Twenty-Eight. By the Middle of July
Chapter Twenty-Eight
By the Middle of July
She had most of it by the middle of July and she had not gone looking for any of it.
William Ashmore had been in to Louisa Court House seven times since April, which was six more than in the whole of the year before.
He had come back from the first one and written for an hour at the desk in the office, and Sarah had seen the papers and said so, in passing, in the way you say a thing that is only odd.
He had been to Meade’s twice that anybody knew of.
There had been a Sunday in July when the two of them had gone at it in the office loud enough to reach the kitchen.
And her son had stopped asking her for anything at all.
Esther had known for eighteen months what the trouble was.
What she had not had, until that summer, was any notion that anybody was trying to do something about it, and when the shape of it came to her — standing at the wash bench, with her hands in the water, the way these things arrive — she stood there for a good while.
He is trying to get him free.
She turned it over for three days and could not decide whether it was the best news of her life or the worst, and then she understood that she did not know enough about it to decide, and that not knowing enough about a thing had never once in her life been a state she was willing to remain in.
—
Elias Poindexter came to Fair Prospect on the ninth of August about barrels.
He was a free man and had been since 1851 and he was a cooper, and there was no better one that side of the county, and he came round the wheat places every August with two apprentices and a wagon and set up in a barn and made flour barrels by the hundred until the work was done.
Fair Prospect had him six days that year.
Esther had never once had ten minutes with him and had been in the same yard as him nine or ten times.
She got the ten minutes on the second afternoon by taking him a jug of water herself, which was not her work and which nobody remarked on, and by being still there when he had drunk it.
“I want to ask you a thing,” she said.
Elias put the dipper down.
He was fifty-odd and had a broad flat face and hands that had been split and healed so many times they had stopped looking like hands and started looking like tools, and he did not say what thing, and he did not say ask it.
He looked at her for about two seconds and then he said, “Sit down, then,” and went on with the barrel, and that was how she understood he had been asked things before.
—
She told him only the part she had to. She said there was a boy of nineteen, and there was a family that might, someday, if certain things fell out, put a paper in for him; and she wanted to know what happened after.
Elias did not ask her whose boy. He asked her three questions — how old was the man that would sign it, was there any other person had a claim in him, and was the place in debt — and she could answer the first two and not the third.
Then he told her.
“Twelvemonth,” he said. “That’s the first thing. He gets his paper and then he’s got twelvemonth and he’s got to be out of Virginia. Not out of Louisa. Out of the state.”
“I know that much.”
“Then you know the most of it.” He turned the barrel and set another stave.
“There’s a way of asking to stop. You go to the county court and you ask.
Two months your name’s on that door, and every justice in the county comes in and votes on you, and the Commonwealth’s man stands up and says his piece.
I done it in ’52. Took from March to July. ”
“They gave it you.”
“They gave it me.” He said it without any pleasure.
“For Louisa. That’s what the paper says.
I’ve got leave to remain in Louisa County and nowhere else in this world.
I have not been to Richmond in eight years.
I’ve got a brother in Hanover, twenty-two mile, and I’ve seen him twice, and both times he come to me. ”
Esther sat on the block by the door with her hands in her lap.
“And if a woman was to be freed after,” she said. “Later on. Would she — “
“Twelvemonth,” Elias said. “Same for her. Her own twelvemonth from her own day.”
“So they’d not run together.”
“Nothing runs together,” said Elias. “Every one of them’s a separate business with its own clock on it and its own two months on that door and its own room full of justices. That’s not a mistake, missus. That’s how it’s made.”
—
Then he gave her the thing she had come for and did not know she had come for.
“There’s another road,” he said. “It’s the one most goes down in the end.
A free man can buy his own. He can’t buy anybody else — the law don’t let a free negro own but his own wife or his own children or his own mother and father.
That’s it. That’s the whole list. But that he can do, and it’s legal, and it’s wrote down. ”
Esther sat very still.
“He could buy me,” she said.
“If he had it. And if the man that’s got you would sell.”
“And then — “
And she stopped, because she had got there herself, in the way she got to things, about two seconds before he said it.
“And then he owns you,” Elias said.
He turned the barrel.
“That’s what it is. That’s what it is exactly, and don’t let nobody tell you different.
He buys you and he’s got a paper says he’s got you, and then he don’t free you — because the day he frees you your twelvemonth starts and you’re on that door and you’re in front of them justices at eight and thirty year old, and them justices ain’t the same men when it’s a woman of eight and thirty as when it’s a man of twenty that Sowers wants on the machine. And if they say no, you go.”
“So he keeps me.”
“He keeps you,” said Elias. “He keeps you and you live in his house and he’s got the paper in a box, and it’s the best thing either of you can do, and it’s the onliest thing, and there’s men in this county living that way this minute and I could give you the names of four.”
He was quiet for a bit, fitting a stave.
“My wife’s at Pendleton’s,” he said. “Nineteen year. I’ve had the money twice. He put it up both times.”
—
She had one more question and she had to make herself ask it.
“You asked me was the place in debt.”
“I did.”
“What’s it signify?”
Elias put the hammer down.
“If a man frees you,” he said, “and that man owed money before he done it — before, mind — then them he owed can come and take you for it. You, not his land. It don’t matter that the paper’s wrote and recorded and the clerk’s got it in the book.
It don’t matter that you’ve been walking about free three year.
That paper’s good against him and it ain’t good against a man he already owed in 1857. ”
Esther heard her own blood.
“That’s not so.”
“It’s so,” Elias said. “I’ve seen it done at Green Springs to a man named Peter that was free four years. The estate come apart and there was a note out of before, and they took him out of his own house.”
He picked the hammer back up.
“That’s why I asked you. It’s the first thing a body ought to ask and don’t nobody ever ask it, because they’re all so took up with the twelvemonth.”
—
She went back up to the house and did the missus’s work until dark and got the supper and heard Junie’s letters, because Junie was nine and had been getting them out of Sarah for a year and Esther had decided a long while ago not to have an opinion about that.
Then she sat on the step.
She had gone down to that barn to find out whether there was any road in it.
And she had found one — a real one, a thing that was written down and that people did — and it went like this: her son would be free, and then he would spend years getting twelve hundred dollars, and then he would buy his mother, and then he would keep her, and they would live in a county he could not leave, on papers that could be revoked, in a house that could be taken by any man Corbin Ashmore had owed a dollar to before he signed.
And it was the best road there was. That was the part she kept coming back to on that step. She had spent thirteen years looking for a road and this was the best one, and it existed, and men were living on it that very minute, and Elias Poindexter could give her four names.
She sat there until the light went out at the kitchen.
Then she made up her mind that she was going to talk to her son.
Not about the road. Not about any of it.
She was going to sit him down and say the thing she had not said in five months, which was that she had been wrong to try and marry him to that girl, and that she was not going to try anything else, and that when it came — whatever came — he was to say nothing and give them nothing and let them have their story and stay alive, and that she would be there, and that was all.
She meant to do it that Sunday.
She did not get to it. It came on the Thursday.
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