A Day to Pick Your Own Cotton - Michael R. Phillips [41]
She was so sad and pitiful when she cried and blubbered like that, how could I stay mad at her?
“It’s all right, Emma,” I said. “What’s done is done and it’s over now.”
“Thank you, Miz Mayme. Yer so good ter me too, jes’ like Miz Katie.”
Her words didn’t go down too easily in light of how angry I’d gotten at her. I was angry with myself for getting so upset. With Aleta here now, and five of us to take care of instead of just me and Katie ourselves, I couldn’t let myself be angry and selfish over something so little as a cuff link. Katie was acting like a grown-up, and I had to too. I had some serious growing up to do, that was for sure.
Even though we’d temporarily solved the riddle of the cuff link’s origin, the incident still raised a lot of questions in my mind that I didn’t have answers for. Along with the gold from the cellar and where Aleta had come from, there were sure a lot of mysteries to think about all of a sudden.
RESPECT
22
I STILL HADN’T HAD A CHANCE TO TELL KATIE everything that had happened when I’d been gone. It was such a private and personal thing, I couldn’t just blurt it all out with Aleta around glaring at me, or when we were milking the cows and doing our chores, or when Emma was likely to start yammering away or asking me a lot of questions about if she was free too. It had to be the right time. I wanted to tell her when we didn’t have to worry about getting interrupted by something.
Aleta had been with us a few days, and we were doing our best to get back to our normal routine, even though nothing had been normal since Emma got there. Having other people around made everything so different than it had been before.
One night Katie came into my room and got under the blankets with me.
“Is Aleta asleep?” I asked.
“I think so,” answered Katie.
We both lay there a minute or two just enjoying the silence of being together under the covers, warm and safe and content.
“It’s nice with William sleeping through the night,” said Katie.
“Emma’s starting to get the hang of mothering a little, isn’t she?” I said. “That little boy’s mighty special to her.”
“I walked in on her today and she was babbling away in his face—I couldn’t understand a word she was saying!”
“Black folks have a baby talk all their own,” I said.
“It’s nice, isn’t it, Mayme, having other people to take care of? It makes me feel like I’m doing something important.”
“It’s helps us forget our own problems for a while, that’s for sure,” I said.
We lay quietly for a while.
“What happened when you went back home?” Katie asked after a bit. “You said it was something really exciting.”
I’d been wanting to tell Katie about it ever since getting back. But it took me a little while to settle my thoughts and know what to say. Sometimes the most important things are hardest to talk about, and you wind up spending all your time talking about little things that don’t really matter. But I waited till I was ready because I really wanted to tell her about what I’d found out and everything I’d been thinking and feeling.
“I saw the housekeeper at the big house,” I said finally. “Nobody there had been hurt, only the slaves at the cabins. I wish I’d have known about Emma then so I could ask about her. I still can’t figure why I never saw her. But Josepha—that’s the housekeeper’s name—told me that the war was over and all the slaves had been set free.”
I looked over at Katie. The news didn’t seem to shock her when she heard it like it had me.
“Like Henry’s son?” she asked.
“All the slaves, Miss Katie,” I said. “Everywhere. It’s against the law for anyone to own slaves now.”
It still seemed like the idea wasn’t altogether getting through. Maybe it was, but it wasn’t affecting her like it had me. How could it? She hadn’t been a slave all her life, so maybe the news didn’t seem so huge to her.
“But she was still there,” said Katie, “the housekeeper, I mean. Wasn’t she still your master’s slave?”
“No, Miss Katie. She didn’t have to stay no more. She wasn’t