A Day to Pick Your Own Cotton (25 page)
By now Mistress McSimmons had come out the door to see what the ruckus was about. Slowly she approached, and the closest thing I can think to call the look in her eye was hatred. Ever since the slaves had been set free, it seemed like some white people’s feelings toward blacks had turned to hatred. They may have looked down on us when we were slaves, but in another sense there was a part of them that respected us for what we did for them. They looked down on us, but they didn’t hate us. But now that we were free, they did.
McSimmons turned. “It’s not her,” he said. “Though I think she was one of my father’s slaves.”
“Where’s she been till now?”
“I don’t know. I don’t remember her.”
“Where have you been, girl?” Mistress McSimmons asked me.
“I told you, ma’am,” I said. “I ran away when everyone else was killed.”
“Don’t be impertinent with me—I asked you where you’ve been!”
“With some other people, ma’am—they took care of me.”
“
Where,
you fool!”
“Over yonder, ma’am,” I said, pointing in the opposite direction from Rosewood. “I ain’t sure exactly.”
“With that white girl’s family who was with you?”
“Yes’m.”
“Do her people have a name?”
“Uh … I forgot, ma’am.”
“You’re as stupid as you are ugly! I don’t believe you.
—She knows, William,” the lady said, turning to her husband. “I can see in her eyes that she’s lying. I’m telling you again what I told you before—you take care of it, or else you won’t like the result.”
She turned and walked back into the house, leaving me alone with William McSimmons. It was all I could do to keep from quivering from head to toe, because even if he didn’t remember me, I sure remembered him. He was the meanest of the McSimmons boys, besides being the oldest, and I’d felt the lash of the whip from his hand more times than I wanted to remember. And he was different than his pa when he whipped us—William McSimmons seemed to enjoy it, which I don’t see how anyone could, no matter what color anyone was.
He grabbed my dress by the back of the neck and half dragged me alongside him toward the barn.
“I’ll teach you to lie to your betters, girl,” he said. “You’ll tell me where the other girl is if you know what’s good for you.”
“But I don’t know what other girl you mean, sir,” I said.
“Shut up, you! We’ll see what you know when you taste the end of my whip.”
I winced in pain, trying not to cry out. One thing I knew about men like William McSimmons is that crying out made them all the angrier. He hauled me into the barn and half threw me to the dirt floor while he grabbed a whip from where it hung on the wall. Then he walked toward me again where I was struggling to get back to my feet, and ripped at my dress two or three times till my back was bare, then started lashing me with his whip.
I’d almost forgotten how much it hurt to be whipped with those tiny little leather straps. I screamed in agony at the first lash, but after four or five, the shock from the horrible pain silenced me until I just waited, trembling in terror, for each new lash.
“I see from your back that you’re an ornery one,” he yelled. “Did me or my pa do that to you?”
“Yes, sir,” I whimpered.
“Are you ready to tell me what you know?” he asked.
“She—curse the fool girl, I can’t even remember her name!—disappeared not long after you did. You must have helped her. She could never have survived on her own, she was such a half-wit.”
“I don’t know who you mean, sir. All the rest of the slaves but me was killed when—”
“She wasn’t a field slave. She didn’t live with the rest of you. She was a house slave and was fat as a cow when she disappeared. Now where is she!”
Three more sudden lashes whipped across my back, and again I screamed out. I could feel that my back was starting to bleed. I couldn’t help thinking of Emma and little William and what would happen to them if this terrible man found them. How could anyone be so evil that he’d want to kill his own son? But I had no doubt that’s what was on his mind.
I fell to the floor, feeling like I was going to faint from the pain.
“I’m sorry, sir,” I whimpered. “I don’t know who you mean.”
“Then you are an imbecile! Maybe you’d rather die yourself.”
He turned and strode angrily out of the barn. I took a deep breath and just lay there sobbing, wondering what was going to happen to me. Before I had the chance to think about getting up and making a run for it, two men came in, grabbed me without even letting me cover myself up with my torn dress, and dragged me out of the barn.
Two or three minutes later I found myself sitting in a corner of the ice house listening to the sound of a lock as the door closed above me, leaving me in near total darkness.
And that’s the way it stayed all night, though I could hardly tell when darkness came outside. Nobody came back to give me anything to eat or even a drink of water. But I was in so much agony I couldn’t have eaten anyway and would only have thrown up. And if I got thirsty enough, I suppose I could have licked at the ice. But the exhaustion of the pain left me so weak I became sleepy and somehow managed to sleep on and off through the night. I had nightmares that everything with Katie had been a dream and that William McSimmons had killed my family, and then he’d found me and brought me here and after whipping me some more was going to rape me and then kill me with all the rest.
Never had the idea of freedom seemed further away. I’d completely forgotten that it was my birthday.
K
ATIE PROBABLY GOT LESS SLEEP THAT NIGHT
than I did, listening to every noise, both afraid of what they might be and yet straining to hear at the same time, hoping she would hear me coming back. She dozed off now and then and finally awoke just about the same time I was waking up where I lay.
With the coming of morning, all the fears that had assaulted her throughout the night retreated a bit. She began to feel better just because she had to take care of Emma and Aleta all by herself, and doing your duty is about the best thing you can do when sad thoughts are trying to conquer you. Though seeing the horse that had found its way home when she got up, standing outside waiting for someone to feed it, reminded her of the fix I was in.
