published.
The Rita thing, which would ultimately bring Skiffington to the job of sheriff in 1843, began with Mildred and Augustus Townsend buying their own son Henry from William Robbins. Augustus and Mildred came to pick up their boy a few days after they made the last payment. They waited on the road that Sunday and about noon Rita, the second mother to Henry, came out with the boy. His groom clothes belonged to Robbins so he came out to his parents barefoot and in some secondhand clothes that Robbins had thrown in for free because the Townsends had never been late with a payment. There was nothing to do but for the boy to get into the back of the wagon after he and Rita had hugged good-bye. “I see you later, Rita,” Mildred said. “I see you later,” Rita said. “I see you later, Rita,” Henry said. What would amaze all involved was that Robbins never suspected the Townsends, and Henry, who became as close to Robbins as Robbins’s own son Louis, would never say a word. Rita came out into the road, which she knew she was not supposed to do, and stood with her arms folded when she was not waving bye-bye to the boy. The moment the wagon took off, she began to vomit, and all she could think, between the tears, was how much she had enjoyed that dinner, now lost to the road. And she vomited again—thinking that this time it was that little breakfast of one stolen egg and a slice of an old pig’s ear that would have been green in another hour or two if she hadn’t cooked it. She took the bottom of her frock and wiped her mouth. Being that it was noon, the sun was high. The sun for a moment went behind a cloud and when it emerged, she took a step toward the departing wagon. She wiped her tears and then she began to run, and in the moments it took for the sun to go behind another cloud, she had caught up with the wagon and had hold of the back of it. Augustus wasn’t driving the wagon very fast because he had his family together again and all time was now spread out before him over the valley and the mountains forever and ever. Henry soon took hold of Rita’s other hand. Augustus and Mildred were facing ahead, toward home. “Daddy,” Henry said quietly as he watched Rita. His legs dangling off the edge of the wagon, he alone was facing back, toward the Robbins plantation. “Daddy.” Augustus turned in his seat and saw Rita. “What you doin, woman?”
“Don’t leave me here. Please don’t leave me here,” Rita managed to say. The wagon was dragging her when she wasn’t able to run along and it was all Henry could do to hold on to her. Augustus stopped. She climbed aboard and pulled Henry into her arms. “Please please. Lord Jesus, please.”
“Go back now,” Mildred said and Augustus repeated her words. The sun was coming full again and the clouds drifted away and so there was even more light on what wasn’t yet a crime, just a minor offense—two lashes of the whip on Rita’s back and a scolding to the free and clear Townsends, even the boy, who should have known better even if his parents were to claim they didn’t. “You go back,” Mildred and Augustus said together. Henry, beginning to understand the weight of the problem, began to cry, but he clung to Rita as much as she was clinging to him. Augustus got down and pulled at Rita. “Go way. Go way, woman,” he said, looking about, waiting for Robbins or the overseer or some slave to come out and bear witness to it all. Augustus trembled and he saw the sun move in that doomed way a dying man sees a clock’s hour and minute hands move; worse was the promise from the much faster second hand on the clock that all their backs would be whipped raw before sundown. “Please go way, Rita. Please.”
“Don’t leave me here, Augustus. I never been bad not one day to Henry. Tell him, Henry, bout what a good mother I been to you.”
“Yes, Daddy, she been a good mother.” He turned and looked at Mildred. “Mama, she been a good mama.”
“It don’t matter. Don’t kill us like this, Rita.” Augustus raised his hands and shook them at the universe. “Bad mother, good mother, it don’t matter.” He knelt to halt the tears. Mildred got down and came to him. “Augustus,” she said and she was followed by Henry saying, “Daddy, daddy.” In less than an hour, he had said “Daddy” more times than he had in three years. Augustus stood up. “Augustus,” Mildred said. She touched his chest and he knew. “We all be dead by mornin,” he said. He got back up on the wagon, and after he had taken the reins, he was silent as he saw time rolling back toward him from the valley and from the mountains. Mildred told Rita to lay down and she and Henry covered her with a blanket. When Mildred got back up, her husband said, “You got your free papers?” “Yes,” she said. “You got yours?” They were the same questions they had asked before setting out every Sunday from home, but now he added, “You got Henry’s bill a sale?” “Yes,” Mildred said. Augustus nodded and commanded the mules to go. “Up,” he said. “Go up.” He looked back once and when he saw the gray lump that was Rita and saw even farther back the opening to Robbins’s plantation where he had been and his wife had been and his child had been, he commanded the mules to go faster.
