Edward Jones - The Known World

There are matters in my memory that I did not know were there until I saw them on that wall. I must tell you, dear Caldonia, that I sank to my knees. When I was able to collect myself, I stood and found not only Priscilla watching me but Alice as well.

I spoke to Alice thus: “I hope you have been well.” What I feared most at that moment is what I still fear: that they would remember my history, that I, no matter what I had always said to the contrary, owned people of our Race. I feared that they would send me away, and even as I write you now, I am still afraid.

Alice responded to me, “I been good as God keeps me.”

I am “laboring” here now, at the Hotel, the Restaurant, and the Saloon, trying to make myself as indispensable as possible and yet trying to stay out of the way, lest someone remember my history and they cast me out. I would be sick unto death if I were sent away. After years of being a nurse to Mother, my work here is not taxing. I am happy when I get up in the morning and I am happy when I lay my head down at night.

All that is here is owned by Alice, Priscilla and all the people who work here, many of them, to be sure, runaways. My room is on the top floor of the hotel where everyone lives. It is a nice room and it fits me well. Jamie comes and goes as a student in a school for colored children. He is as fine a young man as any father or mother could want.

I will close for now and pray that you and Louis are well. When you are able to write, recall my fear of being cast out and please write my name on the envelope as humbly as you possibly can.

I remain

Forever

Your Brother

Calvin

Caldonia read the letter over and over for days, relieved that Calvin had negotiated the state of Virginia and arrived safely in Washington. She shared it with Louis, who warned her that she would wear out the paper with all the reading and folding and unfolding. “By then,” she told him, “I will have memorized every word and will be ready for the next letter.”

Omitting Calvin’s mention of him, Caldonia even read it at Henry’s grave, knowing that her first husband had been fond of Calvin. She was returning to the house that evening and was up the back stairs when she saw down at the lane Moses limping back to his cabin. Her heart stopped. Even years after their last encounter, her heart stopped.

Moses did not look her way. She found it difficult to move after seeing him.

Moses went into his dark cabin and did not light a lamp. Within the hour Tessie and Grant, Celeste and Elias’s children, brought him supper, lighting their way with a lamp brought from home. He rarely bothered to fix his own meals anymore. Sometimes he ate what the children brought and sometimes he just went to sleep without eating, the food only inches from his head.

That evening Caldonia read Calvin’s letter at Henry’s grave, Moses did eat. In the morning, the children returned with breakfast.

He had once tried to remember the names of Celeste’s children who brought him food, but there seemed to be so many that he gave up. He remembered that once upon a time he himself had had a child. A boy. Who was too fat for his own good. He did know that the meals came from Celeste and he kept her in his prayers. Celeste, to be sure, would always have the limp, but her husband and her children never noticed until someone from the outside happened to point it out to them. “Why yo mama be limpin and everything?” “What limp?”

Celeste’s children always came to Moses with a baby, who looked with fascination at Moses on his pallet. Moses could barely move in the mornings, the result, he would always think, of the times he spent with himself in the damp woods. He liked knowing the baby was there, though he had no power to turn and engage it in play or conversation. He lay on his back and kept his arm over his eyes, as if to protect them from some great light.

“How he doin?” Celeste would ask Tessie or Grant or one of her other children when they returned.

“He looked fine, Mama. But I think the light be hurtin his eyes.”

“And how be that fire in the hearth?”

Tessie would usually say that she had a time trying to light the fire. “Mama, it just don’t wanna do right, that fire.”

“Well,” Celeste would say, “I’ll get your daddy to take a look at it. He’s the handiest man alive with fires and such.”

Her meals to Moses would be until the end. Celeste was never to close down her days, even after Moses had died, without thinking aloud at least once to everyone and yet to no one in particular, “I wonder if Moses done ate yet.”

I am very grateful to: Dawn L. Davis, my editor, who may well have believed from the first word; Lil Coyne (grandmother to Steven Mears), a woman of small stature who stood on the night shore and held the lantern up as high as she could; Shirley Grossman (wife to the late Milton), who took up the lantern some nights so Lil could lie down where she stood and rest; Maria Guarnaschelli, the editor of Lost in the City ; the Lannan Foundation and Jeanie J. Kim; Eve Shelnutt, who, though the water rose every hour on her shore, never failed to answer the telephone; Eric Simonoff, my agent, who may well have believed before the first word; and John Edgar Wideman, a kind and generous man.

Edward P. Jones won the PEN/Hemingway Award and was a finalist for the National Book Award for his debut collection of stories, Lost in the City . A recipient of the Lannan Foundation Grant, Mr. Jones currently resides in Arlington, Virginia. The Known World is his first novel.