a half summer weeks. It should have taken him less time but he had plenty of trouble, starting with people like Harvey Travis who wanted to make sure his own children were counted as white, though all the world knew his wife was a full-blooded Cherokee. Travis even called his children niggers and filthy half-breeds when they and that world got to be too much for him. The census taker/tanner/U.S. marshal told Travis he would count the children as white but he actually wrote in his report to the federal government in Washington, D.C., that they were slaves, the property of their father, which, in the eyes of the law, they truly were; the census taker had never seen the children before the day he rode out to Travis’s place on one of two mules the American government had bought for him so he could do his census job. He thought the children were too dark for him and the federal government to consider them as anything else but black. He told his government the children were slaves and he let it go at that, not saying anything about their white blood or their Indian blood. The census taker had a great belief that his government could read between the lines. And though he came away with suspicions about Travis’s wife being a full Indian, he gave Travis the benefit of the doubt and listed her as “American Indian/Full Cherokee.” The census taker also had trouble trying to calculate how many square miles the county was, and in the end he sent in figures that were far short of the mark. The mountains, he told a confidant, threw him off because he was unable to take the measure of the land with the damn mountains in the way. Even with the mountains taken out of all the arithmetic, Manchester was still half as large as the next biggest county in the Commonwealth.

  The boy Louis, by 1840, could not be contained on the days when he thought Robbins was coming to see them. He bounced around the house Robbins had had built when Philomena was pregnant with Dora and he did not want her to be on the plantation near a wife who early on had suspected she was losing her husband of ten years. The boy would run up the stairs and look out the second-floor windows that faced the road, but when he saw no sign of the dust from Sir Guilderham, he would run back down and look out the parlor window. “I must be not lookin in the right place for him,” he would say to whoever was in the room before flying back up the stairs. The teacher Fern Elston had already reprimanded Louis about leaving out the g’s on all his ing words.

  There was no one else in the county who could have gotten away with putting a Negro and her two children in a house on the same block with white people. On one page of the census report to the federal government in Washington, D.C., the census taker put a check by William Robbins’s name and footnoted on page 113 that he was the county’s wealthiest man. He was a distant cousin of Robbins’s and was quite proud that his kin had done so well in America.

  Dora and Louis never called Robbins Father. They addressed him as “Mr. William,” and when he was not around he was referred to as “him.” Louis liked for Robbins to set him on his knee and raise his knee up and down rapidly. “My horsey Mr. William” was what he sometimes called him. Robbins called him “my little prince. My little princely prince.”

  The boy had what people in that part of Virginia termed a traveling eye. As he looked directly at someone, his left eye would often follow some extraneous moving object that might be just to the side-a spot of dust in the near distance or a bird on the wing in the far distance. Follow it as the object or body moved a few feet. Then the eye would return to the person in front of the boy. The right eye, and his mind, never left the person Louis was talking to. Robbins was aware that a traveling eye in a boy he would have had with his white wife would have meant some kind of failing in the white boy, that he had a questionable future and could receive only so much fatherly love. But in the child whose mother was black and who had Robbins’s heart, the traveling eye served only to endear him even more to his father. It was a cruel thing God had done to his son, he told himself many a time on the road back home.

  Louis, over time, would learn how not to let the eye become his destiny, for people in that part of Virginia thought a traveling eye a sign of an inattentive and dishonest man. By the time he became friends with Caldonia and Calvin, her brother, at Fern Elston’s tiny academy for free Negro children just behind her parlor, Louis would be able to tell the moment when the eye was wandering off just by the look on a person’s face. He would blink and the eye would come back. This meant looking full and long into someone’s eyes, and people came to see that as a sign of a man who cared about what was being said. He became an honest man in many people’s eyes, honest enough for Caldonia Townsend to say yes when he asked her to marry him. “I never thought I was worthy of you,” he said, thinking of the dead Henry, when he asked her to marry him. She said, “We are all worthy of one another.”