He sat all night waiting and thinking of what he could do. Rita, as if trying to disappear, went to a corner of the kitchen in the house Augustus had not long completed. She told the Townsends she was afraid to accept a bed upstairs, lest she have the comfort of it to get out of her mind for the rest of her life. No one came Monday and no one came Tuesday. Very early that Tuesday morning Augustus began collecting the walking sticks he had carved and which he was sending to an Irish merchant in New York. He wrapped each stick in burlap. After he had placed the third one in the wooden box, he stopped and looked over at Rita, sitting up and asleep in the corner. “Rita,” he said in a whisper. She woke and immediately stood up, sensing the end. She could not see all the white men and all the white men’s horses who had come for her, but she nevertheless raised her hands high to surrender. “Come here,” Augustus whispered. He took out the three wrapped sticks and told her to get in the box. Her first thought was a coffin but only white people got coffins that nice.
When she was in it, with her head just an inch or so from the top and her feet with a little less than that from the bottom, he put wrapped walking sticks to either side of her. He had planned to send at least forty sticks to the merchant in New York, but he judged now that the box would take no more than seventeen. Rita’s people had always been people of more bones than meat and muscle, and at long last that was a blessing. Augustus had always wondered what type of New York people bought his walking sticks, what kinds of places they wandered to with them, and that was one thing on his mind as he wrapped sticks and smiled at Rita. There was one stick upon which Augustus had carved Adam at the base. Adam was holding up Eve who was holding up Cain who was holding up Abel and so on and so on. After fourteen or more other figures, including his idea of the king and queen of England, there was George Washington. Rita, not knowing, not caring what was on the stick, but knowing only that she might get another day of sun, took that wrapped stick of Adam and his people and held it. “You get out now and lemme make some holes for the air.” Once he finished, he put her back in and fitted the top on the box. “How that?” he asked her through one of the holes once the top was on. “It be good. It be real good, Augustus,” she said. Before he woke her in the corner, she had been dreaming of work—she had planted seeds in her rows and finished long before everyone else and she was waiting for the overseer to direct her to more work. Just before Augustus whispered her name, she had raised both her hands so that the overseer might see that she was waiting and was not just slacking.
Near the end of Augustus’s work on the box, after he had padded it with burlap, Mildred and Henry came down from upstairs and watched Augustus. It was a little after six in the morning. One rooster crowed, then another, and then another. The four people took the box and the sticks out to the wagon. “Fill these here with water,” Augustus said, handing two flasks to Henry before stepping back to consider the box. Augustus put a clean rag with a few biscuits next to the right of where Rita’s head would go. Augustus moved a stick just a bit and put the filled flasks in the space on the other side of where her head would be. He was surprised at the ease of how he worked, no trembling of the hands, as if he had been born just to put a woman in a box and send her to New York. He believed whistling inside or outside the house was bad luck, but right then as he worked, he was tempted to whistle. Finally, he turned to Rita, held out his hand and helped her up onto the wagon and into the box. Before he nailed her in, Mildred said, “Rita, honey, I see you in the bye and bye. Lord willin.” Rita said, “Mildred, baby, I see you one day in the bye and bye. The Lord wouldn’t hurt us so we couldn’t see each other in the bye and bye.” Rita held on to the stick with Adam and Eve holding up their descendants, and that was the last the three of them ever saw of her. Mildred would dream about her often. She would be walking in a cemetery and would come upon a body, Rita’s, that had not yet been buried. “I see you later,” the dead Rita would say. “Yes, you promised you would,” was all Mildred could manage as she picked up a shovel to begin digging.
Henry accompanied his father into town to the shipping agent, talking to Rita the whole trip, and by two o’clock the box was gone. The father and the son watched the train go away, waiting for it to stop on the tracks and back up and have all the world come up to pay witness to the crime of stealing a white man’s property. But the train did not stop. “How she gon do her business?” Henry asked when the train and the people and the engine smoke were all gone. “A little bit at a time,” Augustus said.
About halfway the trip home, the man realized that these had been his son’s first days of freedom. He and
