14 Jan 1828. $180. Kettleman. Account given: ran off.
No. 3, girl, nine, of Charity. 14 Jan 1828. $210.
Kettleman. Account given: ran off. No. 4, boy, four, of Hagar.
2 Dec. 1829. $150. Bledsoe.
Account given: drowned in creek. She read all 31. It took her a long time because of the last column. account given, the account given, not to God and not to a court, because neither God nor a court in the state of Mississippi had ever asked Barnabas Renfruit a single question about the disposal of his own property.
The account given was to the mothers. He had sold a child, and then he had gone out to the quarter and given an account, and then he had come back into this room and written down what he had said, so as not to contradict himself later. He had kept a record of his own lies for 22 years in a neat hand with the dates so that he would not slip, and she had been in the house for all of it. She had nursed Hagar's fever the winter the creek took the boy who did not drown. She had given Charity a length of calico the spring the two children ran off, and she remembered, she remembered, thinking privately, that it was a hard thing, but that they had been ungrateful children.
And halfway down the second page, No. 14, boy, 11, of Zilpa. 4 Nov. 1838. $410. Kettleman. Account given: buried low field, and in the margin in the same small upright hand, the way a careful man notes which of his people he sent on an errand, dy attending, she had stood at that grave.
She could bring the whole afternoon up entire the way you can with things you did not know were important. A cold clear November, the smell of the pine box. Barnabas saying the Lord's prayer too fast, and Zilpa on her knees in the sedge with her hands full of dirt, and Orura Renfruit's own gloved hand on Zilpa's shoulder, and Orura Renfruit's own voice, saying, “He is at rest. He is out of it now. He is better off.” She had said that.
She had believed she was being kind. She had gone back to the house afterward and written in her diary that it had been a sad day and that Zilpa had borne it well. She sat in the office until the fire went out and the room went blue with mourning. What she felt was not grief, and she was cleareyed enough to know it. Grief is for something taken from you.
What she felt was the floor of her whole life going out from under her at once, because it was not only Barnabas. Barnabas had sold them, but Barnabas had needed a house that would not ask. He had needed a wife who would take a lie for an answer and write in her diary that the cook had borne it well. He had needed a woman who was not curious, and she had been that woman for 31 years, and she had been comfortable, and the comfort had been paid for in the last column of that book.
She did not tell anyone. She did not go out to the kitchen and put the ledger in Zilpa's hands. And afterward she would think about why for the rest of her life and the honest answer was cowardice because there is no way to hand a woman that book. There is no sentence that goes in front of it. Instead she did what she knew how to do.
She did arithmetic. She sold the four good mules in March and got $340. She sold her mother's silver and Barnabas's watch in the Woodville lot and got $700 more.
In April, she went to the Britain House in Natchez and borrowed $1,500 more against 420 acres of tired cotton land that already carried 7,900 of her husband's debt. And the factor looked at her over his spectacles for a long moment and said, “Ma’am, this is the whole of it.” And she said, “Yes. $2,540.” $700 of it went straight to the Wilkinson County judgment to keep the sheriff off the lane. $529 went for corn and bacon and salt and the doctor because a plantation that makes no crop still eats. And then she began going to the sales.
She bought Toby out of a Concordia Parish estate sale in May for $780, bidding against a trader until the trader quit and looked at her with real curiosity because Toby was number nine. A boy of seven sold in 1834 to a buyer named Pruitt. account given sent to his people in Virginia, which was a lie so bald that Barnabas had underlined it. Toby was 22 now. He remembered nothing of Tallow Creek, and did not believe her when she said he had been born there, and she did not press it, and he had been on the place 2 months, and had spoken perhaps 40 words.
She bought Winner in June for $520 at the forks of the road, because Winner was number 22. Winner was 31 and had a hand that had been broken and never set and a way of standing very still when a white person came into a room. Two out of 31 and the money gone. And then in July Ruel Kettleman put a man on the block that no one would buy and Orura Renfruit stood under the pecan tree with a folded paper in her glove and on that paper was one line copied out in her own hand. No. 14, boy, 11, of Zilpa.
4 Nov. 1838. $410. Kettleman. She had $11 left in the world.