  Robbins was forty-one when Henry became his groom. The trips into town were not easy. It would have been best if he had traveled by buggy, but he was not a man for that. Sir Guilderham was expensive and grand horseflesh, meant to be paraded before the world. In 1840, when there were still many more payments to be made for Henry’s freedom, Robbins had been thinking for a long time that he was losing his mind. On the way to town or on the way back, he would suffer what he called small storms, thunder and lightning, in the brain. The lightning would streak from the front of his head and explode with thunder at the base of his skull. Then there was a kind of calming rain throughout his head that he associated with the return of normalcy. He lost whole bits of time with some storms. Sir Guilderham sometimes sensed the coming of the storms, and when it did, the horse would slow and then stop altogether until the storm had passed. If the horse sensed nothing, a storm would hit Robbins, and he would emerge from the storm miles closer to his destination, with no memory of how he got there.

  He saw the storms as the price to be paid for Philomena and their children. In 1841, awaking from a storm, he found a white man on the road back to the plantation asking if he was ill. Robbins’s nose was bleeding and the man was pointing to the nose and the blood. Robbins rubbed his nose with the sleeve of his coat. The blood stopped. “Lemme see you home,” the man said. Robbins pointed up the road to where he lived and they rode side by side, the man telling him who he was and what he did and Robbins not caring but just grateful for the company.

  Robbins felt compelled to repay the kindness when two slaves caught the man’s eye the second day he stayed with Robbins. The Bible said guests should be treated like royalty lest a host entertain angels unaware. The man had stepped out onto the verandah to smoke one of Robbins’s cigars and saw Toby, the former groom, and his sister. Mildred’s food had done things for the boy and his sister, marvelous things to their bones that Robbins’s poor food could never have done. The man came inside and offered $233 for the pair, claiming that was all he had.

  The three, the two children and the man who could have been an angel, had been gone four days when Robbins realized what a bad sale he had made, even if he took something off the price to express his gratitude to an angel. He soon got it into his head that the man had actually been a kind of abolitionist, no more than a thief, the devil in disguise. The idea of the slave patrols began with that bitter sale, with the idea that the storms made him vulnerable and that abolitionists could insinuate themselves and cheat him out of all that he and his father and his father’s father had worked for. But the idea would take root and grow with the disappearance of Rita, the woman who became a kind of mother to Henry after Augustus Townsend bought his wife Mildred to freedom. Before the angel/man on the road and Rita’s disappearance, Manchester County, Virginia, had not had much problem with the disappearance of slaves since 1837. In that year, a man named Jesse and four other slaves took off one night and were found two days later by a posse headed by Sheriff Gilly Patterson. The escape and the chase had put
such bile in Jesse’s master that he shot Jesse in the swamp where the posse found him. He had the four other escapees hobbled that night-sharp and swift knives back and forth through their Achilles’ tendons-right after he cut off Jesse’s head as a warning to his other fourteen slaves and stuck it on a post made from an apple-tree branch in front of the cabin Jesse had shared with three other men. The law ruled that Jesse’s murder was justifiable homicide-though the escaped slaves were headed in a different direction from a white widow and her two teenage daughters, the five men were less than a mile from those women when they were caught. No white person wanted to imagine what would have happened if those five slaves had doubled back, heading south and away from freedom, and got to the place with the widow and the girls. Jesse got what was coming to him, Sheriff Patterson theorized as he thought of the widow and her daughters. He did not put it in those words in a report he made to the circuit judge, a man known for opposing the abuse of slaves. But Sheriff Patterson did write that Jesse’s master was punished enough having to live with the knowledge that he had done away with property that was easily worth $500 in a seller’s market.

  In truth, the man William Robbins met on the road was not an abolitionist or an angel, and Toby and his sister never saw the north. The man on the road sold the children for $527 to a man who chewed his food with his mouth open. He met the openmouthed man in a very fancy Petersburg bar that closed down at night to become a brothel, and that openmouthed man sold the children to a rice planter from South Carolina for $619. The children’s mother wasn’t good for doing her job very much after that, after her children were sold, even with the overseer flaying the skin on her back with whippings meant to make her do what was right and proper. The mother wasted away to skin and bones. Robbins sold her to a man in Tennessee for $257 and a three-year-old mule, a profitless sale, considering all the potential the mother had if she had pulled herself together and considering what Robbins had already spent for her upkeep, food and clothes and a leakproof roof over her head and whatnot. In his big book about the comings and goings of slaves, Robbins put a line through the name of the children’s mother, something he always did with people who died before old age or who were sold for no profit.