With me gone and obviously in danger, all three of them, Katie and Emma and Aleta, found themselves quieter and more thoughtful. They didn’t feel like doing the chores. There was no laughter. A deep sadness hovered over Rose- wood, Katie said, like a thick, depressing fog.
Sometime late in the morning, when Emma had gone upstairs for a few minutes and left William on the couch in the parlor with pillows stuffed around him so he wouldn’t fall, Aleta came in and saw him there alone.
She paused, then timidly approached at just the time William began to whimper. She stood above him as his crying grew louder, then gently sat down on the edge of the couch beside him.
“It’s all right, William,” she said softly. “Your mama will be back soon.”
She reached out and took one of his hands and felt the tiny black fingers immediately close around one of her own.
“It’s all right,” she whispered, “I’ll take care of you till your mama gets back.”
Gently she extended her index finger toward the tiny mouth. Instantly William stopped crying and began sucking on the end of it. Aleta giggled at how it felt.
Just then Katie walked into the room. Embarrassed, Aleta quickly pulled her hand away as Katie approached.
“I was just …” she began. “I was trying to make him stop crying.”
“I think William liked it,” said Katie. “He’s just a helpless little baby. He needs people to care for him just like your mother once held you and cared for you. That’s why Emma needs all of our help.”
The sadness of the day and worrying about me had opened up some places in Aleta’s heart that she’d kept closed all this time, ever since the day Katie found her on the doorstep. Now those doors were opening and emotions were pouring out that she’d kept hidden all that time.
All of a sudden Katie noticed her lips beginning to quiver. Her eyes filled with tears as the saddest and most forlorn look she had ever seen came over her face.
“I won’t ever see my mother again,” whimpered Aleta.
Katie sat down on the other side of the couch from where William lay and took Aleta in her arms. For the first time since her mother’s death, Aleta broke down and sobbed. Katie held her close, stroking her hair and whispering words of love and comfort in her ear.
“I don’t have a mama anymore either, Aleta.” Katie said softly. “Neither does Mayme. I don’t know about Emma. I don’t know why this happened, Aleta, but God brought us together to help each other and take care of each other and to be a family to each other, just like you were helping to take care of William just now. That’s why we’ve got to be sisters to each other, because we don’t have mamas and sisters and brothers of our own.”
“But I want my mama back!” wailed Aleta.
“I know, I know … me too,” said Katie. “But we’ll see them again in heaven someday. But until then we’ve got to be the kind of girls our mamas would want us to be. We’ve got to be strong, and you can be strong, because you know that there are four people who love you.”
“Four?” said Aleta, sniffing and wiping at her nose.
“Mayme and Emma and I, and someday this little baby will grow up to love you too. I know that your daddy loved you once, and we will pray that he will love you again.”
It was silent a minute as Aleta’s tears slowly subsided. Unconsciously her hand again began to stroke William’s arm beside her, and a moment later his tiny fingers were again clutching her finger as if his very life depended on it.
“I miss Mayme,” said Aleta after a few seconds. “I hope nothing bad happens to her.”
“Nothing bad will happen, Aleta,” Katie said. “God will take care of her.”
“But why did He let this happen to her and let that bad man take her?”
“I don’t know, Aleta,” answered Katie. “God doesn’t keep bad things from happening, or make bad things happen himself. But when they do, He takes care of us through them. And I know He is taking care of Mayme right now.”
“But why do they want to hurt her?”
“Some people hate other people just because their skin is a different color,” said Katie.
Aleta was quiet. She was still too young to realize how much she herself had changed.
“But someday,” Katie went on, “babies like William will be born, and they won’t know if they are black or white until somebody is unkind to them. Someday maybe babies will be born and it won’t matter what color their skin is.”
M
EANWHILE, WHEN I WOKE UP IN THE MC
-S
IMMONSS’
icehouse, cold and cramped and hungry and thirsty, it was like waking up in the middle of a nightmare and discovering that the nightmare was still going on. My back was in such pain I could hardly move.
I thought about Katie and Emma and Aleta and whether they were safe, wondering what they were doing. It’s funny how you worry more about other people than yourself when you’re in danger. It seems you can be stronger for yourself, but you don’t want others to have to endure the same suffering.
I was suffering all right. My back hurt so bad I could hardly stand it. I couldn’t move a muscle in my whole body without wincing in pain. But I had been whipped before and I knew the pain would eventually go away. But I was so worried that somehow they’d know where to find Emma, that maybe they’d followed Katie home and were doing awful things to the rest of them too. My mind made up all kinds of terrible things I was afraid might be happening. And the worst of it was I couldn’t do anything to help. I had no idea they were all back at Rosewood waiting and worrying about me, and hoping every minute that I’d come riding in.
Sometime in the morning I heard voices above me, followed by the sound of someone fumbling with the lock. Then bright sunlight exploded around me as the icehouse door opened. A little white girl about ten or eleven climbed down the stairs and brought me a pitcher of water and a hunk of bread. She looked at me crumpled in a heap in the corner with that same expression I’d seen on white faces lately but had never noticed before—hatred.