The Known World Read online

  Robbins usually spent the night at Philomena’s, braving all her talk about wanting to go and live in Richmond. He would set out for his plantation just after dawn, weather permitting. There was almost always a storm in his head on the way back. He would have preferred to suffer one going into town, so as to enjoy Philomena and their children knowing the worst was behind him. No matter what weather God gave Manchester County, Henry would be waiting. That first winter after seeing the boy shivering in the rags he tied around his feet, Robbins had his slave shoemaker make the boy something good for his feet. He told the servants who ran his mansion that Henry was to eat in the kitchen with them and forever be clothed the right way just the same as they were clothed. Robbins came to depend on seeing the boy waving from his place in front of the mansion, came to know that the sight of Henry meant the storm was over and that he was safe from bad men disguised as angels, came to develop a kind of love for the boy, and that love, built up morning after morning, was another reason to up the selling price Mildred and Augustus Townsend would have to pay for their son.

  2 The Wedding Present. Dinner First, Then Breakfast. Prayers Before an Offering.

  In the Bible God commanded men to take wives, and John Skiffington obeyed.

  He tried always to live humbly and obediently in the shadow of God, but he was afraid that at twenty-six years old he was falling short. He yearned for earthly things, to begin with, and he rendered far more unto Caesar than he knew God would have liked. I am imperfect, he said to God each morning he rose from his bed. I am imperfect, but I am still clay in your hands, ever walking the way you want me to. Mold me and help me to be perfect in your eyes, O Lord.

  God had not put it in his mind to take a wife until that autumn afternoon in 1840 in the parlor of Sheriff Gilly Patterson. Skiffington, who had been Patterson’s deputy for two years, had come up at twenty years old with his father to Manchester, to a town and county in the middle of Virginia his father had seen only once as a child and had dreamed about twice as an adult. His father had long been the overseer on the North Carolina plantation owned by his cousin, and it was there that John Skiffington grew uneasily into manhood, grew into it among 10 or so white people and 209 or so slaves, the numbers changing only slightly year by year, owing to birth, owing to sales and purchases, owing to death. The night before John Skiffington’s mother died, his father dreamed that God told him he did not want him and his son having dominion over slaves, and two days later the man and his son left North Carolina, carrying the dead woman in a pine box in a wagon the cousin bestowed on them. Don’t leave your wife in North Carolina, God had said to the father at the end of the dream.

  Sheriff Patterson’s two nieces came down from Philadelphia in 1840 for a three-month stay, and he and his wife held one o’clock dinners most Sundays while the young women were there. They would invite folks near and about for small gatherings, and it was on that autumn afternoon that it was John Skiffington and his father’s turn. Patterson’s wife was distant kin to William Robbins’s wife, and Robbins and his wife came as well, though Robbins viewed the Pattersons, to say nothing of the Skiffingtons, as being two or three rungs beneath him and his.

  John Skiffington and his father arrived first and John stepped out of a gray day into Mrs. Patterson’s dull blue parlor and saw first thing Winifred Patterson, a product of the Philadelphia School for Girls, an institution with one foot in Quakerism. He was not a shy man and he was bear-large. Winifred was not shy either, an unintended result of being at the Philadelphia School for Girls, and it wasn’t long before he and Winifred-after the arrival of the Robbinses-had retired to a corner of the parlor and begun a conversation that lasted through dinner and into early evening. What surprised him most was why the female sex had not interested him before that Sunday. Where had God been keeping that part of his head and heart?

  He saw her often after that, in Mrs. Patterson’s parlor, or in church or on buggy rides accompanied by Mrs. Patterson and Winifred’s younger sister. John became the only regular visitor at the Pattersons’ Sunday dinners, and had to be told a few times by Mrs. Patterson, suppressing a titter, that it was rude and selfish to take Winifred aside before the other dinner guests had a chance to relish the worldliness that the Philadelphia School for Girls had instilled in her. By early January Mrs. Patterson told her husband that things were moving in such a way that it might be best if Mr. Patterson summoned his brother from Philadelphia, that the brother and John Skiffington might want to talk. The brother arrived, the men talked, but Winifred returned to Philadelphia in March, after the second frost that did wonders for gardens that year. Skiffington visited Philadelphia twice, and came away that last time in May with Winifred’s promise that she would marry him.

  They married in June, a wedding attended by even the better white people in the county, so liked had John become in his time in Manchester as Patterson’s deputy. His father’s cousin was ill in North Carolina but the cousin sent his son, Counsel Skiffington, and Counsel’s wife, Belle, a product of a very good family in Raleigh. Though John and Counsel had grown up together, as close as brothers, they had no overwhelming love for each other. Indeed, had Counsel not been a wealthy man he would have found his mild dislike of John veering toward something most unkind whenever they met. But wealth helped to raise him above what would have made other men common riffraff and so he was more than happy to come to his cousin’s wedding in a Virginia town whose name his wife had to keep reminding him of. And, too, Counsel hadn’t been out of North Carolina in five months and he had been feeling an ache to walk about under a different sky.

