freed from Allan's demands and from his army service, Edgar Poe had no money and no help to earn his place in the world.
Muddy, a tall, nurturing woman of forty, opened her home to Eddie Poe as though he were her son. He seemed to Edwin the style of man who liked exclusively to be around women. Overwhelmed with family illnesses in the household, Muddy asked her nephew to take the newly inherited slave and act as her agent in Edwin's sale. Soon Poe made an arrangement to sell Edwin to the family of Henry Ridgeway-a black family-for forty dollars.
I expressed my interest in the details of this arrangement. For a strong young male slave, Poe might have received five or six hundred, possibly more.
Edwin explained: "Our legislature tries hampering the freeing of slaves by making the process costly, so they don't look like they're disturbing our domestic economy. Mr. Poe and his aunt did not have that sort of money. But there is no law to prevent a free black family from purchasing a slave, and no law requiring a minimum sale price. Selling a slave cheap, maybe for the price of the lawyer's fee, to a free black owner was another way to free a slave-a way to free me, as Mr. Poe did in this arrangement. It also meant I could stay in Baltimore: not a perfect city, but my home. There are men among my people who own their wives and children as slaves, for the same reason."
"Poe did not write much about the slavery question," I said. "He was not a writer for any abolitionist causes." In fact, it had always seemed to me that Poe had never liked causes at all, automatically believing them hypocritical. "Yet he did this in your situation, forgoing hundreds of dollars, at a time when he was entirely poor and without support."
Edwin replied, "It is not a question of what a man writes. Especially a man who writes to earn his dollar, as Poe was beginning to do then. It is a question of what a man does that says who he is. I was only twenty years old. Mr. Poe was twenty, also, only a few months older. Whatever he thought on slavery, he was quiet about it in the little time I was acquainted with him. He was quiet altogether, actually. He was a man with few associates, and if he had associates, they were not friends. He saw something of himself in me, and he decided right there that he would free me if he could.
"I never saw Mr. Poe again, but I'll never forget what he did. I loved him for it and love him still, even though I knew him a short time. I began employment for several of the local newspaper offices when I was freed. Now I assist in wrapping the papers to be delivered to various points around the city. It was in one of those offices that I overheard your complaints to the editors, around the time Poe died, that Poe had been used up by the press, and that even his grave was unmarked. I had not known where he was buried until then. After finishing work that day, I walked there and left a token at the place you described."
"The flower? Was that you who left it?"
He nodded. "I remember Eddie was always neatly dressed, and sometimes wore a white flower like that one in his button-hole."
"But where did you run to once you left the flower?"
"It is not a Negro cemetery, you know, and it would attract suspicions to loaf there in the evening. While I knelt at the grave I heard a carriage coming fast and made haste exiting."
"That was Peter Stuart, my law partner, out looking to see where I was."
"Every day after that as I readied the newspapers for delivery, I saw another ungentlemanly article about Poe's character-having long ago been taught to read by the Ridgeways and their Webster's spelling-book, I could decipher all of this unkindness. The living like to prove they're better than the dead, seems to me. Much time had passed when another fellow, a foreigner, began coming around to the newspaper offices, filled with blusteration about Poe. He claimed he wanted justice for Poe, but to my eye he wanted to spread base excitement."
"That is Baron Dupin," I explained.
"I talked to this man, more than once, asking that he should respect Poe's memory. But there is a saying he