A Different Day, A Different Destiny (The Snipesville Chronicles)

by Laing, Annette

  A Different Day, A Different Destiny

  The Snipesville Chronicles, Book 2

  By Annette Laing

  For my parents, Watson and Audrey, who made possible that first transatlantic trip that set me on the adventure of a lifetime, with much love.

  Copyright © 2010 by Annette Laing.

  All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Confusion Press. CONFUSION, CONFUSION PRESS and associated logo are trademarks of Confusion Press. No part of this publication may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher. For information regarding permission, write to Confusion Press, P.O. Box 2523, Statesboro, GA 30459 Library of Congress Control Number: 2009907848 ISBN: 978-0-692-00125-7

  Printed in the U.S.A.

  Cover design: Deborah Harvey Inside design: Kelley Callaway Author web site: www.AnnetteLaing.com

  Contents

  Prologue

  ONE

  Meanwhile, Back in Snipesville

  TWO

  The More Things Change

  THREE

  Poles Apart

  FOUR

  Buy One, Get Two Free

  FIVE

  Attitude Adjustment

  SIX

  Fired Up

  SEVEN

  Life in the City

  EIGHT

  A Question of Respectability

  NINE

  How the Other Half Lives (And Dies)

  TEN

  Hard Times

  ELEVEN

  A Change of Scene

  TWELVE Sightseeing

  THIRTEEN

  Ten Thousand Windows

  FOURTEEN A Different Day

  FIFTEEN

  Land, Landed, Landing

  SIXTEEN

  A Different Destiny

  Acknowledgments

  The Snipesville Chronicles, Book 2

  Prologue

  Jupiter wasn’t a large planet or a mighty Roman God. He was a short and burly fifty-one-year old man with a slight limp and grey hair.

  And on March 14, 1851, he had a job to do.

  He and his fourteen-year-old son, who was also named Jupiter but always called Jupe, were walking barefoot through the cotton fields, past the gnarled brown twigs of last season’s crop.

  Soon it would be cotton-planting time in South Georgia, and Jupiter was figuring out just how many acres he would assign to each of his workers, depending on their ages and their strength. Jupiter was in charge of the people at Kintyre Plantation, but he wasn’t really. Like almost everyone else on the plantation, he wasn’t a landowner. He wasn’t even employed. He was owned.

  Jupiter was a slave. He bossed around the slaves who worked in the fields, a job he had inherited from his own father. Jupiter was rewarded for being willing to order people about: There was extra food for the family, and a better cabin without quite so many holes in the walls. His was, by plantation standards, a cushy job. One day, when he got too old, Jupe would take his place.

  But Jupiter hated himself when he had to whip other slaves as runaways and malingerers. These were people he had known all their lives. He had watched them grow up. He celebrated and worshipped with them. He felt sick after a whipping, knew that people were afraid to talk to him like they talked to each other, but he told himself that he had no choice: If he refused, he would lose his job. Worse, his young master might even take him to the slave market in Savannah to be sold, and he would never see or hear from his wife and children again.

  Everyone in the slave quarters reckoned the master to be crazy. Actually, Jupiter didn’t think that his master was crazy. He thought he was an idiot, and that made him even more dangerous.

  So Jupiter kept his head down, and did his job, and tried not to hope for better times, at least in this world. Hope, Jupiter believed, well... Hope hurt. Best to make the best of what he had: A little control over what happened in the fields where he had lived and worked his whole life.

  He walked past the old live oak tree, with its massive spreading branches mostly gone now, and thought to himself that it needed to be removed. Digging up the dead tree would clear a little more land for growing cotton.

