A Day to Pick Your Own Cotton

by Michael Phillips

  I could tell from her voice that she was nervous—especially after what she’d told me after her last trip into town, that she’d had the feeling that Henry knew all about us. I knew she didn’t want anyone, least of all someone who was curious, looking too closely at what was going on inside the kitchen—though he was standing right there at the open door. In Katie’s mind I was the logical one to get him away from the house.

  I walked toward the door and outside. The instant I was on the porch Katie shut the door behind me. I was left alone with Jeremiah.

  I didn’t look at him but walked down the steps and toward the barn. He followed. I glanced back and saw Katie’s face in the window.

  “Where’s your horse?” I asked.

  “Don’ have one, Miz Mayme,” he said. “I walked.”

  “All the way from town?”

  “Yes’m.”

  “That’s a long way.”

  “My pa thought Miz Clairborne might be needin’ dat bridle. He’s been worried it would break.”

  I thought to myself that I wished Henry showed a little less concern about us.

  “An’ I been wantin’ a chance t’ try ter see Miz Clairborne an’ yerse’f agin,” he added, speaking slowly. Heat rose up the back of my neck. I didn’t say anything and didn’t dare glance over at him.

  “Ain’t too many young folks my age ’bout town,” he said. “Leastways, no coloreds. Now dat we’re free, dey all lef ’, I reckon.—Is you free too, Miz Mayme?”

  “I reckon so,” I said. “I heard about that proclamation, whatever it’s called.”

  “Why you still here, den?”

  “Where else would I be?”

  “Why ain’t you lef ’?”

  “I’ve got no place to go. This is my home.”

  “Your ma an’ pa here too?”

  “No.”

  “Where are dey?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Don’ you want ter fin’ dem, now dat yer free?”

  “I can’t find them,” I said. I was getting uncomfortable with so many questions, especially about my kin. “I told you—this is my home. I don’t have anyplace else to go. I don’t want to go someplace else.”

  “Mister an’ Mistress Clairborne pay you?” he asked.

  The question took me off guard. I didn’t know what to say.

  “I’ve got all I need,” I said. “I’ve got food and a bed, and …” I paused briefly, “… and folks who care about me.”

  “Yep … I reckon dat’s mighty important.”

  “And I feel like I’m needed,” I added. “And Katie … I mean, Miss Clairborne needs me.”

  I don’t know why I was talking so much, but I realized it was easy to talk to him. We’d already reached the barn but had unconsciously stopped while we kept talking. I’d been around plenty of boys of my own color. But this was so different from any situation I’d ever been in before in my life … just talking to a black boy my own age. Back at the colored town where I’d lived, if I’d been standing together with a black boy like Jeremiah, we wouldn’t have been talking. We’d have been standing there keeping our mouths shut, while some white man looked us over wondering what kind of babies we’d make together.

  But now we were just two people … two free people. Nobody was watching us. Nobody was thinking anything. And we could just talk. It felt strange, but good.

  “Dey really need you?” asked Jeremiah. His voice sounded like he’d never considered such a thing—that a white person could need a black person. “And you think Miz Clairborne cares ’bout you? You make it soun’ like yer frien’s.”

  “We are,” I said with a little laugh. “What’s so strange about that?”

  “I jes’ neber considered dat afore, I reckon.”

  “Miss Katie couldn’t get by without me … or me without her either. I don’t know what would become of us if we hadn’t—”

  I stopped myself, realizing I’d gone too far. Feeling comfortable talking to Jeremiah was one thing, but what was I thinking!

  “I mean … they …” I said, fumbling to correct myself, “—they took me in and helped me, and … well, that’s all.”

  Again I stopped. He was looking at me funny.

  “What do you mean … took you in?” he said. “Din’t you used ter be one ob dere slaves?”

  “Uh … yes … that’s what I meant to say. I mean, they let me stay after I was free.”

  “Where’s Mister and Mistress Clairborne?” he asked. “My pa wanted me t’ ask dem somethin’ fer him.”

