“So?”
“You know he’ll never completely adjust.”
“So?” he said.
“You know everything here’s strange to him.”
“So?” he said again.
“And it’ll always be a little strange — like seeing the world through a fun house mirror?”
Moses knocked dottle from his churchwarden pipe, banging the bowl on the hard wooden arm of his chair until Harriet, annoyed, gave him a tight look. “You oughta see him, though. I mean, he’s right smart — r’ally. It’s like I just shot out another arm and that’s Mingo. Can do anything I do, like today — he’s gonna he’p Isaiah Jenson fix some windows and watchermercallems”—he scratched his head—“fences, over at his place.” Chuckling, Moses struck a friction match on his boot heel. “Only thing Mingo won’t do is kill chicken hawks; he feeds ’em like they was his best friends, even calls ’em Sir.” Lightly, the old man laughed again. He put his left ankle on his right knee and cradled it. “But otherwise, Mingo says just what I says. Feels what I feels.”
“Well!” Harriet said with violence. Her nose wrinkled — she rather hated his raw-smelling pipe tobacco — and testily laid down a general principle. “Slaves are tools with life in them, Moses, and tools are lifeless slaves.”
The old man asked, “Says who?”
“Says Aristotle.” She said this arrogantly, the way some people quote Scripture. “He owned thirteen slaves (they were then called banausos), sage Plato, fifteen, and neither felt the need to elevate their bondsmen. The institution is old, Moses, old, and you’re asking for a peck of trouble if you keep playing God and get too close to that wild African. If he turns turtle on you, what then?” Quotations followed from David Hume, who, Harriet said, once called a preposterous liar one New World friend who informed him of a bondsman who could play any piece on the piano after hearing it only once.
“P’raps,” hemmed Moses, rocking his head. “I reckon you’re right.”
“I know I’m right, Moses Green.” She smiled.
“Harriet—”
The old woman answered, “Yes?”
“You gets me confused sometimes. Abaht my feelings. Half the time I can’t rightly hear what you say, ’cause I’m all taken in by the way you say it.” He struggled, shaking saliva from the stem of his pipe. “Harriet, your Henry, d’ya miss him much? I mean, abaht now you should be getting married again, don’t you think? You get along okay by yourself, but I been thinking I…Sometimes you make me feel—”
“Yes?” She brightened. “Go on.”
He didn’t explain how he felt.
Moses, later on the narrow, root-covered road leading to Isaiah Jenson’s cabin, thought Harriet Bridgewater wrong about Mingo and, strange to say, felt closer to the black African than to Harriet. So close, in fact, that when he pulled his rig up to Isaiah’s house, he considered giving Mingo his farm when he died, God willing, as well as his knowledge, beliefs, and prejudices. Then again, maybe that was overdoing things. The boy was all Moses wanted him to be, his own emanation, but still, he thought, himself. Different enough from Moses so that he could step back and admire him.
Swinging his feet off the buckboard, he called, “Isaiah!” and, hearing no reply, hobbled, bent forward at his hips, toward the front door—“H’lo?”—which was halfway open. Why could he see no one? “Jehoshaphat!” blurted Moses. From his lower stomach a loamy feeling crawled up to his throat. “Y’all heah? Hey!” The door opened with a burst at his fingertips. Snatching off his hat, ducking his head, he stepped inside. It was dark as a poor man’s pocket in there. Air within had the smell of boiled potatoes and cornbread. He saw the boy seated big as life at Isaiah’s table, struggling with a big lead-colored spoon and a bowl of hominy. “You two finished al-raid-y, eh?” Moses laughed, throwing his jaw forward, full of pride, as Mingo fought mightily, his head hung over his bowl, to get food to his mouth. “Whar’s that fool Isaiah?” The African pointed over his shoulder, and Moses’s eyes, squinting in the weak light, followed his wagging finger to a stream of sticky black fluid like the gelatinous trail of a snail flowing from where Isaiah Jenson, cold as stone, lay crumpled next to his stove, the image of Mingo imprisoned on the retina of his eyes. Frail moonlight funneled through cracks in the roof. The whole cabin was unreal. Simply unreal. The old man’s knees knocked together. His stomach jerked. Buried deep in Isaiah’s forehead was a meat cleaver that exactly split his face and disconnected his features.
“Oh, my Lord!” croaked Moses. He did a little dance, half juba, half jig, on his good leg toward Isaiah, whooped, “Mingo, what’d you do?” Then, knowing full well what he’d done, he boxed the boy behind his ears, and shook all six feet of him until Moses’s teeth, not Mingo’s, rattled. The old man sat down at the table; his knees felt rubbery, and he groaned: “Lord, Lord, Lord!” He blew out breath, blenched, his lips skinned back over his tobacco-browned teeth, and looked square at the African. “Isaiah’s daid! You understand that?”
Mingo understood that; he said so.
“And you’re responsible!” He stood up, but sat down again, coughing, then pulled out his handkerchief and spit into it. “Daid! You know what daid means?” Again, he hawked and spit. “Responsible — you know what that means?”
He did not; he said, “Nossuh, don’t know as I know that one, suh. Not Mingo, boss. Nossuh!”
Moses sprang up suddenly like a steel spring going off and slapped the boy till his palm stung. Briefly, the old man went bananas, pounding the boy’s chest with his fists. He sat down again. Jumping up so quick made his head spin and legs wobble. Mingo protested his innocence, and it did not dawn on Moses why he seemed so indifferent until he thought back to what he’d told him about chicken hawks. Months ago, maybe five, he’d taught Mingo to kill chicken hawks and be courteous to strangers, but it got all turned around in the African’s mind (how was he to know New World customs?), so he was courteous to chicken hawks (Moses groaned, full of gloom) and killed strangers. “You idjet!” hooted Moses. His jaw clamped shut. He wept hoarsely for a few minutes like a steer with the strangles. “Isaiah Jenson and me was friends, and—” He checked himself; what’d he said was a lie. They weren’t friends at all. In fact, he thought Isaiah Jenson was a pigheaded fool and only tolerated the little yimp in a neighborly way. Into his eye a fly bounded. Moses shook his head wildly. He’d even sworn to Harriet, weeks earlier, that Jenson was so troublesome, always borrowing tools and keeping them, he hoped he’d go to Ballyhack on a red-hot rail. In his throat a knot tightened. One of his eyelids jittered up, still itchy from the fly; he forced it down with his finger, then gave a slow look at the African. “Great Peter,” he mumbled. “You couldn’ta known that.”