“Sir, I have to have the name. It’s got to be spoken and entered. That’s the form of it.” Nothing. The snow ticked on the window.
Zilpa stood by the door with her hands folded and did not come forward and did not help him, which was the greatest act of love anybody committed in that room, because she understood better than anyone alive what it was going to cost him, and that no one could carry any part of it. He had not spoken since the autumn of 1846, when a man named Pleasant ran off from Kettleman's pens. Pleasant, who had scratched the alphabet in the dirt with a bent nail for a boy too big for his own age, and Obed, with his jaw already broken and his hip already out, had been beaten for three days, and on the third day had said the name of the place, and they had brought Pleasant back and made Obed hold him, because that was what Obed was for, that was what the size of him was for. Afterward he had made a decision in a shed at the forks of the road and he had kept it for 3 years and more against everything the world could bring against a man. He opened his mouth.
The first sound was terrible. The jaw had healed wrong and the tongue had gone lazy from disuse. And what came out was a wrecked thick dragging noise. And a woman waiting on the bench by the wall flinched. And he stopped and his hands closed.
Then he did it again. Obed. It was slurred and it was ugly and it filled the room. Obed, he said again better. And then with his eyes on his mother by the door, all of it.
Obed Ransom. The clerk wrote it out. Then he turned the book around and, because it was the form and he said it forty times a year, asked, “And the consideration, ma’am—what was paid?” Orura Renfruit looked at the line. Then she took off her right glove, and out of it she counted onto the desk a silver half dime and two copper cents, laid flat and separate the way a woman lays out buttons. “Seven cents,” she said, and she smiled.
It was not a large smile, and it did not last, but it was the first one anybody had seen on that woman's face in 14 months, and the clerk did not understand it, and the people waiting on the bench did not understand it. And when the story got back down the river to Natchez, as it did by June, carried by a boat clerk and improved at every landing, nobody in Adams County understood it either. They told it for years in the Natchez way over cards. The mad Renfruit widow, sold out, ruined, run off north with every negro she had left. And they say she stood in a courthouse in Ohio and gave away $12,000 worth of property and laughed about it. Grief, they said, never was right after Barnabas died.
Bought an enslaved man for seven cents at the forks of the road. You recall that? Seven cents. Craziest thing anybody ever saw. They had the whole story, and they never had one word of it.
The law Orura Renfruit ran into was not an accident. And the road she took was the only one that existed. Mississippi's slave code of 1822 permitted manumission only by special act of the legislature. granted for what the statute called meritorious service and required the freed person to leave the state. Such acts were rare, a few dozen across decades in a state that by 1850 held more than 300,000 enslaved people. In 1842, the legislature closed the remaining route, prohibiting emancipation by last will and testament.
The best known test came from Jefferson County where the planter Isaac Ross died in 1836, leaving a will directing that the people he held be freed and sent to Liberia. His heirs contested it for years. The High Court of Errors and Appeals upheld the will in 1840. Roughly 200 people finally sailed near the end of that decade. The alternative was distance.
Owners who wish to free people generally had to carry them to free soil and record the deed there. Ohio entered the Union free in 1803, though its black laws of 1804 and 1807 required black residents to post a $500 bond and register certificates of freedom. In February 1849, the Ohio legislature repealed those provisions. Black Ohioans still could not vote or sit on juries, but a manumission recorded there was legally solid. That door did not stay open long.
In September of 1850, Congress passed a new Fugitive Slave Act. And free Black communities across the Ohio Valley began emptying toward Canada. Orura Renfruit's party had crossed 6 months before.
She never went south again. She took two rooms on Sixth Street and kept herself by taking in sewing and by writing letters for people who could not. And she died in the spring of 1858 with $41 and a trunk and a copied list of 31 lines of which 14 carried a mark in red ink. Three she had carried north herself and 11 more traced over 8 years by other people's money and Isham Fay's patience and a great many letters into the dark. Not all of the 11 were living and not one of them was free.
But they had names again and somebody knew where they were. Number one was never found.
Zilpa Ransom lived with her son on Broadway near the river, where he was hired on the levee because he could carry what four men carried, and where he was paid wages in coin into his own hand on Saturdays. He never spoke easily. It hurt him to do it, and it always sounded wrong, and among strangers he mostly did not bother. But he spoke, and around his neck on a leather cord until the day he died, he wore a small deerskin pouch, and inside it were a silver half dime and two copper cents, which he had asked her for on the courthouse steps in the snow, in his ruined voice, in the first full sentence he had spoken in more than 3 years. “I want to keep what I cost,” he said.
She gave them to him.