Angels Watching Over Me (Shenandoah Sisters Book #1)

by Phillips, Michael

  For those of you who didn’t ever meet Katie, and who may not know me either, my name is Mary Ann Jukes. All my life, folks have just called me Mayme. And Katie was christened Kathleen O’Bannon Clairborne. She was born on a large Southern plantation a few miles west of Greens Crossing, Shenandoah County. I was born on a large Southern plantation a few miles east of Greens Crossing. That’s the only part of our beginnings that have much in common.

  I’m going to ask you to send your imaginations back a long, long time to when this country fought a war with itself. The year was 1861. That’s when Katie always began her part of the story. That’s where I’ll begin too. Katie was still ten that spring, and I was eleven. But we didn’t know each other yet, even though in miles we weren’t that far away from each other. But in other ways, we might as well have been on opposite sides of the world.

  It all took place northeast of Charlotte, North Carolina, where Shenandoah County and the town of Greens Crossing are located.

  WINDS OF CHANGE

  1

  AHOT SUN ROSE THAT SPRING DAY OVER THE peaceful landscape.

  That’s how Katie always began to tell it. I reckon the same sun came up and shone down over us both that day, though we were in a different part of the county and all my family were slaves on another plantation six or eight miles away.

  The slaves in their quarters, Katie said, looked outside early, saw the heat rising in waves from the damp ground, and sighed.

  The fields would be hot, the work hard. The winter had been a mild one, and slave work during those months was more mild too. Today they would feel the beginning of the intense labor that always came at this time of the year. Rolling hills and valleys in that region stretched for hundreds of miles in every direction. Its soil was rich and fertile. In it grew lots of things that brought prosperity to those who owned it.

  But it wasn’t a very good place or a happy time to be alive if your skin was black. My people knew that as well as the slaves of Katie’s father.

  He came out from his early breakfast to announce they would complete the ploughing of the eastern fifteen acres today. If the warm weather held after last week’s rain, they would move straight to the northern twenty-eight which bordered the river, the master told them. He wanted it ready to plant by next week. The wheat was already in. Now it was time for the cotton.

  He returned to the plantation house to finish his breakfast. The male Negroes hitched up the teams, loaded the tools and themselves in three wagons, and set out for the fields. Their women would follow with water and food once the domestic chores were done.

  By noon the sun had climbed high, and the damp heat felt more like June than April. No breeze offered relief. Even spring days could get downright uncomfortable in North Carolina, but it was a lot hotter than usual for this early in the season.

  A white girl slipped along a wide dirt pathway between two partially cultivated fields. Out of that same dirt her father’s cotton crop would be sprouting in white puffy balls four months from now. A golden retriever bounced along at her heels. Rusty had been her constant companion since her father brought him home for her as a pup a year before.

  The girl was Kathleen Clairborne. She always told this part of her story as if it were somebody else. She sometimes described it as the time before the person inside her woke up. I reckon everybody’s got to come awake sometime. This happens at different times and different ages. Sometimes it’s circumstances that wake people up, sometimes pain or hardship. It’s an odd thing I’ve noticed as I’ve seen more of life—happiness alone doesn’t usually do much to help folks wake up on the inside. What wakes people up the quickest is some kind of tragedy or grief. Most of the time, I suppose, it’s just getting older and starting to think.

  It’s sad, though, that some people never do seem to come all the way awake no matter how long they live.

  But as Katie looked back later on the little girl walking in the fields, she said it felt like she was a different person then. She hadn’t come awake yet.

  She had as few worries in the world as a girl can have. Her carefree gait suited this kind of a Saturday. She understood as little about cotton, which the black people were digging the earth to make ready to grow, as she did about the growing season. Neither was she aware of the great amount of slave labor required to make a plantation owner such as her father a wealthy man. Katie wore nice frocks decorated with ribbon and lace and played with expensive dolls that came from places like England or France. But she had never given any thought to why she had them. Her life was full of music and books and pretty things.

  Nothing particular had driven her outside that Saturday morning. Her actions, Katie said later, were guided by impulse, not decision. She had tired of playing inside and now simply found herself moving along the road eastward away from the house with one of those dolls under her arm. She had not decided to go for a walk. She just found herself doing so. Katie did what came into her head and took what happened in life, without wondering where it came from or why.

  Flies buzzed about, and bees busily conducted their springtime business, and they had plenty to do because there were wild flowers blooming all across the moist, green, humid countryside. In the heat, Katie had slowed her movements to a lazy stroll. Even Rusty had decided to save his energy and simply sniffed at the grass on each side of the path.

  I can still smell the land on a day like that. There’s nothing like the moist earth in the South after a spring rain. Now and then the distant low of a cow could be heard as Katie walked along, though in the heat, even their moos sounded weary. A thin haze lay over the hills in the distance, as it usually did. The earth and its inhabitants were alive with growth and activity. Yet at the same time a sleepy tranquility hung over the land, subdued under the smokelike mist clinging to the mountains in the west.

