“I tell you there ain’t been no damn president from Georgia.”
“There ain’t?” Darcy said. “There ain’t? Well, there damn well should have been. And I’ll tell you somethin-there will be a president from Georgia and real soon.”
“Yes,” Stennis said. “There will be. There will be five at least, as far as I can tell. Maybe ten. Maybe ten. There’ll be ten if I have anything to do bout it. Could go to be twenty or thirty.”
“All right, Stennis, thas anough of that. You see, mister,” and Darcy took his hand. “I’m tryin to give you a good bargain in this here nigger. Just four hundred and fifty. Thas all I’m askin.”
“I thought you said four hundred dollars a minute ago.”
“Did I? Did I say that? Well, it jus goes to show how valuable this nigger gets every minute that goes by. Lordy lordy! Why, in another hour this nigger be so valuable you couldn’t buy him if you was the king of England.”
“I have to be going,” the man said, “I got the queen of England waiting for me.”
“Please, sir,” Darcy said. “Maybe three hundred and fifty, and I’ll be crying in my soup tonight about that.”
“No.” The man began walking away. Darcy followed him and Stennis followed. The Negro stayed with Augustus.
“Three hundred? Two hundred and fifty. Two hundred.” Darcy tugged at the man’s sleeve.
“No. Come along, Belton,” he said to the Negro, but the slave did not move.
“Please. Two hundred dollars. What you want me to do, give him away?”
“That would be a good notion. Come on, Belton,” and both men disappeared around a corner.
“Damn damn damn,” Darcy said, looking at the space the man had just occupied. “You think I was too hard with the bargainin, Stennis.”
“No, Master, I think you was right on the money.”
“Hmm. Well, we best get to beddin down with this fella. I hate to think about headin into Florida. I don’t see good luck in Florida, but tomorrow is another day.”
“And another dollar, Marse.”
10 A Plea Before the Honorable Court. Thirsty Ground. Are Mules Really Smarter Than Horses?
The day Skiffington first came out to Caldonia’s place about Alice and Priscilla and Jamie disappearing, Moses had expected to eat supper again with Caldonia that night, but she was not hungry and the dinner meal would be the only one of her day. She had thought all that day that the three would return before nightfall, finding it difficult to believe that two women and a boy would leave what she and Henry had made. A man perhaps, someone like Elias or Clement, not a madwoman and a woman who seemed to adore her. She had informed Skiffington as a kind of courtesy to the law, but when he showed up and stood before her, the whole matter of the disappearances became more important than the nuisance she figured it to be. It was as if one of her bulls had escaped and before a servant could find and bring him back, he had not just run through someone’s fields but run over a child or two. A simple misdemeanor correctable with money had become a felony. What saved her was that she was the victim.
Moses told her in the parlor that all had gone well even without Alice and Priscilla and Jamie. The harvest would be good. She reached her hand out to him, wanting him to sit beside her.
“Where do you think they are?” she asked. She had looked in Henry’s big book after Skiffington’s visit and estimated that the three might fetch as much as $1,400, depending upon the potential someone might see in a chubby boy and a woman who could work but might wander off on occasion. “Do you think something has happened to them?”
“No, ma’am,” Moses said. Feeling Skiffington’s eyes on him after he returned to work, he had wondered how long before everyone got over that the three would not be coming back, before they all got on to other business.
He put his arm around her but she said she was tired, and when he did not withdraw, she pulled away. They sat for several more minutes before she said again she was tired and needed Loretta and he got up and left.
She went to bed soon after, but could not sleep and got up around two and stood at the window and imagined the three of them coming up the walk, exhausted and glad to be home. What would Henry say of the mess that had come to this place? If three more left tomorrow and then three more and then three more, there would be no one before long but her and Zeddie and Bennett and Loretta. Would Moses be there? Would he go, too? She found solace in the way Skiffington had arrived so promptly. He took what was happening seriously and there was hope in that. She was tempted to go out to Henry’s grave but did not want to go stumbling in the dark out to the cemetery. Waking everyone on such a personal mission.
There was a gentle knock at the door and a momentary fear seized her that it might be Moses. The door opened and Loretta stood with a candle. “I knowed you would be up and not sleepin,” Loretta said. Would Loretta ever leave her? Which group of three would she be among? Henry had paid $450 for her, the big book had told her that morning. “I can feel when the house ain’t settin right.”
“Even if I can’t sleep, you should be,” Caldonia said.
“You want me to bring you somethin?” Loretta did not know all that went on behind the closed parlor door, but she knew that it was probably not good for either the woman or the man.
“Please find something for me in that satchel of yours, Loretta.”
Within five minutes Loretta returned with a drink and Caldonia drank all of it. She got into bed. Loretta sat on the side of the bed. They did not speak. The man Loretta would eventually marry would want to know why she didn’t take his last name, why she wanted no last name at all. “Is that what marryin you gon be?” she asked him. “Question after question every day for the rest of my life? Huh? Is that it?” The man she would marry was a free man who had spent much of his life on the sea. He had been talking to a man one extraordinarily calm day on the sea, and over that man’s shoulder he had seen two other conversing sailors simply disappear, become nothing in only the time it took to end one sentence to the man and begin another. The sailors were not in the sea and they were nowhere on the ship. “No,” the man would say to Loretta, “I won’t ask you no more questions.”
“I worry,” Caldonia said, the drink making its way through her system.
“Shouldn’t worry,” Loretta said. The captain and the sailors on the ship came to attribute the disappearances to one more mystery in their sea lives. The man Loretta would marry did not have very much heart for the sea after that. When his new bride asked him not to ask her so many questions, it was an easy thing to do.
Caldonia covered her mouth as she yawned. Loretta got up and straightened the covers and took up the candle and before she was out the door Caldonia was sleeping.
The next day Moses worked everyone, even the children, until well after dark. Delphie called out at last that they were all hungry and very tired and Moses should mind what he was doing. “We can’t even see what we be doin,” she said. “All this work just goin to waste cause we gon have to do it right tomorrow.”
Moses relented. He stood in the middle of the field and watched them trudge away. He had the reins of a mule and the mule, seeing everyone else leave, started following them. Absently, Moses went with the mule. He had heard someone say after dinner that day that his family had hated him so much that they would rather be whipped and killed by the patrollers than suffer under him. Just yall wait, he had thought, just yall wait till this whole mess is done.
He put the mule up and went to the house, still in the clothes and the sweat of the fields. Caldonia found his appearance endearing. She herself went and brought him some cheese and bread and coffee and watched him eat until a grin slowly spread across his face. “I needed that,” he said at the end.
“Why do you work so hard when you are the one in charge?” she asked. She took the tray from his lap and set it on the tiny table beside his chair. She pulled the perfumed handkerchief from under her sleeve and dabbed at the corners of his mouth and he was uncomfortable with an act that was so far removed from sex, but when she was done and had folded the handkerchief and placed it atop the tray, he was sorry the act was over. “I know overseers who sit on their horses and look over everyone else.”