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By Root 1699 0

of waking up from everything in my life and finding it chimerical, the only reality being my fleshly person, my skin against my nightdress, my hand on my forehead. Where was I? What was I doing? The only answers I had were ones I couldn’t believe: I was in Missouri, which was at war with Kansas; I, who had cared little about the slavery question, had become an abolitionist; the girl sleeping in bed beside me was someone I had not known the existence of a short time before; I had had a love, and he was dead; the dearest companion of my youth, my nephew Frank, had been lost, and I’d hardly even noticed. Such things had no existence within the realm of possibility. Only if Samson and Chaney had proved to be Samson and Chaney would it have all held together in a sensible fashion, but they had not and it had not.

Furthermore, I would not be shot or carried off to jail, but would have to find my own way out of this ... whatever you might call it, into someplace more recognizable.

I lay awake all night, and at dawn was still awake when Helen stirred beside me, sat up, and said, "My goodness, I don’t know which is worse, the attackers or the defenders. But you must never tell Papa I said such a thing! I expect he would think that I’m full of such rebellious thoughts! Well, perhaps I am."

She turned and looked at me. "You know," she said, "I’m not going to let you keep all your thoughts to yourself forever. I’m much too inquisitive for that. And as I get to like you more and more, it gets harder and harder not to know you!"

I said, "I’ll tell you one thing right now, Helen. But only one. You may ask any question."

Now the look on her pretty, fresh face grew positively impish, and she took the tip of her blond braid in her fingers, bit it speculatively, then threw it over her shoulder. She said, "How did you meet your husband?"

I laughed out loud and said, "He was visiting a neighbor, and the neighbor came by to show him off to my brother-in-law, to try to start a fight, but my brother-in-law wasn’t home, so they sat with my sister and me for a while. I thought he was plain-looking and a little gawky, but then I got to know him better."

"May I ask any more questions?"

"Not now."

"Tonight?"

I shook my head.

"Tomorrow?"

I nodded.

"First thing in the morning?"

"I suppose so."

"Lorna thinks she knows you."

"Why do you say that?"

"I heard her telling Delia."

"Has she ever been to Kansas"— I stumbled—"City?"

"Goodness, no."

Well, of course not. I had seen only one or two Negroes in K.T., had I not? "I must look like someone else she knows."

"I reckon. But I may ask another question tomorrow?"

"Yes."

"I have a whole day to think of one, then."

But her thoughts were still running on the same subject, because as we rose for the day and went about our morning ablutions, she broke out in a wail. "Louisa! Now you see my difficulty, don’t you? Those men who were here last night, those are the best men we know! All of them have property, some of them have a great deal of property, and they truly think like we do about all the great issues. Not everyone does! There are quite a few around here who aren’t strictly abolitionists, you know, or who don’t care one way or another about the institution, but they can’t afford slaves or don’t have them. You should see how they live! The wives and children work right alongside the men, dawn to dusk every day. And they live all jumbled together in little houses or even cabins, and they don’t have any nice dresses to wear, and no occasion to wear them, because they have no amusements! They just go to dirty little churches every Sunday, all day, and bring along dishes that they’ve made, and eat together sitting on a blanket, and how amusing is that? And they have ever so many children, because they need lots of people to work, and you know that when you keep having ever so many children, some of them die, and that’s horrible, and then the mother dies from having so many, and then the father marries again, and it starts all over. Did you know that that devil John Brown has twenty-seven