  More changes were in the air, however, than Katie or her father, or than I or my family where we lived, or than anybody realized. New breezes were blowing— that’s how Katie used to describe it. But the slaves with sweat pouring off their black foreheads in Shenandoah County northeast of Charlotte, between the Piedmont Plateau and the Blue Ridge Mountains, they couldn’t yet feel them either.

  They would feel them soon enough. So would Katie. So would I.

  Four years later, destiny would bring us together. When that time came, cruelty and terror would be carried on those winds of change. For many in both races, the storm would bring heartache and destruction. Lots of good folks would die for the cause that both North and South called freedom. Others would learn to grow strong, though it wouldn’t be easy, and that kind of inner strength would cost them many tears.

  But most people alive in 1861 knew nothing of the significance of the times, or realized that history was about to be made. Or that they would be part of it.

  Kathleen O’Bannon Clairborne didn’t know it. Neither did Mary Ann Jukes.

  We were both oblivious to the fact that we were living in a newly created nation calling itself the Confederate States of America. We had not heard of Fort Sumter, almost two hundred miles southeast on the South Carolina coast, where troops were already gathering to defend the right of those Southern states to maintain their independence.

  And so Katie went on with her life as she always had. The slaves did their work and she played with her dolls.

  But winds of change were in the air. Folks would have no choice but to come awake eventually.

  Even two little girls.

  SPECIAL PLACE

  2

  MO’NIN’ TO YA, MIZ KATHLEEN,’’ CALLED out a colored woman as Katie walked by. Katie glanced toward the workers and smiled.

  The large woman was carrying a bucket of water to the field where the men were digging and hoeing. She was as little aware of events about to engulf her as the daughter of the plantation master who owned her. The slave woman had heard bits and pieces about Abraham Lincoln and Jefferson Davis, who had become presidents of their two countries a few months earlier. But if s
omeone had told her that a year and a half later the man called Lincoln would issue a proclamation declaring that she, her husband Mathias, and their three children were free, she would no more have been able to grasp it than to think the sun would not rise tomorrow.

  White and black alike through the South were steeped in the tradition of their cultures. Change was not something they were expecting. But both Katie and the slave woman would have to get used to it eventually. For by now the events bringing change to their lives could not be stopped.

  Katie continued past the toiling Negroes. Another dirt path intersected with the one she was on. She took it to the left, and gradually realized she had come around to the opposite side of the field.

  She stopped and gazed across it. Yes, this was the same field. She had never gone this way before, but she recognized the woods just beyond. Books and music, like I said, were her usual companions. But recently she had discovered a special place, and she had made friends with nature.

  She left the road and entered a large grassy field. By and by she found herself walking through scattered pines at its far side, coming a few minutes later to the brook which wound through the wood. A small pond lay at the center of a tiny secluded meadow, and then the brook flowed out again at the other side.

  This was her own private place. No one else in the whole world, or so Katie thought, knew of it. Katie had learned to love animals, beginning with her beloved Rusty, and now she talked to squirrels and brought them things to eat. She always told Rusty to sit down and behave himself so the other animals wouldn’t be afraid. And even though he was only a year old and full of a pup’s energy, he seemed to sense what she meant and always quieted when she came here.

  There were fish in the pond. Deer came to drink from its edge. Both had become her friends. The fish didn’t know it. But the deer did. And gradually they had grown used to the small girl’s presence. They were not afraid to drink when she was here.

  Katie knew the birds too, and two gray rabbits that lived in a nearby thicket. She saw a raccoon once. But coons didn’t usually come during the day, and try as she might to come early in the morning and sit as still as a rock, the one she had seen never returned. There was also a turtle that sometimes swam about in the water.

  I wish you could hear Katie describe her special place in her own words. Katie was as much a poet in her own way as I am a storyteller. She wrote many poems, though she kept them mostly to herself. Her mother read to her a lot and taught her to play the piano and violin. I think people who can make music can also make words into music. Maybe that’s what poems are—musical words.

  I believe the feelings and observations that later came out in her poems must have been inside her way back when she was just a little girl. I’m sure it takes a long time to make a poet, with things going deep and taking root in the subconscious. It must take years for fancies to get nourished in the soil of imagination before they’re able to come out in actual words. Some of you probably know what I mean, because I’m sure some of you have written poems too. I could never write a poem, but watching Katie helped me understand it a little better. She was always observing, taking things in, living in her imagination, and like I said, feeling things more deeply than she let on, deeper than a practical person like me felt them. Maybe she felt things deeper than she even realized herself.

  So I like to think of Katie sitting by the pond in the woods watching for animals, not necessarily thinking about what was going on around her but feeling it, with the invisible music of poetry moving silently inside her even before she wrote her first poem.

  If she had known about praying then, she might have called such times praying. Some folks think praying happens only when you’re in church or are actually talking to God. But I’m not so sure. I think that when you’re feeling the silent mysteries of the world, and feeling the tunes that God put into it for us to listen to, and when you let His creation make you happy, then that’s a kind of praying too. But that’s just one old black lady’s opinion on the matter.

  One thing I do know, whether you call Katie’s times in the woods beside the pond praying or not, she was learning to feel a love for the world around her that eventually made her able both to pray and write poems expressing what she felt inside.

