A Day to Pick Your Own Cotton - Michael R. Phillips [57]
She looked up from the paper again and we glanced at each other, both reminded that we were part of all this, whether we’d known much about the war or not.
As we sat with Katie reading the paper out loud, Aleta came into the room and listened for a while. Pretty soon she started asking questions. I’d never realized how much Katie knew about things until she started answering Aleta’s questions. It was like all the schooling and teaching she’d had when she was little all of a sudden started coming out, and now she was teaching us.
“Where did slaves come from?” Aleta had just asked.
“They are—were—the workers on the farms and plantations,” Katie answered. “It takes a lot of workers to grow things.”
“Why was there a war?”
“Because the South had slaves and the North didn’t. When Mr. Lincoln started talking about setting the slaves free, the South didn’t like it and decided to start its own country. Then war started.”
“Who’s Mr. Lincoln?” said Aleta. “I heard my father say he hated him.”
As we sat on the couch, now Emma wandered into the room and stood listening.
“He’s the president,” answered Katie.
“What’s a president?”
“He’s the leader of our country. Our first president was George Washington. That was way back in the last century when the United States was a brand-new country. But we’ve had lots of presidents since then, and Mr. Lincoln is president now.”
“But what’s this, Katie?” I asked, pointing to some big black letters on the page. “Doesn’t that say President Johnson?”
“Yes … yes, it does,” Katie replied, looking at it. “I don’t know why.”
She looked over the paper for a bit. All of a sudden she gave a little gasp, then started reading more intently.
“ ‘With the death of John Wilkes Booth, murderer of President Lincoln at Ford’s Theatre on April fourteenth,’ ” she read aloud, “ ‘and last month’s trial and hangings of the other conspirators in the assassination, the administration of President Johnson is at last able to focus all its attention on putting the nation back together.’ ”
“What does all that mean?” asked Aleta.
“It must mean that President Lincoln was killed,” said Katie.
We all sat for a minute in somber silence. Just when I’d found out I was free, and that this was the man responsible for freeing me, now I found out that he was dead. It didn’t seem right. So many people were dead because of this war!
All of a sudden the paper wasn’t so interesting. Katie set it aside and we all sat there for a minute, then gradually got up and went back to our work. The rest of the day was kind of quiet. We hadn’t known much about President Lincoln. But if he was the president, and he had set the slaves free, then he must have been a great man. It wasn’t right that he’d been killed.
After that we thought we oughta read a newspaper once a month. Doing what we were doing, we needed to know what was going on in the country around us. Of course, when I say that we oughta read it, I meant that Katie read it. I was learning, and tried a little, but newspapers were still too hard for me. But I was still reading in the readers and simpler books Katie gave me to read.
As the summer progressed it got hotter. It rained enough to keep the grass growing for the cows. We went and looked at the planted fields every few days and everything was growing fast by now, though we didn’t know what we would do with it later. The cotton was full of weeds and I knew that was bad. But I didn’t see what just two of us could do about it.
I found myself thinking every once in a while about Jeremiah. But every time I did, it made me confused. I was glad we hadn’t seen any more of him. The more time that passed, the more sure I became