Twenty-Six. Four Sheets of Paper
Chapter Twenty-Six
Four Sheets of Paper
William went in to Louisa Court House on the Tuesday and did not come down until the Friday, and when he came he had four sheets of paper.
He had written the whole of it out. That was the thing Nelson noticed before anything else: William, who had hardly written a word since Ould gave up the school, had sat somewhere for an hour or more and put it all down in his own hand in his own bad small writing with the lines running downhill at the ends.
“Right,” he said. He got the candle nearer and got the papers on his knee. “Right. It is all perfectly possible and it is worse than I thought and I am going to tell you the whole of it, and don’t say anything until I’ve done, because I shall lose my place.”
Nelson sat down on the floor with his back against the wall.
—
“First. The doing of it is nothing. That’s the part I had wrong — I thought there’d be a court and a business, and there isn’t.
A man makes a deed. It’s a paper. You write on it that you emancipate so-and-so, and you sign it and seal it and take it to the clerk at the Court House and he records it in the book, and that is the whole of the ceremony, and it is done in the county of the man who owns — “ he did not stop, but something went across the sentence — “in his county. Not the — in his. Meade says he has seen it done in twenty minutes.”
“All right.”
“So that’s nothing. That’s a morning.”
“All right.”
“Now.” William put the first sheet behind the others.
“There is an act. It is from 1806 and everybody in that county knows it and nobody had ever thought to tell me it existed, and when I asked him about it Meade looked at me for about a quarter of a minute before he answered, which I did not care for.”
He found the place on the paper with his finger.
“If a man is emancipated in Virginia, he may not stop in Virginia. He has twelve months from the day his freedom comes to him, and at the end of the twelve months he must be out of the Commonwealth.”
The candle went on burning.
“And if he isn’t,” William said, “he forfeits it. The freedom. It goes. And he can be taken up by anybody and sold, and there’s a thing in it about the sheriff — “ he turned the sheet — “the sheriff sells him. At the front door of the court-house. That’s how it is written.”
Nelson did not say anything.
“I told you it was worse than I thought,” William said, and turned the sheet over, and went on.
—
Nelson let him get through the whole of it because he had said not to interrupt.
He heard about two-thirds of it. He heard the piece about the register and the free papers and the twenty-five cents, and something about a man being taken up if he had not got the paper on him, and he heard the words good character, sober, peaceable, orderly and industrious twice without at that point knowing what they were attached to, and all the while there was one sentence sitting in the middle of the room and he was walking round it.
When William stopped, Nelson said:
“Out of Virginia.”
“Yes. But — “
“Out of Virginia altogether. Not out of the county.”
“Out of the state. But listen, because there’s — “
“Where do people go?”
“North, I suppose. Meade said Ohio and Pennsylvania mostly and some to Liberia, which is in Africa, which he said as though it were a reasonable — “ William caught the look on him and stopped. “Nelson.”
“Twelve months.”
“Yes.”
“And my mother?”
—
There was a long moment in that cabin.
“She can come after,” William said.
He said it easily and immediately, in the voice of a man dealing with the small remaining difficulty, and he had the next sheet already coming up in his hand, and it took him about a second and a half to hear it.
Nelson watched him hear it.
“She’s my father’s,” William said.
“She is.”
“Yes. Yes, I — “ He put the papers down on his knee. “That’s a different — she’d have to be freed as well, and then she’d have the twelve months too, and Junie’s — “
“Junie’s your father’s.”
“Yes.”
“Junie’s eight.”
“Yes,” said William.
He sat there.
“Three of them,” he said, after a while, to nobody in particular, as if it were an interesting difficulty in a thing he had been sent to work out. And then, quickly, with the paper up again: “But that’s only the same problem three times over, that’s not a new — “
“It’s twelve hundred dollars three times over,” Nelson said.
—
They got to the other thing at about eleven o’clock. He had kept it to the last, and he came to it the way a man comes to good news.
“You needn’t go. There’s a way of not going.”
“You said twelve months.”
“There is a way of asking to stop. It’s in the code.
A man who’s been freed can go to the county court and ask leave to remain, and if the court grants it he can stay — in that county, mind, only in that one, he can’t go about — but he can stay.
Meade says they nearly always give it. Nearly always.
He said he has seen four and they gave three. ”
Nelson sat forward.
“How’s it asked?”
And William, who had written it all down and had it in front of him, read out the conditions.
That the notice of the asking must be put up at the front door of the court-house, and must stand there two months.
That all the acting justices of that county must be summoned, and a majority of them must be present and must vote upon it.
That the attorney for the Commonwealth must appear in the case and represent the state.
And that the man asking must produce satisfactory proof that he is of good character, sober, peaceable, orderly and industrious.
“That’s it,” William said. “That’s the whole of it.
And you are all four of those things and everybody in that county knows you are — Sowers has had you on the machine two autumns, Waller’s had you at the threshing, the Beasleys — Nelson, we could get twenty men to that courthouse. We could get Meade.”
“The attorney for the Commonwealth.”
“What of him?”
“What’s he there for?”
William looked at the sheet.
“He represents the state,” he said.
“Against.”
“It doesn’t say against.”
“What else is he there for?” said Nelson.
—
He got up and went to the door and stood in it with his back to the room.
It had rained in the afternoon and it had come off clear, and there was a moon somewhere behind the pack house, and down at the bottom of the quarter you could hear a dog at the Beasley place that carried on that ground when the air was right.
He had it now, the whole of it, laid out end to end the way his mother laid out a piece of work.
A paper at the front door of the court-house with his name on it, standing there two months for every man in Louisa County to read on his way in to pay his taxes.
All the justices of that county summoned and got into one room to vote on him.
A lawyer paid by the state standing up to say what could be said against him.
And twenty white men brought in from four places to swear that he was sober and orderly and had never given anybody any trouble.
And if they said yes, he could stop — in that one county, and nowhere else, and not on any errand out of it, and revocable.
And if they said no, he had twelve months, and at the end of the twelve months he was out of Virginia and his mother was not, or he was standing at the front door of that same court-house being sold by the sheriff.
Same door.
He thought about that for a while. He did not mention it.
“And if they say no?” he said.
Behind him William did not answer.
The dog at Beasley’s gave over. Nelson stood in the doorway a while longer and then came back in and sat down, and William gathered the four sheets together and squared them on his knee and did not look at them.
“Then we find something else,” he said.
“All right.”
“There’s always something else.”
“All right,” Nelson said.
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