West Feliciana Parish, Louisiana – October 1844
The auction block that day was almost empty. Rain had turned the yard to red mud, and most buyers had stayed in New Orleans or gone home early. Only a handful of men stood under the dripping oaks while the sheriff read out the last lots from a bankrupt estate.
“Lot 17,” he droned. “One negro woman, Claraara Mayfield, age about twenty-two, quick with child. Sold as is, no warranty of soundness.”
Henry Duval stood apart from the others, coat collar turned up, hat pulled low. He was thirty-six, newly widowed, and already wealthy enough that he rarely bothered with courthouse sales. Yet here he was, watching the woman on the block with an expression no one could read.
The bidding never really started. Someone offered a dollar. Another shrugged and said fifty cents. When the hammer hovered, Henry Duval spoke for the first time.
“Twelve cents.”
The sheriff blinked, waited for a joke that never came, then slammed the gavel. Sold. The cheapest human being ever recorded in the parish.
Claraara was led down the steps, chains dragging, eyes on the ground. Henry paid with a single silver dime and two copper pennies, took the bill of sale without a word, and loaded her into his buggy himself. No one thought to ask why.
They would ask for the next thirty years.
The Truth That Surfaced Nine Days Later
On the ride back to Greenwood Plantation, Claraara finally spoke. Her voice was soft, educated, the faint trace of a Carolina accent.
“Marse Henry,” she said, using the only name she had ever been allowed to call him, “I know why you bought me so cheap. And I know you gon’ hate what I got to tell you.”
Henry kept his eyes on the road.
“Say it,” he answered.
“The child I’m carrying,” she whispered, “is your brother’s. Mr. Thomas’s. Before he took fever and died last winter in New Orleans. He promised he’d come back for us. He never got the chance.”
Thomas Duval (Henry’s younger brother, charming, reckless, and already half-ruined by gambling) had spent the winter of 1843–44 in the city, supposedly settling estate debts. Instead he had installed Claraara in a small house on Rampart Street, taught her to read in secret, and sworn one day he would free her and the child. Yellow fever killed him in March. The woman he had privately called his wife was seized by creditors and shipped upriver with the rest of his “property.”
Henry listened without turning his head. When they reached the plantation gates, he stopped the buggy, stared at the river for a long time, then said only:
“You will never be sold again. Neither will the child.”
What Happened Next Stayed Out of Every Ledger
Claraara was moved into the big house (not as a field hand, not even as house help, but quietly installed in a room off the back gallery). The child, a boy named Thomas Henry Duval, was born in January 1845. Henry recorded him in the plantation book as “Tom, mulatto, property of the estate,” but everyone on Greenwood knew better.
Henry never married again. He raised the boy himself (taught him to read Greek and Latin, to ride, to manage accounts). Former slaves later remembered that Master Henry would sit on the gallery for hours watching little Tom play in the yard, his face unreadable.
When emancipation came in 1865, Henry walked to the quarters with papers already drawn up. Every person on Greenwood received a deed to forty acres carved from the plantation’s choicest land (including Claraara and her son). He signed the big house itself over to “Claraara Mayfield Duval and her heirs forever,” then moved into a small cottage he built down by the river.
He died there in 1879, alone, at sixty-nine. They found one thing in his locked desk: the original 1844 bill of sale for twelve cents, folded so many times it was soft as cloth, and on the back, written in his own hand:
Paid in full. My brother’s debt, and mine.
The old mansion eventually burned during Reconstruction. The family that still farms the land today (descendants of Claraara and young Tom) keep the crumbling receipt in a safety-deposit box in St. Francisville. They rarely speak of it to outsiders.
But on certain October evenings, when the Mississippi fog rolls in thick and low, people along that stretch of river say you can almost hear the faint clink of twelve cents changing hands (the cheapest price ever paid for a human being, and the most expensive reckoning any man ever faced).