  Suddenly Jupiter stopped in his tracks. He asked himself, who would benefit from a little more cotton? Only the stupid young master, who spent more time playing cards with other “gentlemen” than paying attention to his cotton fields. That was when Jupiter decided to plant pecan trees instead, four of them…

  No, six. The master wouldn’t notice young pecan trees. In a few years, the slaves would have pecans to eat, and maybe to sell in Savannah at the Sunday markets. He made up his mind to start on the project that very week. When Jupiter snapped out of his daydream, he was shocked to see a woman standing just a few feet away from him. There would have been nothing surprising to Jupiter about seeing a black woman in the field. But this was a white woman, a lady, perhaps a little older than him, in a bonnet and long dark red dress with its hem coated in beige dust. She was busily scribbling in a notebook, and occasionally pausing to stab her pencil-end repeatedly on a tiny metal box. Jupiter took off his hat, and tried to look as respectful as possible in front of this stranger. “Beg pardon, missis, but is you needing help? Is you lost? I’s Jupiter, and I’s the driver here.”

  She looked up and smiled, before, again, tapping the box with her pencil.

  “No, I’m not lost. Just running some numbers.”

  Jupiter squinted at the strange lady. “Numbers, ma’am?”

  “Yes,” she said. “Would you like to look them over?”

  “No, ma’am,” Jupiter said hastily, shaking his head. “I can’t read no numbers. I can’t read at all. Nor write. No, ma’am.”

  She looked at him mischievously. “Of course you would say that, Jupiter. It’s against the law for a slave to be literate. Yet, somehow, you still manage to write those marvelous letters to your sister in New York, and to keep that diary of yours. Amazing, for a man who can’t read, really. Miraculous, in fact.”

  Now, Jupiter was scared. How did she know of his diary and letters?

  “How you reckon that?” he asked sharply, before adding, “Ma’am?”

  “Oh, please don’t ma’am me, Jupiter. I’m not Queen Victoria. Anyway, don’t you worry: I won’t tell anyone, I promise. I think it’s great. Keep going. As a girl I know would say, ‘You totally rock.’ “

  Jupiter was confused, and very apprehensive. The lady, meanwhile, had tossed her pencil and notebook into a small bag she carried.

  “All done,” she said, mostly to herself. “Hope I got it right. Oh, well, it’ll do. Bye, Jupiter. Nice meeting you. Love your writing, by the way. Can’t put it down.”

  She gave a small wave to the baffled Jupiter, and took off toward the piney woods.

  “Ma’am?” Jupiter called, gesturing a thumb in the opposite direction. “The road and the big house are that way.”

  “I know,” she said. “But I’m walking back to Snipesville.”

  Jupiter and Jupe exchanged baffled looks, but when they glanced toward the lady again, she had vanished. Jupiter shivered. Was she real? Or was she a ghost, or a spirit, like his ancient great-grandmother used to describe in her lilting West African accent? He shivered, and decided to head home to sit a spell.

  Jupiter didn’t notice that the lady had dropped something, quite by mistake. It was a small metallic box, and it lay glinting in the spring sunshine. That afternoon, some boys, dashing through the field on th
eir way home from collecting firewood, would run over and past it without noticing it. One boy even stepped on it, grinding it slightly into the ground.

  **** The Professor noticed that she had lost her electronic calculator when she returned to her office at Snipesville State College, just a few miles away, and more than 150 years into the future.

  Rummaging through her bag, she muttered under her breath in a vaguely British accent. Now she realized, with a sinking feeling, that the calculator, or part of it, was the mysterious object she had examined just last week at the Victoria and Albert Museum. How had her calculator ended up in present-day London?

  Chapter 1: Meanwhile, Back in Snipesville

  It all started with Hannah Dias’ ankle. More than a hundred and fifty years after Jupiter and his son had met the Professor in a cotton field in Snipes County, Hannah and her brother Alex were playing with their friend Brandon Clark in a forlorn little park in the small town of Snipesville, Georgia.

  At least, Alex and Brandon were playing: They had made swords out of sticks, and were laughingly battling each other. Before that, they had examined a colony of fire ants that was busily excavating the sandy soil. Hannah, meanwhile, was slumped on the only bench in the park, examining her fingernails and looking sour.

  The day was bright and sunny, but Hannah was in a foul mood. Even though she was a native Californian, she hated hot weather: After all, she had grown up in foggy San Francisco. Meeting up with Brandon had seemed like a good idea that morning when it was still cool, but not now, at mid-day, in the sweltering muggy heat of an August afternoon in southeast Georgia.

