Thirty-Two. Shockoe Bottom
Chapter Thirty-Two
Shockoe Bottom
They changed cars at Hanover Junction and waited an hour and ten minutes.
It was a place with a water tank and a shed and a long platform and nothing else, and there was a woman selling something out of a basket at the far end who did not come down their way.
Nelson sat on the boards against the shed wall with his wrists still tied under the coat and the woman Alice beside him, and Pendleton stood ten feet off talking to a man about the through car, and the cold came up out of the boards into him.
He looked at that platform for an hour and ten minutes and it did not mean one thing to him.
—
Richmond came at four in the afternoon.
It came in the way a place does when you have heard about it your whole life and never seen it: in pieces, too fast, and none of the pieces the ones you had been told about.
He got sheds and a great many brick backs of buildings and a hill with houses standing up it and a smell coming off the water that was not like anything at Fair Prospect, and then they were slowing, and then the cars were still and everybody was standing up.
They took them off at the depot and walked them.
That was the part he had not expected — that you walk.
Eleven of them out of two cars, in a loose line with three white men round it, down a street with drays going both ways and men on the pavement stepping round them without looking, past a store with barrels out front and a man in the door of it eating an apple, and up over cobbles into a street so narrow that the light was gone out of it at four in the afternoon.
Nobody looked at them twice. That was the other thing. Eleven people walked through the middle of a city with their hands tied and it was of no more interest to anybody on that street than a load of staves.
—
The house was Hector Davis’s and it stood on Franklin near Fifteenth and the jail was behind it, brick and stone, two stories, with a wall.
There was a room downstairs for the men. It was perhaps thirty feet by twenty with a plank floor and four windows barred outside and in, and a stove at one end that was not lit, and it held between twenty and thirty men at a time and there were twenty-six in it the night Nelson came.
They boarded him there at thirty cents a day, which he found out on the fourth day from a man who had been in that room three weeks and had heard the figure said in the passage.
Thirty cents a day is what it cost to keep him alive while somebody arranged to sell him, and the man who paid it would get it back out of the price, and it was written down somewhere in a book with his name against it, and that was the first thing about Richmond that Nelson understood completely.
—
He did what his mother would have done, and he started on the first night, and it was the only thing that stood between him and the wall.
He counted.
Twenty-six in the room, going up to thirty-one by the seventh day and down to nineteen after a Thursday sale.
Four windows. Two doors, one to the yard and one to the passage, and the passage door was the one that mattered because that was the one they came in by when they wanted somebody.
He learned the sound of the bolt on that door and could tell it from the yard bolt inside two days, and so could everybody else in there, and the whole room went quiet for it eleven or twelve times a day.
He read the men. He had been reading men in a barn lot his whole life and it turned out it worked in a brick room in a city.
There was a man called Ransom, about fifty, who had been sold out of Amelia County and who knew the house — knew Davis’s name, knew what the flags in the street meant, knew that the dressing room was upstairs and what happened in it.
There was a boy of about fourteen who cried the first two nights and not after and who Nelson kept near him without ever saying anything about it.
There were three men from one place in Buckingham who had come in together and did not speak to anybody outside the three of them, and who were gone in a week, together, which Nelson thought about a good deal.
And there was a man whose whole work it was to move them.
He was perhaps thirty and he belonged to Davis, and what he did all day was come in at that passage door with a name and take a man out of that room and up the stairs, and bring him back, or not. He did it eleven or twelve times a day. He did not talk. He said the name and stood in the door.
Nelson watched him more than he watched anybody. He could not work out one thing about him, and gave it up, and never stopped watching him.
—
They took the bag on the second day.
It was done in the yard by a white man with a book and it was done to everybody and it took about three seconds a man.
Anything you had came off and went into a box with a number on it, and you were told you would have it after, and Ransom said in the room that evening that some of them did and most of them didn’t and that it depended on the house.
Nelson stood in that yard and gave up the bag.
He gave up the new ticking his mother had doubled and the broader string she had cut.
He gave up the four other pages and the stub of pencil.
He gave up the page out of the spelling book that he had kept eight years and had had under a floor in a tin box for the last of them, and he gave up the pass — Permit the boy Nelson to pass to Yanceyville mill and return this day.
He is my property. C. Ashmore. — which was the first paper he had ever read that said anything about himself, and which was now the property of a firm in Richmond and worth nothing to anybody, and which he watched go into a box with a number on it.
William’s bone-handled knife went in loose on top of the bag, because it was iron and worth something, and the man with the book put a second line against his name for it.
He kept the thimble.
He had it under his tongue when he came out into that yard and he had it under his tongue when he went back in, and he kept it in his mouth except when he was eating and at night, and nobody ever asked him about it, and he did not know why he had thought of it.
