Seven cents was not a price. It was an insult with coins attached, and every man standing at the forks of the road that July morning knew it. The crossroad sat a mile east of Natchez, where the Liberty Road crossed the Washington Road, and in the summer of 1849, the heat there had weight to it. It pressed down on the whitewashed pens like a hand on the back of a neck. The dust was the color of bone.
Buzzards rode the hot air in slow rings above the pen roofs, patient as clerks. Along the fence line the traders had set out their tables, and behind the tables stood the people they meant to sell, dressed in the cheap osnaburg cloth the trade favored, their faces oiled, their hair cut, their scars powdered over with lamp black and grease so that a buyer might not see what a whip had written on them. July was the wrong month for a sale. The good season ran from the cotton harvest through the spring when planters had money in hand and the fever had gone out of the river towns. In July the buyers were thin and the traders were nervous.
And what stood at the forks of the road in July was what had not sold in November. The trade had a word for it. They called it refuse. Men with hernias, women with a cough that would not clear, a boy with a clubbed foot, an old man whose eyes had gone milk. They were run through fast in a lot at whatever the auctioneer could get, so the trader would not have to feed them through another season.
Ruel Kettleman's refuse lot was 7 that morning, and the last of the seven was the largest man anyone at that crossroads had ever seen. He stood 6 feet 8 inches if he stood an inch. His shoulders filled the frame of the pen door so completely that he had to turn sideways to come through it, and when he stepped up onto the block, the boards took his weight with a groan that made two men in the front laugh out loud. His head was shaved. along the left side of his jaw. The bone had been broken once and had knitted back crooked, so that the whole lower half of his face sat a half inch out of true, and it gave him a look of permanent patient contempt.
Two fingers were gone from his left hand. On the meat of his right shoulder, somebody had burned a letter into him, a K deep and old and shiny. Kettleman climbed up beside him and put a hand on his arm, the way a man puts a hand on a plow he is tired of owning. “Gentlemen,” he said, you have all heard about this one, so I will not stand here and lie to you in the sun.
This is Goliath, 6 feet 8 inches, 22 years of age, sound in the wind. He will carry 400 pounds of anything you name from here to the river landing without setting it down. He paused. He does not speak, not to me, not to any man, not for 3 years. He has been whipped for it and he has been starved for it and he has been offered money for it and he has not opened his mouth.
He has killed no one that I can prove. He has put three overseers on their backs that I can. I have had 11 years of him and I have not had $11 of good out of him and I am selling him because I'm done and I will take what the crowd gives. He turned and spat over the edge of the block. Somebody give me $200 for the biggest man in Adams County.
Nobody spoke. The buzzards turned. A mule down the fence line shifted and blew. 100. A man near the back laughed.
I'll give you a rope for him, Ruel. 50. $50 and he'll clear 10 acres of cane break before Christmas.
Nothing. And then from under the pecan tree where the shade was, a woman's voice said, “7.” The crowd came around like a herd turning. She was standing alone, which was the first strange thing, because women came to the forks of the road often enough, but they came with a husband or a factor or a son.
She was past 50. Her morning dress had been good black bombazine once, and had gone rusty at the seams. She wore gloves in that heat. Her face was long and dry, and gave away nothing at all. Kettleman knew her.
Half the men there knew her. Mrs. Renfruit, he said slowly. Did I hear you say seven cents? You did. Somebody whooped.
Somebody else said loud, “Widows got a bargain eye.” And the laughter went up and rolled along the fence, and the people standing behind the tables did not laugh because they never did, and one young woman in the line closed her eyes. Kettleman stood a moment with his thumbs in his waistband. He was a man who had made a great deal of money by knowing exactly how much humiliation a thing was worth. And he did the arithmetic in front of everybody. He could hold Goliath another season and feed him.
He could take $50 from nobody because nobody was offering $50. Or he could sell the biggest man in the county for the price of a plug of tobacco in front of 40 witnesses to a broke widow in a dead woman's dress. And the story of it would go around Natchez for a year. And every time it was told, it would be told as a joke about her and not about him. He decided fast.
“Sold, Kettleman said, to the widow Renfruit of Tallow Creek. Seven cents.” She came forward through the crowd, and the men opened for her, still laughing, and one of them swept his hat off in a bow so deep it was an accusation. She did not look at him. At the trader's table she drew off her right glove, and out of it she counted onto the wood a silver half dime and two copper cents, laid flat and separate the way a woman lays out buttons. Kettleman's clerk filled out the bill of sale.
Received of Orura Renfruit, widow of Adams County, the sum of seven cents, being full consideration for one negro man called Goliath, aged about 22 years, which said, “Negro, I warrant to be a slave for life, but do not warrant sound.” Kettleman signed it. She folded it into her glove, and as she did it, the men close enough to see swore afterward that there was already a paper in that glove, a small one folded to a square, soft at the creases, the way paper gets when it has been handled a great many times.