The Known World (51 page)
Authors: Edward P. Jones
He had once tried to remember the names of Celeste’s children who brought him food, but there seemed to be so many that he gave up. He remembered that once upon a time he himself had had a child. A boy. Who was too fat for his own good. He did know that the meals came from Celeste and he kept her in his prayers. Celeste, to be sure, would always have the limp, but her husband and her children never noticed until someone from the outside happened to point it out to them. “Why yo mama be limpin and everything?” “What limp?”
Celeste’s children always came to Moses with a baby, who looked with fascination at Moses on his pallet. Moses could barely move in the mornings, the result, he would always think, of the times he spent with himself in the damp woods. He liked knowing the baby was there, though he had no power to turn and engage it in play or conversation. He lay on his back and kept his arm over his eyes, as if to protect them from some great light.
“How he doin?” Celeste would ask Tessie or Grant or one of her other children when they returned.
“He looked fine, Mama. But I think the light be hurtin his eyes.”
“And how be that fire in the hearth?”
Tessie would usually say that she had a time trying to light the fire. “Mama, it just don’t wanna do right, that fire.”
“Well,” Celeste would say, “I’ll get your daddy to take a look at it. He’s the handiest man alive with fires and such.”
Her meals to Moses would be until the end. Celeste was never to close down her days, even after Moses had died, without thinking aloud at least once to everyone and yet to no one in particular, “I wonder if Moses done ate yet.”
I am very grateful to: Dawn L. Davis, my editor, who may well have believed from the first word; Lil Coyne (grandmother to Steven Mears), a woman of small stature who stood on the night shore and held the lantern up as high as she could; Shirley Grossman (wife to the late Milton), who took up the lantern some nights so Lil could lie down where she stood and rest; Maria Guarnaschelli, the editor of
Lost in the City
; the Lannan Foundation and Jeanie J. Kim; Eve Shelnutt, who, though the water rose every hour on her shore, never failed to answer the telephone; Eric Simonoff, my agent, who may well have believed before the first word; and John Edgar Wideman, a kind and generous man.
Edward P. Jones won the PEN/Hemingway Award and was a finalist for the National Book Award for his debut collection of stories,
Lost in the City
. A recipient of the Lannan Foundation Grant, Mr. Jones currently resides in Arlington, Virginia.
The Known World
is his first novel.
The Known World
Lost in the City
Designed by Claire Vaccaro
Jacket Photograph © 1989 by Eudora Welty
Reprinted by permission of Russell & Volkening as Agents for the Welty Estate
Jacket design by John Lewis
THE KNOWN WORLD. Copyright © 2003 by Edward P. Jones. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of PerfectBound™.