  Hannah and Alex lived in a remote subdivision in Snipes County, where there were plenty of expensive houses, but almost no other kids. They had moved from San Francisco to Georgia only a few weeks before, soon after their mother had died in a car accident and their father’s bank had transferred him to Georgia.

  Brandon, a black kid from Snipesville, was Alex and Hannah’s only friend in town. He and Alex had hit it off the moment they met, united in their shared hatred of team sports, their love of obscure facts, and their enjoyment of teasing Hannah.

  Hannah, Alex and Brandon: Three ordinary kids in an ordinary town, right? Not quite.

  The day that Hannah and Alex first met Brandon seemed like an ordinary day at first. They got together when all of them were playing hooky from summer camps at Snipesville State College. Little did they know that this was to be the last ordinary day of their lives. Without warning, the three kids were transported in an instant from Snipesville to Balesworth, a small town in England. That was strange enough.

  But even stranger was this: They arrived during World War Two.

  In 1940, to be exact.

  Soon, Brandon was separated from the others, and thrown even further back in time. He was still in Balesworth: Only now, he was there in 1915, in the middle of World War One.

  And in Balesworth—Alex and Hannah in 1940, and Brandon in 1915-- they had stayed for months. They had made friends, gone to school (except for Brandon, who found a job as a dentist’s apprentice), and settled down with their English foster families. Finally, after they had rescued an abused foster kid called George Braithwaite, they returned to present-day Snipesville as suddenly as they had left, on the very same day in July. No time at all had passed, and it was as though the entire bizarre experience had simply never happened.

  Now it was mid-August, and life in Snipesville seemed to have returned to ordinary, which is to say, dull and miserable. The summer heat was unbearable, especially for Hannah, who really wished she had stayed home with the airconditioning and the TV, instead of roasting her butt on a park bench.

  Alex and Brandon had stopped sword-fighting, and now were standing in front of Hannah looking at her with pity.

  “What?” Hannah snapped. She didn’t like being stared at, especially pityingly.

  “Why don’t you do something?” her brother demanded.

  “Yeah,” Brandon backed him up. “You’re just sitting there looking all mean and grumpy.”

  “Well, excuse me for breathing,” harrumphed Hannah. “This is so boring.”

  She gave a dramatic sigh. “And it’s, like, a gazillion degrees.”

  Brandon rolled his eyes and, turning to Alex, changed the subject. “Hey, did you know that someone wants to build all over this park?”

  Hannah put a hand to her chest in mock shock. “Ooh, I am so sad. Like, I’m supposed to care? At least tell me it’s going to be a new mall.”

  “No, it’s not a mall,” Brandon said. “They’re gonna build houses and apartments. C’mon, Hannah, I know it’s not much, but this is the only park in the whole of West Snipesville. Look, would you guys sign the petition against the development?”

  He pulled a crumpled piece of paper and a stub of a pencil out of his back pocket, and handed them both to Alex, who signed eagerly and sloppily.

  But Hannah was too hot and irritable to care at all. “Brandon, like, who is going to listen to some kids with a petition? For real. It’s a stupid idea.”

  Brandon scowled at her. “Nobody’s making you sign it. You sure have been a pain in the butt since we got back. Too bad Mrs. D. isn’t here to sort you out.”

  “Yeah,” laughed Alex, “Then you’d have a pain in the butt.”

  Embarrassed, Hannah pouted and looked away. She hated being teased about the time that Mrs. Devenish had whipped her. Mrs. D., as the kids called her, was the stern old lady with whom Hannah and Alex had lived in England in 1940. Although Hannah had thought that she would never, ever recover from the humiliation of her punishment, she had eventually and unpredictably bonded with Mrs. D. She missed Mrs. D. and her granddaughter Verity, who had been Hannah’s best friend. She even missed Eric, the mischievous wartime refugee who became Mrs. Devenish’s adopted son.

  After a long silence, Alex asked his sister, “So what do you want to do this afternoon?”

