A Day to Pick Your Own Cotton - Michael R. Phillips [56]
“What would you want to visit for?”
“I thought maybe I’d come t’ visit you, dat’s all. An’ my pa, he said dat if I asked ’bout Mistress Clairborne an’ got no answer ’bout where she was an’ din’t see her wiff my own eyes—an’ I wasn’t sure what he meant, but dat’s what he said, an’ he was serious when he said it—dat he wanted me ter make sure you young ladies was all right.”
“What did he mean by that?” I said.
“Nuthin’, miss … just what I said. Dat’s why he wanted me t’ come out an’ men’ dat bridle, ’cause he wanted t’ know if you an’ Miz Clairborne was all right.”
“Well. you can tell him that we’re fine,” I said. “And that he ought to mind his own business too.”
I shouldn’t have said it. But it was clear enough that Henry was thinking more than either he or Jeremiah was saying.
Jeremiah looked at me real funny, then nodded and shrugged and turned and started walking along the road back toward town. I watched him a minute, then suddenly ran after him.
“Jeremiah!” I called out.
He stopped and turned back toward me.
“Please … don’t tell,” I said.
“Tell what?”
“What you saw here—who you saw in the kitchen … what you said before about only seeing us girls.”
He looked at me seriously, and it was the first time we’d both looked in each other’s eyes.
“What you really want me not t’ say,” he said after a few seconds, “is what I ain’t seen, an’ dat’s Mistress Clairborne—ain’t dat right, Miz Mayme?”
“Please,” I said without really answering him, “you can’t tell. Please promise you won’t tell anyone.”
“Dat’s a hard one, Miz Mayme,” he said finally. “Reckon I’ll have t’ think on dat some on my way home.”
THE REST OF THE WORLD
30
IWENT BACK INSIDE AND WAS A LITTLE SOBER AS WE cleaned up the mess from the cheese making. Aleta and Emma didn’t think any more about it, but Katie and I knew that Jeremiah’s visit could change everything, and we talked about it later when we were alone. We were pretty sure that someone from town now knew how it was at Rosewood, someone we’d just barely met. I was especially worried, since it was my fault for blabbing out what I had. I was afraid he’d tell his pa, and I didn’t know what Henry might do.
But the days went by, and then a week, and no one else came to call, and I gradually began to think that Jeremiah might not tell after all.
It was a good thing Katie had bought the newspaper when she’d been in Mrs. Hammond’s store that day. From it we found out a lot about what was going on that we might never have known.
The newspaper sat where Katie put it on the sideboard in the parlor for several days, along with various farm magazines and almanacs. I’d seen her come home with it. I don’t know what made me notice it one day and pick it up. Maybe I just got curious. I sat down to see if I could read any of it. I could make out a lot of the words, but I couldn’t understand much of what they were talking about.
Katie came and sat down beside me and started looking it over.
“Tell me what it says,” I said. “Read something to me. I’ve never heard what a newspaper sounds like.”
She looked it over, then started to read.
“It says here that a lot of black people are moving about,” she said. “ ‘Now that the war is over,’ ” she read, “ ‘the flow of former slaves into the Northern states has slowed, though many freedmen are still migrating in search of work. With the South in shambles from the fighting, and with resentment of whites high, jobs for free blacks are scarce. Opportunities in the cities of the North, however, remain plentiful.’ ”
She stopped and looked over at me.
“Keep reading,” I said. “That’s interesting.”
“ ‘The economy of the South has been dealt a serious blow,’ ” she continued. “ ‘Many plantation owners are having difficulty harvesting their cotton, tobacco, and sugar cane crops from lack of slave labor. Some are predicting an entire collapse of the former Confederacy. Confederate paper money is now worthless, and Congress is considering the best course of action for the reconstruction of the ravaged South.
“ ‘At the same time,