The Known World by Edward P. Jones Page B

believed he could be a better peacekeeper, given Patterson’s growing irascibility. Though his marriage was two years old, he and Winifred still considered themselves newlyweds; two years wasn’t even a full blink of God’s eye. Skiffington wanted a good life for his bride and he thought a sheriff’s life, and not that of someone’s deputy, would bring that. He felt he might make a reputation that he could carry to a greater job elsewhere, even to something in Philadelphia, where Winifred often said she wanted to return. A man he knew in Halifax County had gone from deputy to state delegate in less than a generation, less time than it took for a boy to grow into a man. Skiffington loved the South, but as a man with a woman from the North, he gradually became comfortable thinking he could live happy in Philadelphia or in any other part of the country and consider himself just another American who had become what he was because of what the South had given and taught him. Whenever he and Winifred visited his in-laws in Philadelphia, Skiffington never returned to the South without paying his respects to the place where Benjamin Franklin had died. He considered Franklin the second greatest American, after George Washington, and before Thomas Jefferson.
    Though Manchester County had money for it, Skiffington did not at that time take on a deputy, having always thought that Patterson had taken him on as a favor to his father. He could do alone what needed to be done. But Skiffington, mindful of the Caesars who controlled all that did not belong to God, took a hint from Colfax and Robbins and assembled a team of twelve patrollers to serve as “nocturnal aides,” slave patrollers. He split Manchester County into three parts and appointed a nightly team of three men for each section. Except for one man who was Cherokee, they were all poor whites, the patrollers, and among them there were only two who had slaves to their names. One was Barnum Kinsey, then considered by everyone to be the poorest white man in the county, “saved,” as one neighbor said, “from bein a nigger only by the color of his skin.” Barnum’s only slave, Jeff, was fifty-seven when his master became a patroller; the slave had been part of his second wife’s dowry, along with five square yards of green silk that had wonderful golden lines running through it, silk so fabulous people said a person could get on it and ride away into the sun. Jeff died at sixty-two, after being unable to work for almost a year and after being cared for all that time by Barnum and his wife. Wherever he went after death, Jeff may have been grateful that in his last months, Barnum would read to him from Franklin’s Poor Richard’s Almanac. “You have to stop all this funnin me with that book, Mr. Barnum,” Jeff would say, laughing. “You and that funny book will be the death of me.” After Jeff died, Barnum had to put his first child from that second marriage to work in his fields. The child was four at the time and by then all the magical green silk with golden lines had been sold off or used up. Sheriff John Skiffington was to say one day of Barnum Kinsey that he was a good man unable to practice in a place that could be hard on people with his kind of religion.
    Despite vowing never to own a slave, Skiffington had no trouble doing his job to keep the institution of slavery going, an institution even God himself had sanctioned throughout the Bible. Skiffington had learned from his father how much solace there was in separating God’s law from Caesar’s law. “Render your body unto them,” his father had taught, “but know your soul belongs to God.” As long as Skiffington and Winifred lived within the light that came from God’s law, from the Bible, nothing on earth, not even his duty as a sheriff to the Caesars, could deny them the kingdom of God. “We will not own slaves,” Skiffington promised God, and he promised each morning he went to his knees to pray.