A Day to Pick Your Own Cotton - Michael R. Phillips [2]
All that time the two of us just lived there in that great big plantation house all alone, milking the cows and making bread and taking care of ourselves. Katie showed me books and gave me one of her dolls and taught me how to read better. And I taught her how to do things like chop wood and sing slave revival songs. She read me stories from books, and I told her stories from memory.
But all the while I knew I needed to be getting away from Rosewood—that’s what Katie’s folks’ plantation was called. If anybody found me, a colored girl and a runaway, sleeping in a white man’s bed, I knew they’d skin my hide or hang me from a tree or something else pretty bad. I didn’t know what had happened to my own master. He might be alive or dead for all I knew. But mostly I was worried about what would happen to Katie. I tried to get her to think about her own future and what she oughta do. She had three uncles and an aunt. The aunt lived up north somewhere, but Katie had never seen her. One of her uncles lived not too far away, and after Katie told me about him, I was afraid he might try to get his hands on the plantation. Another of them had gone to California hoping to find gold, and Katie figured him for dead. The third was a ne’er-do-well that came around sometimes when he needed money from his sister—which was Katie’s ma. Katie didn’t seem to like any of them and didn’t cotton much to the notion of going to live with any of them either.
One day some rough men came looking for one of Katie’s uncles. We hid and managed to scare them away by shooting guns over their heads. After that, I knew Katie was in danger and that she had to do something. Eventually I figured it was the best thing for her if I left. And I did leave, too, but not for long, because Katie came after me and begged me to come back. She had just discovered a girl hiding in the barn! The girl was about to have a baby and Katie needed my help with the birthing.
That girl was Emma, a halfwit slave girl who was running away from some trouble we couldn’t get her to tell us about.
It was while we were trying to figure out what to do with Emma and the newborn baby, and when I was thinking about leaving again, that Katie came up with her crazy scheme.
Her scheme was just this—for us to keep living at Rosewood alone like we had been, but to pretend that we weren’t alone, to make like her father and brothers hadn’t come back from the war and that her mama and the slaves were still there.
And that’s why we were together that day, orphans and Civil War sisters you might say. This trip into town, leaving Emma and her little baby boy, William, alone at Katie’s house, was our first try to see if we could make people believe everything was normal and how it should be back at Rosewood.
THE FIRST TEST
2
K ATIE CAME OUT OF THE STORE AND WALKED toward the wagon, glancing up at me with a little smile on her face. Behind her I saw the hawk eyes of Mrs. Hammond staring at us through the open window.
“Don’t say nothing, Miss Katie,” I whispered, trying to keep my lips from moving. “She’s watching!”
Katie started to turn around.
“Don’t look!” I said.
Katie turned back toward me. As she climbed up and sat down, I stared straight ahead, trying to keep the kind of look on my face that white folks expected out of colored slaves—dull and expressionless, like they aren’t thinking of anything, like they don’t even know how to think.
But inside, my mind was racing. If we can make Mrs. Hammond believe everything is fine, I thought, we oughta be able to make anybody believe it!
Katie took the leather, released the wheel brake, then flicked the reins, and we bounced into motion along the street. I knew we were both dying of curiosity to look back. But we couldn’t yet, ’cause