Nine of those 31 are of the same four women, and every one of the nine went out of this place before it was 8 years old, and the price on them was high for the age. That is not a man selling off increase, Mrs. Renfruit. A man selling off increase sells the ones he does not want to look at. She was quiet a long time. I know what you're telling me, she said finally.
I did not want to be the one. You are not. She closed the book. He was every day for 22 years at that table over the mutton. Word got out that autumn the way word does.
Not the whole of it. Nobody knew about the ledger yet, but the widow Renfruit had been seen at three sales buying grown negroes at above market with money she did not have, and a free cooper had been seen in the record room with paper from her hand. And Ruel Kettleman, who had bought 11 of the 31 over 22 years, began to be a man who did not enjoy hearing her name. and Charles Fenwick of Ivywild, whose late father, Judge Fenwick, appeared twice in the fourth column, began to be a man who crossed the street.
What happened at the forks of the road that July morning was not unusual, and that is the most important fact about it. Congress prohibited the importation of captives from Africa, effective January 1st, 1808. What followed was not the end of the trade, but its turning inward. As tobacco land in the upper south wore out and cotton spread west, historians estimate that roughly 1 million enslaved people were carried from the upper south to the deep south between 1790 and 1860. Most moved through sale rather than with a migrating owner and estimates suggest about one in three enslaved children in the exporting states was separated from at least one parent.
Natchez sat at the receiving end. In 1833, following a cholera outbreak, the city barred slave trading within its limits and the traders relocated to a crossroads a mile east where the Liberty and Washington roads met. The forks of the road became one of the largest markets in the deep south, second in the region only to New Orleans. The Alexandria firm of Franklin and Armfield shipped people there through the 1830s. Traders kept inventories listing height, age, complexion, skills, and what they termed faults.
Those judged unsound were discounted heavily and sold in lots, and the trade's own paperwork called them refuse. Mississippi law placed no restriction on selling a child away from its mother at any age. Louisiana, by an act of 1829, prohibited the sale of children under 10 apart from their mothers. Mississippi never passed such a law, which is to say that everything written in Barnabas Renfruit's hidden ledger was perfectly legal. And this is precisely what made the next thing so dangerous, because it was not the law his widow was about to run into.
It was her own family.
Wilkins Renfruit arrived from Woodville on the 9th of November with a valise and a lawyer. He was Barnabas's brother's son, 34, handsome in a soft way with beautiful manners and the eyes of a man counting the silver while he compliments the soup. He kissed his aunt's hand. He said the place was looking well, which was a lie so large it was almost friendly. He stayed 4 days, and on the third day he asked very gently.
Whether he might glance at the books as family, as a comfort to her, she let him. She had no grounds to refuse and no strength to invent one. He found the Britain House note. He found the sale of the mules and the silver and the Woodville lot. He found $1,300 paid out inside of two months for two grown field hands worth at the outside a thousand between them at a moment when his aunt could not pay her taxes.
And he found a bill of sale for a crippled mute purchased at seven cents. He copied every figure into a memorandum book in a beautiful round hand, and he was in Natchez by the following Tuesday.
On the 21st of November, the probate court of Adams County received a petition sworn by Wilkins Renfruit, praying that an inquisition be held to determine whether Orura Renfruit, widow, was of unsound mind and incapable of managing her estate, and that a guardian of her person and property be appointed. The southern courts had a name for that proceeding, and it was older than the state, de lunatico inquirendo. A jury of 12 men would be impaneled. They would hear evidence. If they found her non compos mentis, her property, the land, the debts, and the 19 human beings the law counted among her chattels would pass under the control of a conservator, and every bill of sale she had signed since February could be attacked as the act of a woman not in her right mind.
Dr. Mercer Pit came out from Natchez on the 28th to examine her, because the petition required a physician's certificate. He was not a cruel man. He was worse than cruel. He was reasonable. He sat in her parlor with his hat on his knee and asked her whether she slept and whether she heard her husband's voice and whether she had been troubled by dreams and she said no to all of it.
Then he asked why she had bought the man at the forks of the road. “Because he was for sale,” she said. “Mrs.”
Renfruit, a woman in your circumstances does not buy what is for sale. She buys what she needs. “That is exactly right, Doctor.” He wrote for a while.
Then he said without looking up, “You understand that if you were to tell me you had a reason, a plain ordinary mistaken reason, sentiment, grief, anything a jury could put a name to, I could write it down, and this would very likely go away.” And she looked at that man for a long moment and understood that he was offering her the whole of her old life back at the price of one sentence and that the sentence would have to be a small one and that she had spent 31 years saying small sentences. I have nothing to tell you.
She said, Doctor Pit certified that in his opinion the widow Renfruit exhibited a fixed and irrational purpose respecting the disposition of her estate and the court set the matter for January.