  “Katie’s pa ain’t back—”

  “What about Mistress Clairborne—she in da house? I din’t see nobody but jes’ two other girls, an’ one ob dem was colored.”

  “She’s … she’s somewhere and it ain’t … well, it ain’t none of your business where she is,” I said. Then I turned and led the way into the barn. “Here’s that bridle,” I went on. “Just fix it and mind your own business.”

  He set about his work with the straps of leather and few tools he had. I saw him looking around the barn. I knew he was noticing things—maybe we’d done a few things wrong, but at least it was pretty clean.

  I walked outside, more mad at myself than at him. I hoped I hadn’t got us into a worse fix than we were already in.

  I went back to the kitchen where Katie and the others were waiting for me. Katie sent me a look of question and I just shrugged.

  “I don’t think he’ll be too long,” I said. “We can finish the cheese when he’s gone.”

  Then I went back outside and waited on the porch. I didn’t figure it’d do anybody any good for him to come snooping around looking inside again.

  Five or ten minutes later I saw him coming out of the barn. I got up and walked over to meet him.

  “Got it mended,” he said. “Reckon I’ll jes’ tell Miz Clairborne.”

  I didn’t like the idea of him looking into the kitchen again, but after what had happened I figured I’d better not protest too much.

  We walked in silence back to the house. He climbed the steps and knocked on the door again. Katie had been watching and immediately opened it.

  “Bridle’s fixed, Miz Clairborne,” he said.

  “Thank you.”

  “Anything else you’d like done aroun’ da place?”

  “Uh, no … but thank you,” said Katie. Then without waiting for anything further, she closed the door, leaving me to get rid of Jeremiah by myself.

  Slowly he came back down the three or four steps.

  “Well … reckon I’ll be headin’ back t’ town,” he said slowly. “You, uh … you min’ if I come out agin?”

  “I don’t think Miss Katie, I mean Miss Clairborne—” I started to say.

  “No, Miz Mayme … I mean, does you min’ if I comes fer a visit?”

  “What would you want to visit for?”

  “I thought maybe I’d come t’ visit you, dat’s all. An’ my pa, he said dat if I asked ’bout Mistress Clairborne an’ got no answer ’bout where she was an’ din’t see her wiff my own eyes—an’ I wasn’t sure what he meant, but dat’s what he said, an’ he was serious when he said it—dat he wanted me ter make sure you young ladies was all right.”

  “What did he mean by that?” I said.

  “Nuthin’, miss … just what I said. Dat’s why he wanted me t’ come out an’ men’ dat bridle, ’cause he wanted t’ know if you an’ Miz Clairborne was all right.”

  “Well. you can tell him that we’re fine,” I said. “And that he ought to mind his own business too.”

  I shouldn’t have said it. But it was clear enough that Henry was thinking more than either he or Jeremiah was saying.

  Jeremiah looked at me real funny, then nodded and shrugged and turned and started walking along the road back toward town. I watched him a minute, then suddenly ran after him.

  “Jeremiah!” I called out.

  He stopped and turned back toward me.

  “Please … don’t tell,” I s
aid.

  “Tell what?”

  “What you saw here—who you saw in the kitchen … what you said before about only seeing us girls.”

  He looked at me seriously, and it was the first time we’d both looked in each other’s eyes.

  “What you really want me not t’ say,” he said after a few seconds, “is what I ain’t seen, an’ dat’s Mistress Clairborne—ain’t dat right, Miz Mayme?”

  “Please,” I said without really answering him, “you can’t tell. Please promise you won’t tell anyone.”

  “Dat’s a hard one, Miz Mayme,” he said finally. “Reckon I’ll have t’ think on dat some on my way home.”