  I’ve always been thankful for this quiet side of Katie, because there came a time in my life when it would teach me a lot and make a better person of me.

  Listening to Katie tell about the trees and fields and the animals made you think you were there. I could smell the scent that the sun drew out of the pine trees when she was talking about it.

  On this day she set her doll—I think she was named Rebecca—down beside her as she sat on her favorite rock, then picked up a stick and began jabbing at a few pebbles and flicking them toward the water’s edge. All the while she was looking around at everything about her. And though she might not have said it in these words, I think her heart was glad to be alive.

  A VISIT TO TOWN

  3

  THE SUN DAWNED JUST AS IT HAD MANY times before during Kathleen Clairborne’s young life.

  She rolled over in bed to see its light slanting through her window. She gave a sleepy sigh of pleasure. It was Monday and no more rain was in sight. They would be able to go into town. Her mother had promised her a new dress for her birthday, but Katie had been afraid more rain might cancel the outing. Greens Crossing was six miles away. It was not a trip her mother made often, especially if the road was muddy.

  There was not anything unusual about this particular day. The sun had beamed into Katie’s window on countless mornings just like it. Yet this would not be like any of those other days.

  Katie would look back on this as the day when, for her, everything began to change.

  Greens Crossing was not a large town. A handful of stores, a livery stable, a school, a church, a bank, a general store and post office, and one saloon clustered together at the intersection of two roads. We lived a little closer to town than she did, but I’d never set foot in it in my life.

  Though the Clairbornes’ Rosewood was not the largest plantation of the region, they were known by most of the citizens of Greens Crossing. Richard Clairborne, Katie’s father, was a hard worker, fair to his slaves, faithful to his family, but a man who kept mostly to himself. He didn’t have close friends in town. His three sons were like him in that way. Neither they nor Katie attended the Greens Crossing school. The Clairbornes weren’t seen at church except for occasional special circumstances. Six miles is a fair piece by horse and buggy.

  Once or twice a year, Mrs. Clairborne rode the even more daunting nineteen miles into Charlotte. That’s where she bought her own clothes and Katie’s and did most of the family’s shopping. But Katie had grown two inches over the winter, and the dressmaker in Greens Crossing was as skilled as any in the city. Since it would not be until later in the summer that she and her husband would be taking a wagon into Charlotte again, the buggy would carry them into Greens Crossing today.

  Katie and her mother left the dressmaker’s an hour after arriving in town and stepped from the wooden sidewalk to cross the dirt street.

  ‘‘Hello, Rosalind,’’ a woman’s voice called out behind them.

  Mrs. Clairborne paused and turned toward the general store owner’s wife, who had spoken to her. Katie continued into the street, still thinking of the soft, pretty fabric they had picked out and the bright yellow hat they had ordered to go with the new dress. She didn’t notice her mother stopping to chat with Mrs. Hammond. Neither did she see two riders suddenly gallop recklessly around the saloon at the corner.

  A tumult of shouts and whinnies suddenly filled the air.

  ‘‘Get outta the way, you—!’’

  Mrs. Clairborne swiftly turned toward the ruckus.

  ‘‘Katie . . . watch out!’’ she cried as she ran frantically toward the street.

  Suddenly a man’s heavy step ran past Mrs. Clairborne. The next instant Katie was thrown to the ground.
A second later the riders thundered by.

  The tall, lanky Negro picked himself up off the ground beside the frightened girl. He stooped down, took her hand, and pulled Katie to her feet.

  ‘‘Yo needs be a mite mo careful crossin’ da street, Miss Kat’leen,’’ he said, brushing the dirt from his trousers and shirt. ‘‘Dem two soldiers mighta run right ober da top er you.’’

  Mrs. Clairborne rushed toward them.

  ‘‘Oh, Henry, I can’t thank you enough!’’ she exclaimed to the black man who worked in the livery stable. ‘‘Katie, are you all right?’’ she said, taking Katie’s hand. Still too stunned to speak, Katie nodded.

  ‘‘Dern blamed soldiers,’’ muttered Henry, who had bought his own freedom some years before, ‘‘dey been raisin’ a ruckus roun’ ’bout fo days now. Ah doan know what’s goin’ on. De’re all ridin’ down t’ Charleston. Somethin’s up fo sho—I been hearin’ talk ’bout an army gatherin’. Yor husband joinin’, ma’am?’’

  ‘‘I don’t know, Henry,’’ sighed Mrs. Clairborne. ‘‘I really don’t know.’’

  As they talked, Katie gazed up into the face of the tall man. The shine in his eyes and the gleam of his perfect teeth drew her gaze into his earnest countenance. An uncommon sensation of gratitude welled up within the heart of the young white girl for the Negro man who had run in front of racing horses’ hooves to keep her from being trampled.

  Mrs. Clairborne’s voice intruded abruptly into Katie’s reflections.

  ‘‘Kathleen, sometimes I wonder if there’s a brain in that head of yours,’’ she said, pulling on Katie’s hand as they walked away. ‘‘What gets into you to wander into the street like that?’’