Robbins sat in the back seat with Dora, Louis’s sister, another of Caldonia’s schoolmates. Robbins got out of the surrey and went around and helped Dora out. None of the slaves moved; with a black master and mistress, a white man was now a day-to-day rarity for many of them. Robbins took off his hat and went to the steps and up to the door and his children followed. Augustus watched the white man all the way. Robbins had not once looked around, but at the door, a storm went off in his head and it made him turn around. “Sir?” his son Louis said. “Sir?” Robbins came to the end of the verandah and looked down at everybody. “What have I told you?” he asked the assembly. “Have I not told yall?” Dora asked her father what was wrong. Except for the skin a shade and a half darker and the differences in their age, Dora was the very image of the daughter Robbins had with his white wife. “What have I told yall?”
A wind, gentle but insistent, drifted through Robbins’s head and the storm quieted, and in a moment or so he raised a hand in greeting to the crowd. The people did not react. Robbins knew something had happened in the minute just gone by but he could not know what, could not know in what way he may have disgraced himself, even before a passel of slaves. He remembered now that he was there because a man he had cared about was dead. Henry, good Henry, was dead. Dora came behind her father and put her hand softly on his shoulder. “Let’s go inside now,” she said.
Robbins turned and opened Caldonia’s door without knocking. His two children followed. Calvin came out of the house and went down to everyone to say that Caldonia wanted no one working that day or the next day, when the funeral was planned. “Moses,” he said, “if anyone needs anything, just let me know.” He meant whatever anyone needed to make a coffin and grave for Henry. Stamford, trying to impress the woman who did not want him anymore, made a show of shaking Calvin’s hand and saying he was sorry to hear about poor Master Henry. Calvin nodded. Calvin wanted to stay on down there with them but he feared that he would not be welcome the way Mildred and Augustus were. He and his mother had thirteen slaves to their names, but he was not a happy young man. Whenever he talked to her about freeing them, as he often did, Maude his mother would call them his legacy and say that people with all their faculties did not sell off their legacies.
No other slave came to Calvin and he made to go away. Augustus said to his back, “Tell Caldonia we be back up directly.” Calvin nodded again and began walking to the house. His father had died a slow death three years before, shriveling and drying up like a leaf in a rainless December, and Calvin always suspected that his mother had poisoned him because his father had been planning to free all their slaves, their legacy. “Sweet Maude, I want to go home to God with a clean mind,” Calvin’s father kept saying. After his father’s death, Calvin stayed on with his mother, in their house, surrounded by the legacy he did not want, because Maude told him she, too, was not long for this world. He stayed also because he wanted to be close to Louis, William Robbins’s son, whom Calvin loved but who could never love Calvin back. Calvin now walked away from the gathering of slaves and Augustus and Mildred and reached the top of the stairs and stopped, stood there for a long time, only two feet or so from the door.
The slaves and Mildred and Augustus went down to the lane to the cabins. Even now with him gone, especially now, Mildred and Augustus had no plans to stay in the house their son and his slave had built. They would stay in the cabin they had just left only days before, after Henry had assured them that he was getting well.
The slaves Henry Townsend left his wife were thirteen women, eleven men, and nine children. The adults included the house servants Loretta, Zeddie, and Bennett, who lived and worked in the house. At any one time some adults and children might be working in the house, depending upon the tasks that needed to be done and whether they might be needed in the fields. As the crowd made its way back down to the lane, some of the children were at the front, and at the head of those children was Elias and Celeste’s oldest, Tessie. She began skipping but an adult told her that a human being had died and skipping should be left off to another day. Tessie would soon be six years old and being the child of her parents that she was, she listened and stopped skipping. Tessie would live to be ninety-seven years old, and the doll her father was making for her would be with her until her last hour. She and the doll, long missing the corn— silk hair Elias her father had put on it, would outlive two of her children, and the doll would outlive her. Beside Tessie that day going back down to the lane was Jamie, the son of Priscilla and Moses the overseer. The boy leaned toward mischief and he was the fattest slave child in four counties, eight years old and the best friend of Tessie. Jamie always talked about him and Tessie marrying one day but that was never to be.
