Fifty-Two. Information Wanted
Chapter Fifty-Two
Information Wanted
He asked Pollard about it on the Sunday after and Pollard told him the whole business in about ten minutes, standing in the door of that carpenter’s shop with the sun going.
The notices cost money. They were reckoned by the line and by how long they ran, and a short one running three months came to two dollars and fifty cents in most of the papers a man would want, and the money went with the copy, and the paper would run it and that was the end of the transaction.
A man wrote what he wanted said. Somebody put it in a fair hand. It went in the mail.
“And which paper,” Nelson said.
“That’s the question,” Pollard said. “That’s the whole of the question.”
He had the four he had read out that morning, and he named them, and he said what he thought of each.
He sent things to a weekly out of Philadelphia that was read in Black churches from Baltimore down to New Orleans and that cost a man nothing if a minister sent it, and he said he would send Nelson’s to it and welcome, and that it was the best chance in the world of a notice being heard.
Then he said the other thing.
“Heard by who, though,” he said. “Your mother can’t read. Neither can most of the people round her. Somebody’s got to read it out in a church she’s in, and that means the notice has got to get to that church, and I don’t know what churches there are in Louisa County, Virginia, and neither do you.”
—
Nelson took ten days over it, and most of the ten days was not writing.
It was the same work he had done on the road to Virginia in April and it went better because there was something at the end of it. He sat down and asked himself one question, which was: who, in the world, at this moment, knows where Esther is?
The answer was short and he did not like any part of it.
His mother knew. She could not read.
Junie knew. She was fifteen and had been taught by her mother and might read a little and might not.
Anybody on that place knew, and most of them could not read either, and there was no telling who was still on it.
And then there were the others. Waller at Fairlawn.
Aleck Dabney. The Beasleys. Meade the lawyer.
Pendleton at the Court House, who had bought him and sold him.
The men who came up that lane in 1861 to talk about a horse.
They could all read, every one of them; they had all known his mother by sight for twenty years; and if a paper came into that county with the name Corbin Ashmore printed in it, one of them would see it inside a fortnight and would say so out loud at the Court House on a court day, because that is what such men do with such a thing.
He sat with that a good while.
A notice in a Black weekly out of Philadelphia had to find a church in Louisa County and a person in it who would read it out and a woman in the room. A notice in a Richmond daily had to be seen by any one of about forty white men who already knew every fact in it except where he was.
Then he did the other sum, which was the money.
Two dollars and fifty cents was five days at the landing. He had thirty-one dollars left of the eighty-one, and it was going out at the rate money goes out of a man living in a town, and there was not going to be a second two dollars and fifty cents that year that he could see.
So it was one notice, in one paper, once.
He took the Richmond one.
—
He wrote it out three times over four evenings on paper he bought.
The first one was too long and had things in it that were about him. The second one had all the facts in it and read like a man shouting down a well. The third one he wrote slowly, and read it over, and did not change it.
I want information of my mother Esther and my sister Junie.
I left them in Louisa County Virginia in November 1859 when I was sold away by Mr. Corbin Ashmore of that county.
My mother was his seamstress and had belonged to him thirteen years and was brought from Richmond.
Junie was nine years old then and is fifteen now.
I was carried to Richmond and sold there and then by water to New Orleans and sold from there into the parish of Lafourche in Louisiana.
I served in the United States Colored Troops and am discharged.
I was called Nelson then and had no other name.
I am Nelson Reuben now. If anybody knows anything of them please send word to me at Thibodaux Louisiana care of Rev.
J. W. Pollard and I will pay any expense.
He read it over once more for the spelling and got two of them and missed one.
Every fact in it was a fact that would help a man find a woman: a county, a year, a name that owned land there, a trade, a term of years, a girl’s age. He had gone through it that way and taken out everything that was not that.
He did not put in what she looked like, because a seamstress on that place for twenty years did not need describing to anybody who could answer.
He did not put in that he was well, because he had put that in the letter in October and the letter had come back with the corners soft, and he had stopped putting things in for the pleasure of putting them in.
—
Pollard read it standing at the window on the Wednesday evening.
He read it twice and put it down and said, “That’s a good one. That’s better than most I see.”
Then he got out a sheet of his own and copied it.
Nelson stood at that window and watched him do it, and Pollard went slowly, and about four lines in Nelson saw him stop and look at the paper and then write something that was not what was on the paper in front of him.
He did it again further down. Once he went back up and put something in above a line with a caret.
He did not ask Nelson about any of it and Nelson did not ask him.
When he was done he read the fair copy out loud, and every fact in it was Nelson’s fact, in Nelson’s order, and none of it any longer sounded like a man talking.
“That’s it,” Nelson said.
—
They put the two dollars and fifty cents in with it and marked how long it was to run, and Pollard wrote the direction on the outside and it went in the mail on the thirtieth of May.
The other one, the free one, Pollard copied out again and sent to Philadelphia, and did not charge him for the paper.
—
It came out on the fourth of June and Pollard got the paper itself three weeks after, because he took it, and he brought it down to the landing and found Nelson and gave it to him without saying anything.
Nelson sat on the piling with it.
It was down among a column of them and it was set in type smaller than the type of the rest of the paper, and it was between a notice about a stray horse and a notice about a partnership dissolved, and it was nine lines long, and it had cost him five days.
He read it three times.
The last line of it had the name of a man in Thibodaux, Louisiana, and the word care of in front of it, and that meant that from the fourth of June in the year 1866 there was a place on the face of the earth that a letter for him could be sent to and would arrive.
There had never been one before.
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