  Counsel and his wife, with some discussion from his dying father, brought a wedding present for Winifred from North Carolina. They waited to present it until the reception for family members in the house John had bought near the edge of town for his bride. About three o’clock, after matters had quieted down some, Belle went out to where her maid was in the backyard and returned with a slave girl of nine years and had the girl, festooned with a blue ribbon, stand and then twirl about for Winifred. “She’s yours,” Belle told Winifred. “A woman, especially a married one, is nothing without her personal servant.” All the people from Philadelphia were quiet, along with John Skiffington and his father, and the people from Virginia, especially those who knew the cost of good slave flesh, smiled. Belle picked up the hem of the girl’s dress and held it out for Winifred to examine, as if the dress itself were a bonus.

  Winifred looked at her new husband and he nodded and Winifred said, “Thank you.” Winifred’s father left the room, followed by Skiffington’s father. Counsel went on smiling; he was thinking of all those early days in North Carolina when his dislike for his cousin was taking root. The trip up to that nowhere Virginia town had been worth it just for the look on his cousin’s face. “It’s a good way of introducing you to the life you should become accustomed to, Mrs. Skiffington,” Counsel said to Winifred. He looked at Belle, his wife. “Isn’t that right, Mrs. Skiffington?”

  “Of course, darling.” She said to the wedding present, “Say hello. Say hello to your mistress.”

  The girl did, curtsying the way she had been shown before leaving North Carolina and many times during the trip to Manchester. “Hello. Hello, mistress.”

  “Her name is Minerva,” Belle said. “She will answer to the name Minnie, but her proper name is Minerva. She will, however, answer to either, to whatever you choose to call her. Call her Minnie and she will answer. But her proper name is Minerva.” Her first maid, received when Belle was twelve, had had a disagreeable night cough and had to be replaced after a few weeks with a quieter soul.

  “Minerva,” the child said.

  “See,” Belle said. “See.” The night that Belle Skiffington would die, that first maid, Annette, grown out of a cough that had plagued her for years, would open a Bible in the study of her Massachusetts home, looking for some verses to calm her mind before sleep. Out of the Bible would fall a leaf from a North Carolina apple tree that she
had, the night she escaped with five other slaves, secreted in her bosom for good luck. She would not have seen the leaf for many years and at first she would not remember where the browned and brittle thing came from. But as she remembered, as the leaf fell apart in her fingers, she would fall into a cry that would wake everyone in her house and she could not be calmed, not even when morning came. Belle’s second maid, the one who had never been sick a day in her life, would die the night after Belle did. Her name was Patty and she had had three children, one dead, two yet alive, Allie and Newby, a boy who liked to drink directly from a cow’s teat. Those two children would die the third night, the same night the last of Belle’s children died, the beautiful girl with freckles who played the piano so well.

  “See,” Belle said again to Winifred. “Now I don’t want you spoiling her, Mrs. Skiffington. Spoiling has been the ruination of many. And, sweet Winifred, I just will not have it.” Belle laughed and picked up the hem of Minerva’s dress again.

  “Yes,” Counsel said, winking at John his cousin, “my wife is the best evidence of the ruination that spoiling brings.”

  The morning after their wedding night Winifred turned to her husband in their bed and told him slavery was not something she wanted in her life. It was not something he wanted either, he said; he and his father had sworn off slavery before they left North Carolina, he reminded his bride. That was how his father had interpreted the final dream, as well as the ones he had been having for weeks. Wash your hands of all that slavery business, God had said in his dreams. The death of John Skiffington’s mother was just God’s way of emphasizing what he wanted. Don’t leave your wife in North Carolina.

  Skiffington sat up on the side of his marriage bed. He and Winifred were whispering, though Minerva, the wedding present, and his father were way at the end of the hall. Counsel and Belle would be leaving that day, but even with them gone Skiffington saw no way to rid themselves of the girl. Selling her would be out of the question because they could not know what would become of her. Even selling her to a kind master, a God-fearing master, did not ensure that such a master would never sell her to someone who did not fear God. And giving her away was no better than selling her. Winifred sat up in bed. They had both gotten up after their lovemaking the night before and put on their nightclothes, so unaccustomed were they to each other. She pulled the gown’s collar tight around her neck and placed her hand over the collar and her neck.

  “I had almost forgotten where I was,” Winifred said, meaning the South, meaning the world of human property. She looked over at the window where even the heavy curtains could not hold back what was promising to be an extraordinarily beautiful day. Right then, she recalled the woman and her handsome husband in Philadelphia who had been thrown into jail for keeping two free black people as slaves. They had been slaves for years, confined to the house, and all the white neighbors knew the slaves by name, but people just thought they were part of the family. They even had the white people’s last name.

  “That was just Counsel,” Skiffington said, a bit defensively. The South was home, and not at all the hell some in the North wanted to make it. “Not everyone can afford to give away a slave like that. They’re expensive, Winifred. That was just Counsel, pokin at me. He can afford to take pokes at me. And they really wanted to please you. Make you happy.”

