Caldonia sat up in bed again. “Mother, Henry worked too hard to give me all of this. I would not squander it away, not in any way you could imagine. I know my duty to what he left me. However much I am Papa’s daughter, I am just as much your daughter.”
“You must remember that it is so easy to go down into destitution.” Her own family had been free for generations but they had never had enough to buy even one slave. “I would not want that for you. A destitution brought on by grief.” They looked at each other. “You should eat something, Caldonia.”
“My heart is not in food, Mama.”
“Put your heart into it, Caldonia. A little milk. A little bread. Try and put your heart into a little something.” Tilmon Newman had planned to find a way to get all his slaves to freedom, had been in touch with a white man from South Carolina who thought they could load them all up and drive up to freedom. “We must go before God with no more than what babies come into the world with,” Tilmon told Maude. But she had poisoned Tilmon before anything like that could happen. Arsenic pie. Arsenic coffee. Arsenic meat. The servants had thought she had gone mad wanting to do all the cooking for her husband. “He has done so much for me, so why shouldn’t I tend to my husband from time to time?” she said to them. The arsenic devoured Tilmon, ate all the meat and muscle off his bones. “For the life of me,” the white doctor said, “I can’t find what’s ailing him.” Years later, Maude still had some arsenic left, kept it in a bottle in a corner beside her chest of drawers. The servants who cleaned that room thought it some remedy for Maude’s frequent headaches. The house servants had never gone into the bottle when they had headaches for they all believed that what worked for Maude would never in a month of Sundays work for a slave.
“Some preserves on a piece of bread, then,” Caldonia said.
Loretta was standing at the bed. “Some milk?” she said.
“Plain water. Cold, plain water, Loretta. Please.”
Maude stood up. “And once she’s eaten, Loretta, help her get dressed.”
“Yessum.”
“I always dress myself, Mama.”
“You needn’t go on with the old ways, Caldonia.”
“They will do for now.”
Loretta and Maude left together. Downstairs, Loretta went to the kitchen and Maude went out onto the verandah where she knew she would find Calvin.
“I hope you haven’t been at her so early in the morning, Mama,” Calvin said. He was leaning against a post and his arms were crossed. He had brought the white man from South Carolina to his father. “With all that legacy rigmarole. She shouldn’t have to hear that so soon after burying Henry.”
“Calvin, with each day of your life, you pull me deeper into misery,” Maude said and stood at the other post. She realized after Tilmon was dead that her husband had known the South Carolina white man, the abolitionist, only because of her son. Within months of where they were that day, Maude would become terribly ill and would stay that way for years. Calvin would stay by her side, a kind of nurse to a mother who really didn’t like him anymore. “For the life of me,” the white doctor said to Calvin in the third year of his mother’s illness, “I can’t find what’s ailing her.”
“I’m sorry for that, Mama,” Calvin now said to Maude. “For all the misery.” It was getting harder and harder for him to think of a reason to remain in Virginia. He had, as he dug Henry’s grave, thought that he would speak to Caldonia about freeing her slaves but he knew now that her mind was not going that way. And, too, his mother was formidable.
Maude came to him. “It’s not your fault, Calvin. We are what God puts in us.” She touched his arm and he looked at her briefly. “I do not want you to talk to Caldonia about selling her legacy. Telling her that she can be happy somewhere over yonder without all of it.” He put a hand over hers, the one that was on his arm. “Don’t try to put your dreams in her head.”
“That was far from my mind, Mama.”
Maude went back inside, then she returned in moments. “I want you to know that I have a legacy for you, whether you want it or not.”
“I really don’t.” He waited for her to remind him that he lived in her house, which was run by slaves. Ate the food they prepared. Slept in a bed they made. Wore clothes they cleaned.
“Still. I have it, Calvin. With Caldonia on her own, I have no one but you to give it to. Everyone else is dead. I will leave it all to you. They may not allow me to take the legacy into heaven, so I will just leave it to you.” She went back into the house.
Later that morning, the slaves of the field went back to their labors. Only those under five years were exempt, cared for in Caldonia’s kitchen by seven-year-old Delores. Some weeks, Tessie, Celeste and Elias’s six-year-old, cared for the small children. Though it was Sunday, a day Henry always gave them to rest up from the other six, Moses the overseer decided on his own to put them back to work. Valtims Moffett came very early to preach to them and was surprised to see them in the field. He simply shouted out a few words to them as they labored and left without seeking payment. When Calvin-less than two hours after the slaves, including Celeste, four months pregnant, went to the fields-learned what Moses had done, he spoke with Caldonia and she said she wanted no work that day. Calvin went out and told everyone to come out of the fields and go back to their cabins. “Caldonia doesn’t want you doing anything more on your own,” Calvin told Moses. Moses disturbed him in a way he had never been able to understand and it pleased him to pull Moses down a peg. “Don’t do anything without coming to her first. Or me.” “Yessir, Mr. Calvin,” Moses said. “I understand that now.”
Calvin stood at the beginning of the lane and watched the slaves return in twos and threes, the children skipping ahead. He had worked hard to get to know all their names, as he knew the names of all the slaves at places he visited often. He called to people as they came his way, and most of them called or nodded or called him Mister Calvin. The children were always shy around him and he wondered, again, what they might have been told about him and people like him.
“Now you tell Mistress not to worry,” Stamford, the man who lived for young stuff, the man Gloria had turned away, was telling Calvin. “You tell Mistress Stamford said not to worry.”
“No, don’t let her worry, Massa,” said Priscilla, Moses’s wife. “It wouldn’t do to have her worry her po self to death.” The other slaves moved around the three; they knew how Stamford and Priscilla could be.
“You tell Mistress,” Stamford said, “that Massa Henry went straight to heaven. He got to them gates and the Lord just opened em right up, said, ‘Massa Henry, I been waitin so long for you. Just come right in. I got a special place for you, Massa Henry, right here sida me.’ You tell Mistress that Stamford say that, Massa Calvin.”
“I’ll tell her,” Calvin said, trying to remember if Caldonia knew all their names. Once, at twenty, he had gone to spend a week or so with a friend near Fredericksburg and they had met a man, a slave of a white man, on his way home as the evening came on. The slave knew Calvin’s friend, a freed man whose family had had a slave but sold him because they could not afford to keep him. Calvin and his friend were drunk.
Alice came up and stuck her head between Priscilla and Stamford and chanted to Calvin, “Massa be dead. Massa be dead. Massa be dyin in the grave.”
“How are you, Alice?” Calvin said. There had been something about the way the slave on the Fredericksburg road had so very readily taken off his hat for Calvin’s friend and then for Calvin. “Hi you this evenin, Mister Ted?” the man had said to Calvin’s friend before putting the hat back on. Calvin, as the friend and the man talked about nothing as the bats took off for the evening, had finally reached around and knocked the man’s hat off his head. He did not know what had gotten into him. The drinking, he told himself later. He had always become meaner when he drank. He never saw the slave again, and the best Calvin could offer as an apology was to never drink again.