A woman of 51 widowed twelve months. Within 60 days of the funeral, she sells the working stock of a cotton plantation. She sells her mother's plate, her husband's watch, and a town lot. She borrows $1,500 against 420 acres that already carry $7,900 of her husband's debt. And then she goes to market, not to buy mules, gentlemen, not to buy seed, and pays $780 and $520 for two grown field hands worth a thousand between them at the outside, at a moment when she cannot pay her taxes.
And then in July, before 40 witnesses, she pays seven cents for a crippled mute that the trade itself had given up on. And in December, she assembles the neighborhood in a rainstorm and digs up a child's grave. “We do not say she is wicked,” the lawyer said. We say she is not well. Grief takes people in strange ways, and there is no shame in it.
We ask only that her property be kept safe until she is herself.“ Ruel Kettleman testified for an hour and enjoyed every minute of it. Charles Fenwick testified that he had asked her directly in July what she was doing and that she had answered, ”I am paying a debt, and could not say to whom or how much. Isham Fay sat at the back of that room for the whole day, and was not called, and could not have been. Mississippi law did not permit any black person, free or enslaved, to give evidence against a white person in any court in the state. Every fact in the case that mattered had passed through his hands, and the law's position was that he did not exist.
So it fell to Absalom Tate, who was 71 and had been off for Renfruit's father's lawyer in Kentucky 40 years before and had come down the river at his own expense, and who stood up now and asked leave to put a document in evidence. Cressy had it. She had taken it out of the desk on the 18th of December, the night before the fire, and put it under a floorboard in her mother's cabin, and what Doc Yarro had burned in the yard so patiently, page by page, was Barnabas Renfruit's 1846 cotton book. On Christmas morning, Cressy had carried the real one up to the house, wrapped in a meals sack, and set it on the table, and said only, “I figured he'd get to it.” Isham Fay had taken it into Natchez inside a barrel of white oak staves.
Tate read it aloud or 31 lines. It took 11 minutes. And here is the thing that Orura Renfruit carried for the rest of her life, and that she said afterward was the only moment of the whole business when she was afraid she might actually lose her reason. The room was not horrified. There was a stir at first, the novelty of it, the hidden book, the brick in the chimney.
But as Tate read on, the room settled, and she watched 60 faces settle, and she understood what she was looking at. Not one line in that ledger was a crime. Selling a child of four away from its mother was not a crime in Mississippi. Telling the mother it had drowned was not a crime. Burying an empty box in a field, and standing over it with your hat off was not a crime.
It was at worst a private ugliness of the sort a gentleman does not discuss. And there was not a man in that room who did not know three others like it. What moved them was the fourth column, the buyers, because Judge Fenwick's name was in it twice, and Kettleman's 11 times, and a name belonging to a family that had a pew at Trinity, and when Tate read those out, the room went cold and tight in a way it had not gone cold for the children, and Orura Renfruit sat with her gloved hands in her lap, and understood exactly what she was living in.
Tate asked her three questions. Mrs. Renfruit, did you know of this book while your husband lived? I did not. When did you first read it?
The 18th of February at about 9:00 in the evening. Mrs. Renfruit, the petition says you are of unsound mind. What have you to say? And she stood up and said in a voice that did not carry past the third row, I am not mad. I am late.
Then Tate did the thing that actually won it because it was never going to be won on conscience. He put the Britain House factor on the stand and established item by item that Tallow Creek stood mortgaged and encumbered at $9,400 against an assessed value of $8,000, that the taxes were 2 years in arrears, and that the estate of Barnabas Renfruit had been insolvent on the day he died. There was nothing to conserve. Whatever Wilkins Renfruit had written down from Woodville to protect, his aunt had already spent, and every dollar of it had gone into human beings she could not sell without unspending it. He withdrew the petition before the jury retired.
He had been advised that a conservator of an insolvent estate collects nothing and pays the lawyers. She was found of sound mind at twenty minutes to four, and she walked out of that courthouse into the cold and stood on the steps a moment, and not one person spoke to her. And she was 51 years old, and had no land, no husband, no money, no friends, and 19 human beings on a piece of dirt that would be sold out from under them at the courthouse door before the spring was out. Isham Fay was waiting at the bottom of the steps with the mule cart. “Well,” she said.
Well, he said, “Now the hard part.” The hard part was this, and Absalom Tate explained it to her that night in his rented room on Main Street, with a fire going, and his spectacles pushed up on his forehead. She could not free them, not by will, not by deed, not by kindness, not by wanting to. Mississippi's code of 1822 had made manumission possible only by a special act of the legislature granted for extraordinary service to the state and granted almost never and requiring in any case that the freed person leave Mississippi. And in 1842 the legislature had gone further and prohibited emancipation by last will and testament altogether so that a man could not even do at his death what he had lacked the courage for in life. There is no door in this state, Tate said.
There has not been for 8 years. Isaac Ross tried it in Jefferson County, died in 36, willed his people free and passage to Liberia, and his own kin fought the will for years. The high court upheld it in 1840, and even then it was near a decade before those people sailed. And that was a rich man with a famous name and a courtroom full of lawyers. He took his spectacles down.
You have got $11. Then what is left? Distance, said Absalom Tate. It is the only thing that has ever worked. You cannot make them free here.
You can carry them somewhere they already are.