  “It hurts me to think about it,” she said and began to cry. He turned round in the bed and pulled her to him, placing his hand on the back of her head. “Please, John…”

  “Shhh,” he said. Then, after a while, he kissed the top of her head and put his mouth to her ear. “She might be better off with us than anywhere else.” He was thinking not only about what would happen if they sold her into God only knew what but what their neighbors might say if they gave her to Winifred’s people for a life in the North: Deputy John Skiffington, once a good man, but now siding with the outsiders, and northern ones at that. Skiffington asked his wife, “Are you and me not good people?”

  “I would hope so,” Winifred said. She lay back in the bed and Skiffington got up to dress, for he was still the deputy, newlywed or not. There were still tears in her but she held them and busied herself watching her husband. Then he was gone. She started back crying.

  Three rooms away, the wedding present, Minerva, heard her master leave and she came silently out of her room and studied the bare window nearest her and the hall and all the doors along the hall. The sun came full through the window and made most of the glass knobs on the doors glow. Then before her very eyes, bit by bit, the sun rose and the glow was gone. Minerva was barefoot, though Belle had more than once warned the child never to traipse around without her night slippers. Minerva had, though, remembered to put one of Winifred’s shawls around her shoulders. “You will be in a proper house,” Belle had instructed her, “and you must not go about with your shoulders bare. Now repeat what I have just told you.”

  Minerva went to the window nearest her and looked out to where the sun was still rising. She had an older sister back in North Carolina and every morning back home she could look down where the sun was coming up to the neighboring farm where her sister was a slave. They had been able to visit with one another about once every three weeks. Minerva, though she had traveled for days and days to get from North Carolina to Virginia, looked down to where the sun was rising, believing with a heart that had a long reach that she could see the farm where her sister was. She was disappointed that she could not. Though just a shout and a holler away from Belle Skiffington, the sister back in North Carolina would escape the devastation that was to come to Belle and almost all that God had given her. Minerva wanted to raise the window, thinking that the farm with her sister was just a little look-see beyond the windowpane, but she dared not touch it. Minerva and her sister would not see each other again for more than twenty years. It would be in Philadelphia, nine blocks from the Philadelphia School for Girls. “You done growed,” her sister would say, both hands to Minerva’s cheeks. “I would have held back on growing up,” Minerva would say. “I would have waited for you to see me grow but I had no choice in the matter.”

  Minerva stepped away from the window and took one step down the hall and stopped. The child listened. She took two more steps and was near the staircase going down. She was not brave enough to go down the steps where she thought the rest of the household might be. In less than a week she would be brave enough, brave enough to even go to the front door and open it up and take a step onto the morning porch. The child now took more steps, passing her own room, and came to a partly opened door. She could see John Skiffington’s father on his knees praying in a corner of his room. Fully dressed with his hat on, the old man, who would find another wife in Philadelphia, had been on his knees for nearly two hours: God gave so much and yet asked for so little in return. Minerva stepped on and finally came to the end of the hall where Winifred was still crying in her bed and did not hear the little girl knock once and then once again on the door that was ajar. Finally, Winifred heard. “Yes. Yes,” she said. “Who is it?” Minerva touched the door with her baby finger and it opened some more. The child peeked into the room and looked about until she found Winifred. She took an innocent measure of the whole room and then stepped slowly up to the side of the bed. Minerva was more afraid than she had been out in the hall. She was even now missing Belle because Belle was a certainty she knew about and Winifred could see all that in her face. She touched the girl’s shoulder, recognizing the shawl she had brought from Philadelphia in what she had joked to Skiffington was her “dowry trunk.” Winifred lightly touched Minerva’s cheek, the first and last black human being she would ever touch.

  “I heard you cryin,” Minerva said.

  “A bad dream,” Winifred said.

  Minerva looked about the room some more, half expecting to see Skiffington. She was trying to remember all she had been taught about the proper decorum with a mistress. Concern about her well-being was certainly one thing Belle had told her about. “It
a really bad dream?” the girl asked.

  Winifred thought. “Bad enough, I suppose.”

  “Oh,” Minerva said. “Oh.” She looked around again.

  “Are you hungry?” Winifred said.

  “Yes, mistress,” Minerva said, both hands now resting on the bed.

  “Then we must eat. And we must find a new and better name for me. But first, you and I must eat.”

  Three weeks later William Robbins and four other major landowners summoned Sheriff Gilly Patterson and John Skiffington to Robbins’s home. Robbins had not been able to let go of the sale of Toby and his sister to the man he had met on the road and he was able to convince the four others that something threatening was loose in the land. He was never definite about any of it, but if William Robbins said a storm was coming, then it did not matter how blue and pleasant the sky was and how much the chickens strutted happily about the yard.

  Robbins expressed dissatisfaction with Patterson’s vigilance, hinted that while Patterson and Skiffington slept, abolitionists were spiriting away their livelihood to some fool’s idea of nigger heaven in the North. He had become convinced that the man on the road had come into their county and waited on the road and befriended him with the one aim of stealing Toby and his sister. Robbins, for the first time, broached the idea of a militia.

  “This is a peaceful land, William,” Sheriff Patterson said. “We have no need for anything more than what we got. Me and John are doing a good job.” Patterson liked what little authority he had and was concerned that anything else would be a usurper. And he had never liked the idea of Robbins riding into town in broad open daylight any day of the week to be with a nigger and her nigger children.