Five-year-old Grant, the oldest of Tessie’s brothers, held her hand as they went down to the lane. Grant and another boy in the lane, Boyd, also five, had been plagued by identical nightmares for weeks. What Grant dreamed one night, Boyd would dream the next. And then, days later, the reverse would happen, and Boyd’s dream would go across the lane and settle into Grant’s dreaming head. “You just be tryin to do what I be doin,” they teased each other under the safety of the sun. They were both terrified of going to sleep but they had found a strange enjoyment in comparing the dreams, remembering and sharing some detail that the other boy may have forgotten. “You see that big giant man in the blue hat comin at you?” “Whatn’t blue atall. Was all yellow.” “Well, I saw blue.” “You saw wrong.” In recent days the nightmares had eased off, and there was talk that with the coming of fall, the dreams would end altogether. Elias carried their third child, Ellwood, thirteen months. Celeste limped beside her husband. She was three months pregnant with their fourth child.
Two other children at the head of the crowd that day were three-year-old twins, Caldonia and Henry. The twins had had a bad spell the year before, seized for nearly two weeks by a paralyzing and feverish malady that the white doctor could not understand and so could not cure. He did recommend that the whole plantation be quarantined and John Skiffington, the sheriff, used his patrollers to make sure that was done. Each day and night of the children’s illness Caldonia was with them, leaving only to go up to the house to change clothes. Finally, Delphie, who knew something about roots, told the mother of the twins to have them sleep with the tops of their heads touching, and in two days the children were up and about. Delphie surmised that a bond had been created while the twins were in the womb and that that bond had been cut to their detriment with their births. Only sleeping head- to-head could repair that bond, making them ready for the rest of their lives together. The twins would live to be eighty-eight years old. Caldonia would die first, and though her brother Henry had a good and happy life with a good wife and many offspring with their offspring, he decided to follow his sister. “She’s never led me wrong in all this time,” he said to his best friend over drinks the night before he decided to up and die. “I don’t think she’ll lead me wrong this one last time.”
Also at the head of the crowd were Delores, seven years old, and her brother Patrick, three years younger. Delores would live to be ninety-five years old, but her brother would die when he was forty-seven, shot three times by a man as Patrick came out of the man’s bedroom window after being with the man’s wife. The night Patrick was killed he had had a choice—go down to the bottom and spend the night playing cards or go through that man’s bedroom window where the wife was waiting, all wet and hungry and everything. “I need what you got, P Patrick,” the wife had said to him earlier that day. “I need it bad.” The cards had not been falling right for Patrick that week. He had already lost $53 and owed one evil man $11 more, so he thought he would have better luck with that man’s wife. “Give me what you got, P Patrick.”
Augustus and Mildred would again stay in the cabin they had been in when they visited during Henry’s illness. Peter and his wife May had lived in that cabin until about five weeks before when two horses, frightened by something in the barn only they could see, ran Peter over in their effort to escape. May’s child was now seven months old and as everyone walked back down to the lane, the child was carried by a neighbor next door to where Peter and May had lived. Peter, after being trampled by the horses, had been carried back to his cabin and that was where he died. May had abandoned the cabin for the requisite month to give Peter’s spirit time to say good-bye and then find its way to heaven. But after that month she had not returned. May, known for her stubbornness, would decide the day after Henry Townsend’s funeral that Mildred and Augustus’s being in the cabin a second time was Peter’s way of telling her that he was home and settled in. She returned to the cabin
Though there was to be no work in the fields that day, there were things to be done if the world was to go on. Milking cows, a mule to be shod, eggs collected, a plow to be repaired, cabins to be swept if more dust and dirt were not to join what was already inside. And the bodies of slaves and animals required nourishment and fires needed tending to. They, all of them except the children under five, went to work, having decided that food could wait until the chores of the morning were done since they had the rest of the day to themselves. Mildred and Augustus shared in all the work, as they were not strangers to labor.
About noon Calvin and Louis came down and told Moses the grave should be dug. There was a good-sized plot at the back and off to the left of the house where Henry had planned for himself, Caldonia and their generations
