The Known World читать онлайн

n 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.”
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
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.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Edward P. Jones won the PEN/Hemingway Award and was a fin