  THE REST OF THE WORLD

  30

  IWENT BACK INSIDE AND WAS A LITTLE SOBER AS WE cleaned up the mess from the cheese making. Aleta and Emma didn’t think any more about it, but Katie and I knew that Jeremiah’s visit could change everything, and we talked about it later when we were alone. We were pretty sure that someone from town now knew how it was at Rosewood, someone we’d just barely met. I was especially worried, since it was my fault for blabbing out what I had. I was afraid he’d tell his pa, and I didn’t know what Henry might do.

  But the days went by, and then a week, and no one else came to call, and I gradually began to think that Jeremiah might not tell after all.

  It was a good thing Katie had bought the newspaper when she’d been in Mrs. Hammond’s store that day. From it we found out a lot about what was going on that we might never have known.

  The newspaper sat where Katie put it on the sideboard in the parlor for several days, along with various farm magazines and almanacs. I’d seen her come home with it. I don’t know what made me notice it one day and pick it up. Maybe I just got curious. I sat down to see if I could read any of it. I could make out a lot of the words, but I couldn’t understand much of what they were talking about.

  Katie came and sat down beside me and started looking it over.

  “Tell me what it says,” I said. “Read something to me. I’ve never heard what a newspaper sounds like.”

  She looked it over, then started to read.

  “It says here that a lot of black people are moving about,” she said. “ ‘Now that the war is over,’ ” she read, “ ‘the flow of former slaves into the Northern states has slowed, though many freedmen are still migrating in search of work. With the South in shambles from the fighting, and with resentment of whites high, jobs for free blacks are scarce. Opportunities in the cities of the North, however, remain plentiful.’ ”

  She stopped and looked over at me.

  “Keep reading,” I said. “That’s interesting.”

  “ ‘The economy of the South has been dealt a serious blow,’ ” she continued. “ ‘Many plantation owners are having difficulty harvesting their cotton, tobacco, and sugar cane crops from lack of slave labor. Some are predicting an entire collapse of the former Confederacy. Confederate paper money is now worthless, and Congress is considering the best course of action for the reconstruction of the ravaged South.

  “ ‘At the same time, there is evidence of an increased incidence of racial violence of whites, not only toward Negroes but toward whites and plantation owners who are seen as sympathetic to the Negro cause. Lynchings of Negroes and burning of white homes have been widespread. The violence of marauding bands of former deserters and renegades which spread during the closing stages of the war is reportedly on the decline.’ ”

  She looked up from the paper again and we glanced at each other, both reminded that we were part of all this, whether we’d known much about the war or not.

  As we sat with Katie reading the paper out loud, Aleta came into the room and listened for a while. Pretty soon she started asking questions. I’d never realized how much Katie knew about things until she started answering Aleta’s questions. It was like all the schooling and teaching she’d had when she was little all of a sudden started coming out, and now she was teaching us.

  “Where did slaves come from?” Aleta had just asked.

  “They are—were—the workers on the farms and plantations,” Katie answered. “It takes a lot of workers to grow things.”

  “Why was there a war?”

  “Because the South had slaves and the North didn’t. When Mr. Lincoln started talking about setting the slaves free, the South didn’t like it and decided to start its own country. Then war started.”

  “Who’s Mr. Lincoln?” said Aleta. “I heard my father say he hated him.”

  As we sat on the couch, now Emma wandered into the room and stood listening.

  “He’s the president,” answered Katie.

  “What’s a president?”

  “He’s the leader of our country. Our first president was George Washington. That was way back in the last century when the United States was a brand-new country. But we’ve had lots of presidents since then, and Mr. Lincoln is president now.”

  “But what’s this, Katie?” I asked, pointing to some big black letters on the page. “Doesn’t that say President Johnson?”

  “Yes … yes, it does,” Katie replied, looking at it. “I don’t know why.”

  She looked over the paper for a bit. All of a sudden she gave a little gasp, then started reading more intently.

  “ ‘With the death of John Wilkes Booth, murderer of President Lincoln at Ford’s Theatre on April fourteenth,’ ” she read aloud, “ ‘and last month’s trial and hangings of the other conspirators in the assassination, the administration of President Johnson is at last able to focus all its attention on putting the nation back together.’ ”

  “What does all that mean?” asked Aleta.