—
They put him up on the ninth day.
It began with the dressing room, which was upstairs at the back, and which was a room with two long tables and a stack of clothes in it and a smell of new cloth and old bodies.
They gave him a shirt and trousers and a coat and shoes, and the shirt was new and cheap and had never been washed and had a stiffness in it, and the shoes were somebody else’s and were half a size wrong, and a man went round with a brush and did the coats while they were on the men.
Then they took twelve of them down a passage and into the store.
The store was the front room of the house on Franklin Street and it was a long low room with the ceiling not far above a tall man’s head, and it had a counter down one side that had been a counter for some other business once, and a stove, and benches along the wall for the men to sit on.
There was a flag out front over the door.
There was a red flag, and a piece of paper pinned on it, and Nelson could not read what was on the paper because he could not read a page and never had been able to, and he stood there in a new shirt on the sixteenth of November thinking about that.
There were between eighty and a hundred men in that room, and none of them were sitting down.
—
The examining took about an hour and a half and he had known it was coming and had not known what it was.
There were two screens in the corner, canvas on a frame, and older men were taken behind them.
The young men were done in the open room.
He was told to take the coat off and then the shirt, and he did it, and he stood in the middle of that floor in front of eighty or a hundred men in the middle of the afternoon and let it be done.
Hands in his mouth. A thumb pushing his lower lip down and turning his head to the window for the light.
His arms out and turned over at the elbow.
His hands taken and the fingers spread and the palms looked at, and one man put a thumb into the base of Nelson’s right hand and pressed the muscle there and said something to another man about the machine, having got that from somewhere.
Then he was turned round.
It went quiet where he was standing. Not the room — the room went on — but the eight or ten men round him.
There were four ridges across the small of his back and two of them had healed wide and thick because nobody had done anything about them for the first fortnight, and they had had three weeks and they were what they were going to be.
“Mm,” said a man behind him.
Somebody else said, “What’s that from?”
“August,” Nelson said.
Nobody had asked him and it was not his place to answer and he answered it anyway, and there was a second in which he did not know what was going to happen, and then a man on his left laughed, once, and said something to the man beside him, and they went on.
He counted them, afterward, back on the bench with the shirt on. Twenty men had been shown in that room that afternoon.
Three had backs you could not tell anything from.
—
They sold him at about half past four.
He stood on a block about eighteen inches high with the auctioneer beside him on it, and the man had his hat on and a stick in one hand, and he said what Nelson was: nineteen, sound, out of Louisa County, worked in tobacco and wheat, and had fed a threshing machine two seasons, which he said twice.
He did not say anything about the back and he did not have to.
The bids came in tens. Nelson stood up there and listened to them and could not see who was making them because he had been told where to look and was looking there.
Eleven hundred. Eleven-ten. Eleven-twenty.
There was a long stop at twelve hundred that went on so long he thought it was done, and then twelve-ten out of the back, and it went up in tens for a while more with two men in it, and the auctioneer talked the whole time, the same six or seven words going round and round —
Right and tight and sound. Right and tight and sound, gentlemen.
— and at fourteen hundred it stopped, and the auctioneer said the number twice and put the stick down on the counter, and the whole thing had taken a little under four minutes.
—
Ransom told him in the room that night who had bought him.
“That’s Reddick. He don’t keep nobody. He’s making up for New Orleans — he’s got eleven, twelve out of here already, he’ll go when he’s got thirty or he’ll go when the boat goes.”
“New Orleans.”
“That’s where he sells. He don’t buy for himself, he never has.” Ransom was lying on his back with his hands behind his head. “You’ll go on the water. Norfolk, then round.”
Reddick did not take him out of that room.
He bought him on the sixteenth and left him where he was and went on paying Davis the thirty cents a day, and Nelson lay on that floor a fortnight more and better while the lot was made up, and the only thing that changed about his life in all that time was whose name stood against his in the book.
Nelson sat with his back against the wall, which he could do now, and did not say anything for a while.
Fourteen hundred dollars.
He turned it over and it would not go anywhere.
His mother had spent thirteen years keeping a figure in her head and had told him twelve hundred in April and had been under it by two hundred, and she had been under it because the machine she had put him on to make him hard to sell off a place had turned out to be the thing that made him easy to sell into one, and because she could not have known that he would come to Richmond in November with a new shirt on and four ridges across his back, and he did not know, sitting against that wall, which of those two things had moved the number and in which direction.
He thought about writing to her.
He got as far as thinking it. Then he lay down on the floor of a room in Shockoe Bottom with twenty-five other men and put Delphy’s thimble under his tongue and went to sleep.
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