It was a sum of money, with the accumulated interest, to become the negro son’s on his verbal demand but which Tomey’s Turl, who elected to remain even after his constitutional liberation, never availed himself of.
And he died, and old Carothers McCaslin was dead more than fifty years then, and Amodeus and Theophilus were dead too, at seventy and better, in the same year as they had been born in the same year, and McCaslin Edmonds now had the land, the plantation, in fee and title both, relinquished to him by Isaac McCaslin, Theophilus’s son, for what reason, what consideration other than the pension which McCaslin and his son Zachary and his son Carothers still paid to Isaac in his little jerry-built bungalow in Jefferson, no man certainly knew.
But relinquished it certainly was, somehow and somewhere back in that dark time in Mississippi when a man had to be hard and ruthless to get a patrimony to leave behind himself and strong and hard to keep it until he could bequeath it; — relinquished, repudiated even, by its true heir (Isaac, ‘Uncle Ike,’ childless, a widower now, living in his dead wife’s house the title to which he likewise declined to assume, born into his father’s old age and himself born old and became steadily younger and younger until, past seventy himself and at least that many years nearer eighty than he ever admitted any more, he had acquired something of a young boy’s high and selfless innocence) who had retained of the patrimony, and by his own request, only the trusteeship of the legacy which his negro uncle still could not quite seem to comprehend was his for the asking.
He never asked for it. He died. Then his first son, James, fled, quitted the cabin he had been born in, the plantation, Mississippi itself, by night and with nothing save the clothes he walked in. When Isaac McCaslin heard about it in town he drew a third of the money, the legacy, with its accumulated interest, in cash and departed also and was gone a week and returned and put the money back into the bank. Then the daughter, Fonsiba, married and moved to Arkansas.
This time Isaac went with them and transferred a third of the legacy to a local Arkansas bank and arranged for Fonsiba to draw three dollars of it each week, no more and no less, and returned home. Then one morning Isaac was at home, looking at a newspaper, not reading it, looking at it, when he realised what it was and why. It was the date. It’s somebody’s birthday, he thought. He said aloud, “It’s Lucas’s. He’s twenty-one today,” as his wife entered.
She was a young woman then; they had been married only a few years but he had already come to know the expression which her face wore, looking at it always as he did now: peacefully and with pity for her and regret too, for her, for both of them, knowing the tense bitter indomitable voice as well as he did the expression:
“Lucas Beauchamp is in the kitchen. He wants to see you. Maybe your cousin has sent you word he has decided to stop even that fifty dollars a month he swapped you for your father’s farm.” But it was all right. It didn’t matter. He could ask her forgiveness as loudly thus as if he had shouted, express his pity and grief; husband and wife did not need to speak words to one another, not just from the old habit of living together but because in that one long-ago instant at least out of the long and shabby stretch of their human lives, even though they knew at the time it wouldn’t and couldn’t last, they had touched and become as God when they voluntarily and in advance forgave one another for all that each knew the other could never be.
Then Lucas was in the room, standing just inside the door, his hat in one hand against his leg — the face the colour of a used saddle, the features Syriac, not in a racial sense but as the heir to ten centuries of desert horsemen. It was not at all the face of their grandfather, Carothers McCaslin. It was the face of the generation which had just preceded them: the composite tintype face of ten thousand undefeated Confederate soldiers almost indistinguishably caricatured, composed, cold, colder than his, more ruthless than his, with more bottom than he had.
“Many happy returns!” Isaac said. “I godfrey, I was just about — —”
“Yes,” Lucas said. “The rest of that money. I wants it.”
“Money?” Isaac said. “Money?”
“That Old Marster left for pappy. If it’s still ourn. If you’re going to give it to us.”
“It’s not mine to give or withhold either. It was your father’s. All any of you had to do was to ask for it. I tried to find Jim after he — —”
“I’m asking now,” Lucas said.
“All of it? Half of it is Jim’s.”
“I can keep it for him same as you been doing.”
“Yes,” Isaac said. “You’re going too,” he said. “You’re leaving too.”
“I aint decided yet,” Lucas said. “I might. I’m a man now. I can do what I want. I want to know I can go when I decide to.”
“You could have done that at any time. Even if grandpa hadn’t left money for Tomey’s Turl. All you, any of you, would have had to do would be to come to me.…” His voice died. He thought, Fifty dollars a month. He knows that’s all. That I reneged, cried calf-rope, sold my birthright, betrayed my blood, for what he too calls not peace but obliteration, and a little food. “It’s in the bank,” he said. “We’ll go and get it.”
Only Zachary Edmonds and, in his time, his son Carothers knew that part of it. But what followed most of the town of Jefferson knew, so that the anecdote not only took its place in the Edmonds family annals, but in the minor annals of the town too: — how the white and the negro cousins went side by side to the bank that morning and Lucas said, “Wait. It’s a heap of money.”
“It’s too much,” the white man said. “Too much to keep hidden under a break in a hearth. Let me keep it for you. Let me keep it.”
“Wait,” Lucas said. “Will the bank keep it for a black man same as for a white?”
“Yes,” the white man said. “I will ask them to.”
“How can I get it back?” Lucas said. The white man explained about the cheque. “All right,” Lucas said. They stood side by side at the window while the white man had the account transferred and the new pass-book filled out; again Lucas said “Wait” and then they stood side by side at the ink-splashed wooden shelf while Lucas wrote out the cheque, writing it steadily under the white man’s direction in the cramped though quite legible hand which the white man’s mother had taught him and his brother and sister too.
Then they stood again at the grille while the teller cashed the cheque and Lucas, still blocking the single window, counted the money tediously and deliberately through twice and pushed it back to the teller beyond the grille. “Now you can put it back,” he said. “And gimme my paper.”
But he didn’t leave. Within the year he married, not a country woman, a farm woman, but a town woman, and McCaslin Edmonds built a house for them and allotted Lucas a specific acreage to be farmed as he saw fit as long as he lived or remained on the place.
Then McCaslin Edmonds died and his son married and on that spring night of flood and isolation the boy Carothers was born. Still in infancy, he had already accepted the black man as an adjunct to the woman who was the only mother he would remember, as simply as he accepted his black foster-brother, as simply as he accepted his father as an adjunct to his existence.
Even before he was out of infancy, the two houses had become interchangeable: himself and his foster-brother sleeping on the same pallet in the white man’s house or in the same bed in the negro’s and eating of the same food at the same table in either, actually preferring the negro house, the hearth on which even in summer a little fire always burned, centring the life in it, to his own.
It did not even need to come to him as a part of his family’s chronicle that his white father and his foster-brother’s black one had done the same; it never even occurred to him that they in their turn and simultaneously had not had the first of remembering projected upon a single woman whose skin was likewise dark.
One day he knew, without wondering or remembering when or how he had learned that either, that the black woman was not his mother, and did not regret it; he knew that his own mother was dead and did not grieve.
There was still the black woman, constant, steadfast, and the black man of whom he saw as much and even more than of his own father, and the negro’s house, the strong warm negro smell, the night-time
