The Known World Read Online Free PDF Page A

They were quite large stones, which they would boil for many hours at home on Sunday mornings before setting out to see Henry. Then, just before they left home, the stones were wrapped in blankets and placed in the center of the wagon. When the stones stopped giving warmth and the boy began complaining of the cold, they knew it was time to go.
    That Sunday Augustus pushed Henry, the three of them ate, once again, in silence.
    The next Sunday Robbins was waiting. “I heard you did something to my boy, to my property,” he said before Augustus and Mildred were down from the wagon.
    “No, Mr. Robbins. I did nothin,” Augustus said, having forgotten the push.
    “We wouldn’t,” Mildred said. “We wouldn’t hurt him for the world. He our son.”
    Robbins looked at her as if she had told him the day was Wednesday. “I won’t have you touching my boy, my property.” His horse, Sir Guilderham, was idling two or so paces behind his master. And just as the horse began to wander away, Robbins turned and picked up the reins, mounted. “No more visits for a month,” he said, picking one piece of lint from the horse’s ear.
    “Please, Mr. Robbins,” Mildred said. Freedom had allowed her not to call him master anymore. “We come all this way.”
    “I don’t care,” Robbins said. “It’ll take all of a month for him to heal from what you did, Augustus.”
    Robbins set off. Henry had not told his parents that he had become Robbins’s groom. An older boy, Toby, had been the groom but Henry had bribed the boy with Mildred’s food and the boy had commenced telling the overseer that he was not up to the task of grooming. “Henry be better,” Toby said to the overseer so many times that it became a truth in the white man’s head. Now, all the food Mildred brought for her son each Sunday had already been promised to Toby.
    “We wouldn’t hurt him to save the world,” Mildred said to Robbins’s back. She began crying because she saw a month of days spread out before her and they added up to more than a thousand. Augustus held her and kissed her bonneted head and then helped her up on to the wagon. The journey home to southwest Manchester County always took about an hour or so, depending upon the bitterness or kindness of the weather.
    Henry was indeed better as a groom, far more eager than Toby had been, not at all afraid to rise long before the sun to do his duties. He was always waiting for Robbins when he returned from town, from Philomena, a black woman, and the two children he had with her. Henry would, in those early days when he was trying to prove himself to Robbins, stand in front of the mansion and watch as Robbins and Sir Guilderham emerged from the winter fog of the road, the boy’s heart beating faster and faster as the man and the horse became larger and larger. “Mornin, Massa,” he would say and raise both hands to take the reins. “Good morning, Henry. Are you well?” “Yes, Massa.” “Then stay that way.” “Yes, Massa, I plan to.”
    Robbins would go into his mansion, to face a white wife who had not yet resigned herself to having lost her place in his heart to Philomena. The wife knew about the first child her husband had with Philomena, about Dora, but she would not know about the second, Louis, until the boy was three years old. This was in the days before Robbins’s wife turned beastly sour and began to spend most of her time in a part of the mansion her daughter had named the East when the daughter was very young and didn’t know what she was doing. When the wife did turn beastly sour, she took it out on the people nearest her that she could not love. It got to be, the slaves said, as if she hated the very ground they had to walk on.
    Henry would take Sir Guilderham to the stable, the one reserved for the animals Robbins thought the most of, and rub him down until the animal was at peace and the sweat was gone, until he began to close his eyes and wanted to be left alone. Then Henry