Caldonia stepped to the edge of the verandah and raised her head for the first time since she had walked out her front door. She was wearing the black mourning dress and the veil that her mother had brought with her. The sun was full in her face but she did not shade her eyes. She had been crying before she came through the door, and she knew that the tears would soon come back so she wanted to hurry to get at least a few words out. Fern put one arm around Caldonia and Caldonia raised her veil.
“You know now that our Henry has left us,” she said to her slaves. “Left us for good, left us for heaven. Pray for him. Give him all your prayers. He cared about you all, and I have no less care than he did. I have no less love.” She had not considered beforehand what she would say. Every word was not original, was part of something she had heard somewhere else, something her father may have told her as a bedtime story, something Fern Elston may have long ago put into Caldonia’s head and the heads of dozens of other students. Caldonia said to the slaves, “Please do not worry yourselves. I am here and I will not be going anywhere. And you will be with me. We will be together in all of this. God stands with us. God will give us many days, good and bright days, good and joyful days. Your master had work to do, your master wanted better things for you and your children and this world, and I want them for you as well. Please do not worry. God stands with us.” Something she had read in a book, written by a white man in a different time and place. Henry had always said that he wanted to be a better master than any white man he had ever known. He did not understand that the kind of world he wanted to create was doomed before he had even spoken the first syllable of the word master.
Caldonia faltered and began crying and Augustus her father-in-law took her into his arms, and then, not long after that, he put her in her brother’s arms and her brother led her into the house, followed by her mother and Fern Elston and Loretta.
Augustus came down the steps and Mildred came after him. They knew all that was in the hearts of the slaves, they knew all that they were thinking. The slaves came to them, wordless. Augustus had come down not to accept their condolences but because he knew now, after hearing Caldonia speak, that the death of his son would not set them free. He knew that not one of them had ever believed that death would free them-that was not the benevolent way their world moved through the universe. But he himself had believed, had hoped from the moment of the knock at his door at two that morning. “Augustus, I’m sorry, but Mistress say to say to you that Master Henry dead,” Bennett had said, holding his pass in one hand and the lantern in the other so his face might be seen in the darkness. Augustus had believed in Caldonia, had always believed in her, having seen from the beginning a light in her that had failed in his own son born into slavery. But the light was not in her words. So he and Mildred came down the steps to offer their own condolences. They went through the crowd, hugging men and women, kissing the faces of the children, for they had come to know them over the years.
It was before they reached the end of the crowd that William Robbins came up to the house in a surrey driven by his son Louis. Louis and Caldonia and her twin brother Calvin had been schoolmates, all taught by Fern. Robbins sat in the back seat with Dora, Louis’s sister, another of Caldonia’s schoolmates. Robbins got out of the surrey and went around and helped Dora out. None of the slaves moved; with a black master and mistress, a white man was now a day-to-day rarity for many of them. Robbins took off his hat and went to the steps and up to the door and his children followed. Augustus watched the white man all the way. Robbins had not once looked around, but at the door, a storm went off in his head and it made him turn around. “Sir?” his son Louis said. “Sir?” Robbins came to the end of the verandah and looked down at everybody. “What have I told you?” he asked the assembly. “Have I not told yall?” Dora asked her father what was wrong. Except for the skin a shade and a half darker and the differences in their age, Dora was the very image of the daughter Robbins had with his white wife. “What have I told yall?”
A wind, gentle but insistent, drifted through Robbins’s head and the storm quieted, and in a moment or so he raised a hand in greeting to the crowd. The people did not react. Robbins knew something had happened in the minute just gone by but he could not know what, could not know in what way he may have disgraced himself, even before a passel of slaves. He remembered now that he was there because a man he had cared about was dead. Henry, good Henry, was dead. Dora came behind her father and put her hand softly on his shoulder. “Let’s go inside now,” she said.
Robbins turned and opened Caldonia’s door without knocking. His two children followed. Calvin came out of the house and went down to everyone to say that Caldonia wanted no one working that day or the next day, when the funeral was planned. “Moses,” he said, “if anyone needs anything, just let me know.” He meant whatever anyone needed to make a coffin and grave for Henry. Stamford, trying to impress the woman who did not want him anymore, made a show of shaking Calvin’s hand and saying he was sorry to hear about poor Master Henry. Calvin nodded. Calvin wanted to stay on down there with them but he feared that he would not be welcome the way Mildred and Augustus were. He and his mother had thirteen slaves to their names, but he was not a happy young man. Whenever he talked to her about freeing them, as he often did, Maude his mother would call them his legacy and say that people with all their faculties did not sell off their legacies.
No other slave came to Calvin and he made to go away. Augustus said to his back, “Tell Caldonia we be back up directly.” Calvin nodded again and began walking to the house. His father had died a slow death three years before, shriveling and drying up like a leaf in a rainless December, and Calvin always suspected that his mother had poisoned him because his father had been planning to free all their slaves, their legacy. “Sweet Maude, I want to go home to God with a clean mind,” Calvin’s father kept saying. After his father’s death, Calvin stayed on with his mother, in their house, surrounded by the legacy he did not want, because Maude told him she, too, was not long for this world. He stayed also because he wanted to be close to Louis, William Robbins’s son, whom Calvin loved but who could never love Calvin back. Calvin now walked away from the gathering of slaves and Augustus and Mildred and reached the top of the stairs and stopped, stood there for a long time, only two feet or so from the door.
The slaves and Mildred and Augustus went down to the lane to the cabins. Even now with him gone, especially now, Mildred and Augustus had no plans to stay in the house their son and his slave had built. They would stay in the cabin they had just left only days before, after Henry had assured them that he was getting well.
The slaves Henry Townsend left his wife were thirteen women, eleven men, and nine children. The adults included the house servants Loretta, Zeddie, and Bennett, who lived and worked in the house. At any one time some adults and children might be working in the house, depending upon the tasks that needed to be done and whether they might be needed in the fields. As the crowd made its way back down to the lane, some of the children were at the front, and at the head of those children was Elias and Celeste’s oldest, Tessie. She began skipping but an adult told her that a human being had died and skipping should be left off to another day. Tessie would soon be six years old and being the child of her parents that she was, she listened and stopped skipping. Tessie would live to be ninety-seven years old, and the doll her father was making for her would be with her until her last hour. She and the doll, long missing the corn- silk hair Elias her father had put on it, would outlive two of her children, and the doll would outlive her. Beside Tessie that day going back down to the lane was Jamie, the son of Priscilla and Moses the overseer. The boy leaned toward mischief and he was the fattest slave child in four counties, eight years old and the best friend of Tessie. Jamie always talked about him and Tessie marrying one day but that was never to be.