The men who kidnapped and sold Augustus Townsend-the white man Darcy and his slave Stennis-were caught without incident near Virginia’s border with North Carolina. They were riding in a brand-new covered wagon. In the back of the wagon were two children, a boy and a girl, both stolen from their free parents. The children were Spencer and Mandy Wallace. Mandy would go on to become the first black woman to receive a Ph.D. in literature from Yale University. Also in the new wagon were two adult sisters, slaves, who had been taken one evening on their way home from the funeral of a third sister at a nearby plantation. Those sisters, Carolyn and Eva, might not have been on the road to get themselves kidnapped if the owner of their dead sister had not decided that her funeral should be in the late afternoon, after most of the work in the fields was done, so as to maybe cut down on the length of another colored funeral.
Stennis and Darcy were tried and sentenced, Darcy to five years in the penitentiary, and Stennis to ten years. Darcy spent his time at the same prison where the murderer Jean Broussard had met his end. Stennis would have gone to a prison for Negroes in Petersburg, but the day before Stennis was to enter, the authorities decided better use might be made of him if he was sold to help pay the families of the slaves they had kidnapped and sold. He had a colorful history and was bought and sold five times in six weeks. Only the owners of slaves were compensated, all of them white; those people the government could find were paid $15 for each stolen adult slave and $10 for each stolen slave child. All the money left over, some $130, was put in the Virginia treasury.
There was nothing the Commonwealth of Virginia could do about the stolen loved ones of freed people, since such people really didn’t have a money value in the eyes of the law. So they received nothing but an earnest letter of apology from a dreamy-eyed assistant to the governor. The government acknowledged that it had failed to protect the loved ones and for that it was sorry, the assistant wrote.
Stennis was finally sold for $950 to a white man, a Kentuckian. On the way there, Stennis asked if Kentucky was anywhere near Tennessee. “Next door,” his new master said, “but we in Kentucky stays to ourselves.” Stennis, driving the wagon, went on and on about how the air from Tennessee wouldn’t have that far to travel to get to him in Kentucky. At the last, his new owner had had enough. He took out the pistol he had tucked in his coat and told Stennis to stop the wagon. He put the pistol to his temple and said, “I’m tired of your yappin so you best shut up right here and now. The people of Kentucky don’t care one whit for a nigger woodpecker.”
On Mildred’s porch the afternoon she died, Moses looked at Counsel putting out his cigarette in the yard. He said to Moses, “You done your business?” Moses looked one last time at Mildred’s covered body. Just before Moses came out, Counsel had been talking to God and God was answering back. God said, Job, I have not forgotten you. I heard you crying out there. You have been my worthy and loyal servant, and I have not forgotten you, Job. I will do what is right by you. I will put you back where I found you. I promise. “Your business done here?” Counsel asked Moses.
Moses nodded. He shut the door to Mildred’s house.
“Then you ready?” Counsel said.
“Yes, I be ready,” Moses said, not offering a “Master” or even a “Mister,” but just saying again, “I be ready.” Counsel didn’t notice that he wasn’t getting a “Master” or a “Mister.” They both looked at Skiffington’s body. Moses thought the white man would want to take the dead white man with them. He informed Counsel that Mildred’s place did not have a wagon to carry the dead man. Skiffington’s horse had wandered off.
“That so?” Counsel said about the missing wagon. He had never intended to take Skiffington with them. There would be time enough to come back and get him. “That so?” Moses nodded. “If you’ve done all your business in there, we may as well leave. So les you and me go,” Counsel said as Moses walked toward him and held out his hands to be roped and tied.
Three years and nine months after John Skiffington was killed, Minerva Skiffington, the young woman who had been like a daughter to him, came out of a butcher shop eight blocks from the Philadelphia town hall and turned left. It was, as usual, a day of crowds. She lifted the tea towel over that morning’s purchases in her basket with the notion that she was forgetting something. She made her way to the druggist for the soap she and Winifred Skiffington, John’s widow, liked. Her skin had thrived once freed of the lye-based soap that was the standard in Virginia. They lived with Winifred’s sister, who herself was a widow, and with John’s father, Carl.
At the corner, one block from the druggist, Minerva stepped without looking into the street and was nearly knocked over by a white man on a horse. “Watch how you step!” the man shouted. Minerva screamed and was pulled back in time by someone behind her. She turned around to see a very dark black man a head and a half taller than she was. “You could get killed,” the young man said. He was the darkest handsome man she had ever seen. “You could get killed by a horse,” he said and let go of her shoulders. “Go on with all care,” he said and she nodded. “Take all care.” He raised his hat good-bye and stepped around her and went across the street and down the block.
Watching him blend into the crowd, Minerva crossed, and as she did, a pack of three dogs, smelling the purchases from the butcher, began following her. She walked right past the druggist, and near the end of that block, the black man turned around and she stopped and the dogs behind her stopped. She followed the man for one more block. The dogs continued to follow her. The dogs knew that people made mistakes and that at any moment the basket could become vulnerable.
The man turned around again just three blocks before the town hall and seemed only half surprised to see her. He came toward her and she bent to set the basket on the ground. The dogs came closer and she noticed them and pulled the tea towel away to make it easier for them. The man walked to her and people passed on either side of them. “Afraid of all them horses?” he said. “I’m not afraid of any horses,” she said, “or anything like that.”
She began telling him her story and he took her to the house where he lived with his parents and two sisters, one younger than Minerva and one older. Three days later the man saw a poster on a building and a similar one just two blocks away. He took the second poster to Minerva, to the room she had been sharing with the younger of his sisters. Minerva read the poster again and again. The next day she and the man went to the constabulary to tell the authorities that she was not missing and that she was not dead. She was, she said, nothing more than a free woman in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.
The black man and his family would try for the longest to get her to go to Winifred to explain her new life but Minerva refused.
The posters read: “Lost Or Harmed In Some Unknown Way On The Streets Of This City-A Precious Loved One.” They gave Minerva’s name, height, age, everything needed to identify her. A daguerreotype of Winifred and Minerva had been taken not long after they came to Philadelphia, both women sitting side by side in the photographer’s studio. The poster reproduced that portion of the photograph that contained Minerva. But at the bottom of the posters, like some kind of afterthought, in words much smaller than everything else on the poster, was the line “Will Answer To The Name Minnie.” And so Minerva did not see Winifred Skiffington again for a very long time.
It was the “Will Answer To,” of course, that had done it. Winifred had meant no bad thing by the words. With what little money she had, she hired a printer-an enlightened white immigrant from Savannah, Georgia-to make up the posters and put them up all about Philadelphia, “where any eye could see,” she had instructed the printer. She had meant only love with all the words, for she loved Minerva more than she loved any other human being in the world. But John Skiffington’s widow had been fifteen years in the South, in Manchester County, Virginia, and people down there just talked that way. She and the printer from Savannah would have told anyone that they didn’t mean any harm by it.