  “It must mean that President Lincoln was killed,” said Katie.

  We all sat for a minute in somber silence. Just when I’d found out I was free, and that this was the man responsible for freeing me, now I found out that he was dead. It didn’t seem right. So many people were dead because of this war!

  All of a sudden the paper wasn’t so interesting. Katie set it aside and we all sat there for a minute, then gradually got up and went back to our work. The rest of the day was kind of quiet. We hadn’t known much about President Lincoln. But if he was the president, and he had set the slaves free, then he must have been a great man. It wasn’t right that he’d been killed.

  After that we thought we oughta read a newspaper once a month. Doing what we were doing, we needed to know what was going on in the country around us. Of course, when I say that we oughta read it, I meant that Katie read it. I was learning, and tried a little, but newspapers were still too hard for me. But I was still reading in the readers and simpler books Katie gave me to read.

  As the summer progressed it got hotter. It rained enough to keep the grass growing for the cows. We went and looked at the planted fields every few days and everything was growing fast by now, though we didn’t know what we would do with it later. The cotton was full of weeds and I knew that was bad. But I didn’t see what just two of us could do about it.

  I found myself thinking every once in a while about Jeremiah. But every time I did, it made me confused. I was glad we hadn’t seen any more of him. The more time that passed, the more sure I became that he hadn’t told Henry anything to make him more suspicious than he already seemed to be.

  So I didn’t want to see him for fear of him raising awkward questions we couldn’t answer. But every once in a while I’d find myself glancing along the road, or listening to see if someone was coming, halfway hoping it might be him. And more than once I found his face and voice coming to my mind.

  Gradually we kept working more and more parts of the plantation. Now that it was summer and there was so much to do, we worked sunup to sundown. Katie was showing Aleta and Emma how to tend the vegetable garden, and we were starting to have lots of fresh vegetables. We canned as much as we could for next winter, and dried some of it. Fruit was coming on too, peaches and strawberries first, though apples and the wild berries weren’t ripe yet.
The iceman came regularly now as we were going through the ice faster. So far he hadn’t seemed to mind that he hadn’t seen Katie’s mother. Since Katie was paying him now, he didn’t seem to ask too many questions. William was growing like a weed, and Emma was looking a lot healthier herself.

  We continued to make cheese every few days and started to get a good supply built up. Most of the things in the root cellar from last year were either gone or spoiled, but now we started collecting a new supply from this year’s onions, potatoes, turnips, sweet potatoes, carrots, cabbages, and squash, though we wouldn’t be able to harvest most things till a little later. We were about out of honey too, so we smoked the bees out of a couple of nests and collected what we could. Emma was scared to go with us and stayed back at the house, and Aleta ran around as terrified and excited as one of the bees herself. We continued to churn butter, which we stored in the root cellar in a big barrel of well water. We still had some corned meat in the brine barrel left over from Katie’s mama. What we would do when we ran out, I didn’t know. The only animals we’d had to kill so far were a few chickens. But we didn’t eat that much meat, except for the poultry.

  The cows kept milking, though with the heat they weren’t giving as much milk. We ate a lot of johnnycakes, though I knew we would have to resupply the corn bin before next winter or we’d run out of corn too.

  All the hard work was showing in Katie. She was getting stronger and was becoming tan and hardy. I could see her changing in so many ways. Though every once in a while, out of the corner of my eye, I’d see her stop for a few seconds and wipe her hair back out of her face and let out a sigh that almost seemed to say, It never used to be this hard around here! But she didn’t lose her composure anymore.

  Then she’d always go right back to work without complaining. I think she knew she had to stay strong for the sake of Aleta and Emma. Even though Emma was a mama, in so many ways it was like having two young’uns to take care of. Without Katie telling her what to do, Emma was just about as helpless a creature as I’d ever seen.