“That’s not right,” Samuel said to the trader. “That’s not right at all. I said I had a buck to sell . . .” In his confusion, he couldn’t remember the words from the note he’d written to Lancaster, nor what he’d intended it to say, only what had been whispered in his ear from the night before.
“No, sir,” Lancaster said. “With the greatest of apologies, I fear you are mistaken. Wait . . .” He patted his breast pocket. He reached inside, searching. “I don’t know what I did with that paper, but I distinctly recall what this nigger gave me.” He gestured to Claudius, who had climbed down from his horse. Asked, boy, what did that paper indicate? And don’t pretend he hadn’t read it.
Claudius looked from Samuel to Lancaster. He was caught like a catfish on a line. One of these white men was his master, and a nasty sumbitch at that. Yet he could not accuse Lancaster of lying, either—this would assure that he’d be whipped at the least. So Claudius looked down at his shoes, until Samuel said to him, go into the fields and tell Carson Franklin to get his son, Jeremiah. And then bring back a Quarters-man. Anyone, as long as he was strong.
A half hour passed, and Carson and Jeremiah walked to the yard. They had taken hold of the struggling Midas. Aggie was sitting in the small yard in front of her cabin and saw the braided head of her husband. She began to run toward the big house, but Samuel made a gesture, and she was caught by Claudius. He whispered that he was so sorry. He was only doing the best he could, as she called him a white man’s nigger. Samuel urged Claudius to hit her. Make her shut up, but Claudius only held her arms and rocked her. He pulled Aggie closer and pressed her face into his chest. He whispered, look away from her man, ’cause it was too much. Just look away, and she fainted in Claudius’s arms.
In the wagon, the overseer’s two sons held on to Midas, who yelled and kicked as the trader’s helper locked him in chains. He screamed Aggie’s name. Pop George’s name. Then, repeatedly, the names of his two children, Nick and Tess.
“Papa love y’all!” Midas cried. “I won’t never stop! Y’all ’member me! Papa love his babies!”
His voice could be heard as the trader drove off. Hours later, it seemed as if his voice screamed still, like the ghost of somebody who had died.
A Family’s Grief
We do not need to tell you that Aggie and Pop George grieved after the selling of Midas. That evening after he was taken away, Aggie was senseless in the bed she had shared with him, where Claudius had carried her and laid her down. Outside, the Quarters-folks had congregated and sang their sorrow songs around a fire. That night, no one in the Quarters slept. Even the children refused to lie down on their pallets in their cabins. In their mothers’ arms, the babies cried throughout the night. Sadness was a wounded animal crouching in every corner.
In the years after her father’s selling, Tess would not remember him, but she would withdraw into quiet, except when she sat underneath the large pecan tree that was feet away from the general store that Samuel had built. Then she talked to herself, laughing, and sometimes jokingly hitting the pecan tree. Tess insisted that the tree and she had long conversations, and Aggie left her in peace to her fantasies, the way she’d left Mamie to the same tree. Aggie reasoned that life was long and full of suffering; let children have their scant happiness.
Yet Nick would not forget his father, and in the days and weeks after the trader’s wagon had pulled away, he would ask Aggie, where was his papa? Where had he gone? Aggie would cry and hug herself, and Nick would ask her, why ain’t she say where his papa had gone? Until the day that Pop George took the child aside, saying that he needed him to be a big boy now. Didn’t nobody know where his papa had gone, and his mama was sad about that. And every time he be asking about Midas, Nick be making his mama even more sad.
Thus, Nick hushed his questions and became stoic, but one morning, he announced to Aggie, “I know where my papa be. He be gone to Jesus.” His mother asked, where’d he get that notion? and her son told her the Good Lord had told him in a dream. The child was so serious that Aggie did not have the heart to correct him. And when Nick said he wanted to put a rock in the graveyard for his papa, so he could pray, Aggie assented.
Then came the day when Nick was put to work. This was a ritual in the life of every Quarters-child: in their seventh summer （or rarely, their sixth or eighth year）， the top milk teeth of the Quarters-children fell out, leaving the empty homes as the marker of a new time. Most of the children that Aggie and Pop George tended would go to the fields, but some would help Claudius work the two large vegetable gardens, one supplying the House and one the Quarters. These same children would help Claudius tend the hens and the milk cows, which supplied the butter, cream, and cheese to the House. They would not be allowed near the left cabin, however, to trim the flowers that wound through the spires of the fence that imprisoned the Young Friend.