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By Root 256 0

were exhausted. And after a whole day, the wagon wasn’t even half full. I didn’t know how much it would make when we pressed it down and made it into bales. I hoped what we had picked would make a whole bale. I knew a slave doing real good could pick three or four hundred pounds in a day. Master McSimmons used to give his man-slaves a dollar for every day they picked over four hundred fifty pounds. I figured if the three of us together could get so we could even pick a hundred pounds a day, then we would get a lot of hundred-pound bales picked in a month. Maybe we could make the money Katie needed, although I had no idea how much you got paid for cotton. Maybe we wouldn’t be able to get it all picked. Rosewood probably had forty or fifty acres in cultivated cotton, from what Katie had shown me. But we’d pick as much as we could, and it seemed it oughta help.

The next morning we were all sore and tired. We went out again, but we couldn’t put in as long a day. We only worked till early afternoon. Then we went back to the house and slept.

By the third day we started to get used to it, though it was also getting tedious. And we were barely starting on the field. We still had miles of rows to go!

Five days later the wagon was almost up to the top. We had four packed bales of picked cotton. We were all pretty excited to see the full wagon sitting beside the field.

“Shall we take it in to Mr. Watson’s?” asked Katie excitedly.

“Let’s try to get one more bale,” I said. “We’ll roll one of the bales on top of the others. That will give us room to pack one more and tie it, and dump it out of the baling box and take the box off the wagon. Then tomorrow or the next day you can take the five bales into town.”

“This time I won’t even be nervous to take it in to Mr. Watson’s,” said Katie.

“Do you want me to go with you?” I asked, “… or if you want to go in alone, I can stay and keep picking.”

“I think I can take it alone,” Katie said. “And I’m nervous about you being seen now, after what happened. What if any of those McSimmons men were there? I’d rather take it alone.”

Two days later she was on her way into town while Aleta, Emma, and I got started on filling up a second wagon.

A few stares followed her along the streets of Greens Crossing, seeing as she hadn’t been to town since the incident with Jeremiah. But she didn’t return the stares, and purposefully avoided the livery stable as she made her way through town.

Katie pulled up to Watson’s mill two and a half hours after leaving Rosewood, got down, and went inside to tell Mr. Watson she had a delivery. He came out and looked over the load.

“Hundred-pound bales, I see,” he said. “Your mama should know I can’t pay as much since I have to repack them into quarter tons before shipping them out.”

“That’s all right, Mr. Watson,” said Katie. “She knows.”

He jumped up onto the wagon and lifted one of the bales by the straps we’d tied.

“Those aren’t a hundred pounds either,” he said. “Your hired darkies aren’t pressing them none too tight. This feels barely eighty-five.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Well, it’ll all be weighed.—Does your mama want me to credit her account?”

“Yes, sir.”

“I haven’t seen her in months, maybe a year or more. She doing okay?”

“Yes, sir. But we’re shorthanded, and she needs me to bring you the cotton.”

“All right, then. I’ll get this unloaded so you can get the wagon back to her.”

DIRE NOTICE

47

THE WEEKS WENT BY AND WE TOOK A WAGONLOAD into town every four or five days. Gradually as we picked we got faster.

The man at the mill was a little curious why it seemed to be going so slow when he was getting deliveries from the other plantations by the thousands of pounds. But as long as the cotton came in and looked okay, he didn’t ask too many questions.

One day Katie returned from town and came out to the field where I was working. Aleta had gotten tired and gone back in, and Emma had been with William all day because he had become a little sick and fussy for a day or two.

As Katie approached I saw that she was holding an envelope. From the look on her