Edward Jones - The Known World

She tapped him twice on the top of the head and the dust and dirt on the wood flew about and then settled on his head. “There your sugar,” she said. “There all the sugar you gon get from me. Now take it and go on.” She tapped him twice again and he stepped quickly back, just in time to avoid more dust and dirt settling on him. “That ain’t a nice thing to do to your man, sugar.”

He was back the next evening after Moses had released them all from the fields. He came later than usual, having waited until all was clear before he stole flowers from Caldonia’s garden. “Sugar, I got somethin for you, sugar.” He could hear Cassandra and Alice and Delphie in the cabin. He heard Cassandra tell one of the other women to go see what he want, and Alice flung open the door. Her eyes widened at the sight of the flowers, a few red roses and a couple of not very lively begonias. Alice began dancing about. “What is it, Alice? What he doin to you?” Cassandra said. She came to the door in time to see Alice support herself on the doorjamb, lean down and bite into the roses. She chewed and swallowed and went back for more as Stamford moved away.

“You girl, what you go and do that for? Lord have mercy?” he said. “Lord forgive her.”

“Serve you right,” Cassandra said. “Stealin and then wantin me to be in the stealin with you. Come on in here, Alice,” and she closed the door.

What was left of the flowers was at the door at two in the morning when Alice came back from wandering. She brought them in and laid the little bundle beside the sleeping Cassandra on her pallet.

He might have come back again the next night but he had awakened the night he stole the flowers from a dream he could not remember. The dream went to pieces as soon as he sat up on his pallet, but what came into his head was the thought of his mother and father. He had not seen them in more than thirty-five years. He called out to them there in the dark and received no answer. He was forty years old. He sat on his pallet and began to think that he would never again have young stuff, that he would shrivel up and die alone in slavery. There in the dark he realized that he did not even remember his parents’ names. Did they have names? he asked himself as the cabin rose and fell with the snoring of the two other men. Did they have names? They must have, he told himself. All God’s children have names. God wouldn’t allow it to be otherwise. If his parents did not have names, then maybe they had not existed, and so could not have created him. Maybe he had not even been born, but just appeared one day as a little boy and someone, seeing him alone and naked in some lane, had taken pity on him and given him a home. No mama, no papa, give that po boy a home.

Stamford lay back down and tried to find a comfortable spot on the straw. He turned and turned and finally settled for something on his side. It worried him that he could not remember their names. Maybe if he had thought of them more throughout his life. He closed his eyes and took his parents in his hands and put them all about the plantation where he had last seen them, his mother in his left hand and his father in his right hand. But that did not feel right and so he put his father in his left hand and his mother in his right hand, and that felt better. He set them outside the smokehouse, which had a hole in the roof in the back. “Hants come down that hole and take you to the devil,” an older boy had once told him. Stamford was five and it had not been long since his parents had been sold away. “Say Jesus name three times and the hants gon leave you lone.” “Jesus Jesus Jesus.” “You gotta say it faster than that for the hants to leave you lone.” “JesusJesusJesus.” “That sound jus bout right.”

Stamford set his mother and father down before the cabin they had shared with another woman, and still the names did not come. He left off for a moment to touch his navel and that told him that he had once been somebody’s baby boy, been a part of a real live woman who had been with a real man. He had the navel and that was proof he had once belonged to a mother. In his mind, Stamford took up his parents again and put them in front of the master’s big house, he put them in front of the master and the mistress, he put them in front of the master’s children, big and redheaded and loud as three angry bulls. He put them in the fields, he put them in the sky, and at last he put them before the cemetery where there were no names. And that was it: his mother’s name was June, and so he opened his right hand and let her go. His father’s name did not come to him, try as he might to put him all about the plantation. Maybe God had slipped just that one time. Stamford slept, and just before dawn he awoke and said into the darkness, “Colter.”

He went into a kind of mourning for his parents and did not go back to Cassandra. But he was afraid of death and so, after four days, he got it into his head that Gloria might take him back even though she said she did not want to have anything to do with him. He watched her go about her days, and on Thursday evening, after the fields, he sidled up to her coming back from Celeste and Elias’s cabin and said, “Whatcha been doin, sugar?”

“Ain’t none a your damn business.”

“It be my business cause a what I feel for you.”

“Well, be feelin it somewhere else, cause I don’t want you feelin it here.”

He was trying to be patient so he let her be for two days. At dinnertime Stamford found Gloria in a far part of the field she was working in, and she was eating with Clement, the last slave Henry had purchased before he died. “Whatcha you doin gettin with Gloria for?” he asked Clement.

Gloria laughed and that gave Clement license to ignore the older man. The two went on eating, some biscuit, some molasses.

“I done ask you what you doin with Gloria? She ain’t with you.”

“Look that way to me,” Clement said.

“And look that way to me,” Gloria said.

Stamford leaned over and pushed Clement’s left shoulder. “You leave off now, Stamford, if you know whas good for you,” Clement said.

“All right there now, Stamford,” Gloria said, putting her food back in her pail.

“Leave me off, if you know what’s good for you,” Clement said. He shared the cabin with Stamford and they had always gotten along.

“Oh, I know whas good for me all right. Seem like the only person that don’t know it is you.” He pushed the shoulder again and Clement shoved the hand away. When he pushed again, Clement stood up.

“I’m gonna call Moses on you, Stamford,” Gloria said, also rising.

Stamford slapped Clement and Clement punched him in the face, first with one fist and then with the other. Gloria screamed and the other women near them began screaming, too. Stamford began falling with the second punch and all the screaming seemed to push him down more. Clement was upon him and began pummeling. “Leave me be is all I want,” Clement said. “Just leave me be. Leave me in peace. Leave leave leave.” Gloria ran to get Moses and Elias and the other men, and the women tried to pull Clement away from Stamford, who was now all blood and cuts and lying very still.

“Stamford,” Celeste shouted, “don’t you be dead! It wouldn’t be right,” and Tessie repeated what her mother had just said, word for word.

The women roused Stamford before the men arrived. Then four men carried Stamford back to his cabin and Moses, who was not one of the four, told everyone to get back to work. He did not want to carry the news to the house, to Caldonia: an overseer was supposed to handle all such little matters, as Henry had once told him. But when he got to the cabin and saw the condition Stamford was in, he knew he could not keep it from her. Celeste and Delphie followed him into the cabin and began tending to Stamford. “Lord, whas got into that old fool?” Delphie said. She was three years older than Stamford.