  “I know what, Hannah,” said Brandon, a twinkle in his eye. “You should go check out that new girls’ clothing store on West Main Street.”

  “Where?” Hannah gasped, jumping to her feet.

  “Right next to the bakery,” said Brandon. No sooner had the words left his mouth than Hannah started speed-walking across the park. The boys laughed, and resumed their swordplay. But they had just crossed swords (or sticks) when they heard a shriek, and turned to see Hannah lying sprawled on the ground.

  “Trust you to break your ankle,” said Alex. He was sitting on his hands on a chair in Dr. George Braithwaite’s living room, swinging his legs, while Brandon propped up the wall next to him. Hannah answered her brother with a withering glance.

  It was too amazing to be a coincidence: George Braithwaite, the abused little boy in England, now lived in retirement in Snipesville, where he was best known as Snipesville’s First Black Doctor. He was also Snipesville’s First British Doctor, but nobody in Snipesville, apart from Hannah, Alex and Brandon, found that nearly as interesting.

  “It’s not broken,” Dr. Braithwaite said, as he carefully wrapped Hannah’s ankle. His accent still echoed his long-ago upbringing in England. “It’s just a sprain. But you will need crutches, Hannah, and you’ll need to take good care…”

  “Crutches!” Hannah said disdainfully.

  “Crutches,” Dr. Braithwaite said firmly. “I have a spare pair that you may borrow. Anyhow, you don’t have any major plans for this week, do you?”

  “We did,” said Alex morosely. “Hannah and me are supposed to be going to London with my grandparents on Friday. They’re coming all the way from California to get us.”

  Dr. Braithwaite gave a sympathetic cluck. “That’s a pity. Hannah might find it hard to get around in the city. You’d better call and see if they can postpone the trip.”

  Hannah and Alex were dismayed. The trip had been a wonderful surprise: Grandma had called from California just that past weekend to tell them.

  Dr. Braithwaite stood up and admired his handiwork in br
acing Hannah’s ankle. “Look on the bright side. If your trip were delayed, that would give me time to arrange for you to visit Eric and Verity… if you would like.” He had seen Hannah’s hesitation and the doubtful looks that Alex and Brandon had traded.

  It was weird enough, Hannah thought, to be friends with old Dr. Braithwaite. Would she want to meet Eric and Verity as old people, too? They had married after World War Two, and were still living in Balesworth, in Mrs. Devenish’s old house. Much as Hannah missed Verity, she wasn’t sure she wanted to meet her as an old lady. Sitting beside her, Alex was thinking much the same thing about Eric. Brandon, meanwhile, felt guilty for being secretly pleased that the Dias kids would go to England after all, because he was stuck in Snipesville for the summer, and wanted their company.

  There was an awkward silence. Fortunately, Dr. Braithwaite’s telephone rang. It was Hannah and Alex’s dad calling, to say that he was on his way.

  “It’s a shame,” Dr. Braithwaite said as he hung up the phone, “that this might be your first and last experience of our little park, Hannah. By the time you recover, I’m afraid it will probably be gone. But there’s still some hope. You see, the city council is meeting this afternoon to decide whether to approve a scheme to develop the land. If you could all come to the meeting to help us oppose the plan…”

  “Well, I can’t,” Hannah said quickly, “Obviously.”

  Dr. Braithwaite handed her a pair of crutches. “Now you have these,” he said, “there’s no reason why you can’t hobble from the car to the city council chambers.” Hannah scowled at him. Dr. Braithwaite smiled to himself.

  In the end, both Hannah and Alex went to the meeting, but not because they wanted to go.

  When Mr. Dias collected them from Dr. Braithwaite’s house, he told them that he needed to attend the city council meeting before he could take them home.

  But that wasn’t the worst news he had for them: He had already spoken to Grandma about Hannah’s ankle, and she had decided to postpone the London trip. “I always thought this was one of your Grandma’s crazy ideas, anyway,” said Mr. Dias, as he parked his car and put on the handbrake. “You guys need a chance to get settled here in Snipesville.”