A Day to Pick Your Own Cotton - Michael R. Phillips [6]
“We gotta figure this whole thing out and decide what’s to be done. We can’t do everything around here, so we gotta decide just what we can do and what we should do, which fields to tend and which parts of your mama’s plantation to keep up.”
“But I don’t know anything about tending fields, Mayme.”
“I do. I been working in the fields since I was eight. But besides the fields, we gotta tend to other stuff to make it look like your mama’s still running the place.”
“Like what kind of other stuff?”
“You gotta try to think back to everything your mama did.”
“All right, I see what you mean.”
“So tomorrow, Miss Katie,” I said, “here’s what I think we oughta do … that is, if it’s to your liking. I don’t want to tell you what to do, but—”
“Mayme, please don’t talk like that,” interrupted Katie. “I could never do any of this without you. I’ve told you that before. You’re smart, Mayme, just like I told Mrs. Hammond. You have more common sense than me.”
“You been showing a heap more smarts about Emma than me.”
“I don’t know—we’ll help her out together. But I don’t know what to do about so many things. So I want you to just keep saying what you think and telling me what we ought to be doing.”
“But it’s your plantation, Miss Katie. I don’t wanna be presuming too much and—”
“For now, Mayme, it’s our plantation … yours and mine.”
“That can’t hardly be, Miss Katie.”
“If it’s mine, like you say, then right now I’m giving half of it to you.”
Her words silenced me on the spot. I didn’t know what to say.
“All … all right, then, Miss Katie,” I said, fumbling for words. “If that’s the way you want it, I don’t reckon I can keep arguing with you.”
“It is the way I want it, Mayme. So what were you getting ready to tell me?”
“What I was gonna say a minute ago is that I think you oughta show me all around to everything. We’ll saddle a couple of horses, and then we’ll ride everywhere and you can show me your mama’s plantation.”
“Our plantation now.”
“All right, then, our plantation … the fields, the slave cabins, what’s growing where … everything.”
“I don’t know if I know where it all is, or exactly which fields were my mama and daddy’s.”
“Well, do the best you can, and probably you’ll remember as you go places where you saw your papa or his slaves working at one time or another. But we gotta try to figure out what’s yours and what we oughta do with it.”
ROSEWOOD
4
A FTER BREAKFAST THE NEXT MORNING, WHEN our chores with the cows and pigs and chickens were tended and we had Emma and William taken care of for a spell, we saddled up two horses. Then we set out for a ride around the farm, with Rusty and the other two dogs barking and chasing along with us.
First Katie led me down the sloping hill toward the colored cabins about half a mile from the main house.
“This is where our slaves lived,” she said as we rode up, then slowed to a stop.
We sat on the horses for a few seconds just looking at it. Everything was so quiet. There wasn’t much to say. One colored village looked about the same as any other. This run-down collection of cabins could have been where I lived, or where any slaves lived. I had the feeling Katie was seeing it through different eyes now, after being to where I’d lived. It was probably hard for her to think that these shacks had once been people’s homes, people just like me, people that her own daddy had owned and who he had likely treated no better than my master had treated us.
Both of us were looking at the world through different eyes than we had just a short time before. Just the fact of slavery was dawning on Katie more than ever, I think. And I was seeing things different too, ’cause now I wasn’t living in a place like this anymore.
After a while we continued on.
“That field there,” Katie said, pointing to the right, to a stretch of land behind the cabins. “I know that’s our main cotton field.”
I looked where she was pointing. The field was full of growing cotton. It was just like our cotton fields, and I had hated them. The field was getting full of weeds between