And she said the thing plainly. I know who you are, she said. You are Zilpa's boy. You were sold on the 4th of November 1838 to Ruel Kettleman for $410 by my husband, and he told her you died of the egg, and I stood at the grave, and I believed him. He did not move.
I have had a paper in my glove with your line on it since February, she said. Every sale I have gone to, I have gone with it. I did not know you when I saw you. I knew the size and the age and the letter Kettleman burns on them. And I have been wrong twice this spring.
Her voice was as flat as a person reading off a list. You have been in this yard 6 weeks, and you have not gone to her. Why? The wind moved in the cedars. Down at the row, a dog barked twice and quit, and the man reached over and took her hand.
She was too startled to pull it back, and he turned it palm up, and with one finger, slowly he wrote on her palm. It took a long time. He had never had a pen in his hand in his life. He had learned his letters in a holding pen at the forks of the road, from a man who scratched them in the dirt with a bent nail, which was against the law in Mississippi, and cost them both a beating when it was found out. He made them the way a child makes them, huge and wrong way.
And she had to say each one out loud as he made it to keep her place, and twice he had to start over. What he wrote was, “I held a man down.” She sat very still. He was not finished. He turned her hand and wrote again, smaller, faster now. And she said the letters out loud into the dark, one at a time, and put them together.
And what he had written was, They made me, and I did it. I gave them the name.
She learned it in pieces over the rest of that summer on the kitchen steps at night, one word at a time on the palm of her hand, and she learned the rest of it from a free man of color named Isham Fay, who made barrels in Natchez, and had a memory like a courthouse. Isham Fay was 39 and had been freed in 1831 by a special act of the Mississippi legislature, the only road there was after he pulled two children out of a burning warehouse on Silver Street, and he carried his freedom papers in an oil cloth wallet against his chest and touched them roughly every quarter hour without knowing he did it. He made the barrels for half the plantations in Adams County, which meant he went everywhere, which meant he heard everything, and he was the most careful man Orura Renfruit ever met, and he had reason to be. She went to him in August, because she needed someone who could read a deed book, and could not afford to gossip. “Ma'am,” he said when she had finished, I want to be plain with you about what you are asking.
You are asking a free black man to go into the Adams County courthouse and read bills of sale for negroes and to go into Ruel Kettleman's counting room and read his books. If a white man takes it in his head to ask me why, I have got no answer that saves me. I have got a shop and two apprentices and a paper in my coat that any drunk on Silver Street can burn. I know it. You do not know it, Isham said not unkindly.
You cannot, but I will do it. He set down his adze. You want to know why? Before you ask me again, and I have to lie. My sister was sold out of Rodney in 1822, and I have never found her, and I have been reading deed books on my own account since the day I was freed.
I am not doing you a service. You have got a list. I have never had a list.
They worked from the end of August into October. She wrote out orders in her own hand. Isham Fay is about my business, Orura Renfruit, and he carried them. And in the record room of the Adams County Courthouse, he sat at the end of the long table with the deed books and turned pages until his eyes ran. Not every sale of a human being was recorded.
Most were not. But mortgages were recorded, and estate inventories were recorded, and sheriff sales were recorded. And a man who is patient can walk a number from a ledger to a name in a probate file to a name on a Concordia Parish tax roll if he is willing to spend 40 nights doing it. Twice a deputy clerk stood over him and asked what business a Cooper had with book K. And both times Isham Fay produced the paper in the widow's hand and kept his eyes down and said nothing else. because a free man in Mississippi in 1849 who explained himself well was more frightening to white men than one who did not explain himself at all.
The second time the clerk kept the paper for an hour before giving it back. Isham did not go into the courthouse again for 11 days, and when he did, he went at noon when the room was full, and a man could be seen. And in October, he coopered 18 barrels for Kettleman's warehouse, and he was left alone in the counting room for 2 hours on a Thursday afternoon, and he read the trader's daybook for 1838 straight through, and did not write down a single word, and carried it out in his head. They put the list together on the dining room table at Tallow Creek with the doors shut. 31 numbers, 31 children, nine of them were dead and could be proved dead.
Three in one week in the Louisiana cholera of 1833. One on a Bayou Lafourche sugar estate at 14. The others in ways nobody had trouble to write down. Six could not be traced at all. Sold to a trader who went broke.
Sold to Texas. Sold. And then the record simply stops, which happens to people the way it happens to hogs heads of sugar. 11 were alive and locatable at a distance, Yazoo City, Concordia, a place on the Homochitto. A woman of 29 in Vicksburg, who had four children of her own now, and did not know she had ever had a mother in Adams County, and five, counting Obed, Toby, and Winner were at Tallow Creek, or within a day's ride of it.
There is a thing in the book you have not asked me about, Isham Fay said at the end of that night. And I have gone back and forth about telling you. “Tell me.” “The ‘of’ column. Read it down.” He waited while she did it.