A Day to Pick Your Own Cotton (3 page)
A minute later I walked back in and picked up the last of the three packages wrapped in brown paper. Then we left the shop together. I was conscious of Mrs. Hammond’s scowl staring at our backs the whole way out to the street.
We were both mighty relieved to get up on that buggy and finally start back toward Katie’s home. We felt like laughing, but we couldn’t yet because we were still in town.
“Hello, Reverend Hall,” said Katie as we passed the church at the edge of town.
The minister, who was walking toward the church from town with his back toward us, turned and then when he saw who it was, beckoned toward Katie. At first Katie didn’t slow up, intending to keep on going. But he ran toward us and called out, so that Katie had to rein in the horses.
“Good morning, Kathleen,” said the minister, walking up to the wagon, puffing a little. “I wanted to ask a favor of you—tell your mama to come see me, would you?”
“Yes, Reverend Hall.”
“Your father and brothers aren’t home yet?”
“Uh … no, sir.”
“Well, some of the men are having a hard time of it when they come home after so long at war. There’s a man on the other side of town who is drinking so much that his wife and daughter are sometimes terrified of him.”
“My daddy doesn’t drink like that,” said Katie.
“I’m sure not, Kathleen, and I am glad. But there are other problems too. Men change from war and I just want your mama to be prepared. Tell her to come see me when she can.”
“Yes, sir,” said Katie, flicking the reins.
Relieved again to be on our way, eventually the last of the houses disappeared out of sight behind us. What the minister had said sobered Katie for a minute. But pretty soon we both started thinking about Mrs. Hammond again.
Finally we couldn’t help it. I started to giggle and Katie burst out laughing so hard I thought she was gonna scare the horses into a gallop.
“That was the beatenest thing I ever saw!” I said.
“—with Mrs. Hammond. You were acting like a regular grown-up back there in her store, Miss Katie.”
Katie was still laughing too hard to say anything.
“One thing for sure, you knocked poor old Mrs. Hammond into a cocked hat!”
“What about you?” said Katie as she laughed.
“Yes’m, Miz Katie,”
she said in a gloomy voice, trying to imitate how I’d sounded. Then she started laughing again. “And with that long face and staring down at the ground. You were doing more playacting than I was!”
“Except for my mistake of calling you Miss Katie! That just about put her on to us.”
“It didn’t, though.”
“But did you notice that look on that fellow Henry’s face? He didn’t seem too altogether pleased with your answer after he asked about your mama.”
“He’s always been nice to me, nicer than just about anyone. But I didn’t really notice Henry too much with his son standing there. I can’t believe it. And to think that they haven’t seen each other in all those years.”
I didn’t reply. I didn’t know what to say about Henry’s son. But there’s no use denying that I couldn’t help thinking about him for the rest of the day. But Katie’s voice interrupted my thoughts.
“Do you think that man in the store was looking for Emma?” she asked.
“I reckon,” I said. “Leastways, that seems likely.”
“Should we tell her?”
“That’s up to you, Miss Katie. But it’d likely set her into an almighty panic—as if she isn’t in enough a one all the time as it is.”
“You’re right, Mayme. I don’t suppose there’s any reason to tell her … not unless something comes of it.”
Neither of us said anything for a spell, then slowly a smile spread across Katie’s face as we rode along.
“Mayme,” she said excitedly, “we did it!”
“You did it mostly yourself, Miss Katie,” I said.
The thought sobered her up some. She stopped laughing and got a funny look on her face, like she realized I was right and was almost proud of herself for it.
Then she smiled. “I guess I did at that, didn’t I?”
“You sure did, Miss Katie … I mean Miss
Kathleen
.”
We both burst out laughing again.
W
HEN WE GOT BACK TO KATIE’S MAMA AND
papa’s house, Emma was in a fix of excitement and worry waiting for us. We’d been talking excitedly and laughing all the way back from town. Having Emma running outside the moment she saw us, going on and on about how she thought we were never going to come back, reminded us right quick that no matter how much we might have fooled Mrs. Hammond, we still had problems of our own right here.
By then we were tired and hungry. We went inside and sat down and tried to eat something while Emma kept talking without taking a breath.
“William was fussin’ real bad, Miz Katie,” she said. “I cudn’t git him ter stop no how.”
“What did you do?” asked Katie, speaking softly to calm her down.
“I fed him, Miz Katie, an’ den he went ter sleep, but I thought you was neber gwine git back.”
“Well, we’re back now, Emma,” said Katie. “And we won’t have to go back into town again for a good while yet.”
After we’d had something to eat and drink, we set to unloading the supplies and taking care of the buggy and horses.
“We gotta start making plans, Miss Katie,” I said later that day.
“What kind of plans?” she asked.
“We gotta figure this whole thing out and decide what’s to be done. We can’t do everything around here, so we gotta decide just what we can do and what we should do, which fields to tend and which parts of your mama’s plantation to keep up.”
“But I don’t know anything about tending fields, Mayme.”
“I do. I been working in the fields since I was eight. But besides the fields, we gotta tend to other stuff to make it look like your mama’s still running the place.”
“Like what kind of other stuff?”
“You gotta try to think back to everything your mama did.”
“All right, I see what you mean.”
“So tomorrow, Miss Katie,” I said, “here’s what I think we oughta do … that is, if it’s to your liking. I don’t want to tell you what to do, but—”
“Mayme, please don’t talk like that,” interrupted Katie. “I could never do any of this without you. I’ve told you that before. You’re smart, Mayme, just like I told Mrs. Hammond. You have more common sense than me.”
“You been showing a heap more smarts about Emma than me.”
“I don’t know—we’ll help her out together. But I don’t know what to do about so many things. So I want you to just keep saying what you think and telling me what we ought to be doing.”
“But it’s
your
plantation, Miss Katie. I don’t wanna be presuming too much and—”
“For now, Mayme, it’s
our
plantation … yours
and
mine.”
“That can’t hardly be, Miss Katie.”
“If it’s mine, like you say, then right now I’m giving half of it to you.”
Her words silenced me on the spot. I didn’t know what to say.
“All … all right, then, Miss Katie,” I said, fumbling for words. “If that’s the way you want it, I don’t reckon I can keep arguing with you.”
“It
is
the way I want it, Mayme. So what were you getting ready to tell me?”
“What I was gonna say a minute ago is that I think you oughta show me all around to everything. We’ll saddle a couple of horses, and then we’ll ride everywhere and you can show me your mama’s plantation.”
“
Our
plantation now.”
“All right, then, our plantation … the fields, the slave cabins, what’s growing where … everything.”
“I don’t know if I know where it all is, or exactly which fields were my mama and daddy’s.”
“Well, do the best you can, and probably you’ll remember as you go places where you saw your papa or his slaves working at one time or another. But we gotta try to figure out what’s yours and what we oughta do with it.”
A
FTER BREAKFAST THE NEXT MORNING, WHEN
our chores with the cows and pigs and chickens were tended and we had Emma and William taken care of for a spell, we saddled up two horses. Then we set out for a ride around the farm, with Rusty and the other two dogs barking and chasing along with us.
First Katie led me down the sloping hill toward the colored cabins about half a mile from the main house.
“This is where our slaves lived,” she said as we rode up, then slowed to a stop.
We sat on the horses for a few seconds just looking at it. Everything was so quiet. There wasn’t much to say. One colored village looked about the same as any other. This run-down collection of cabins could have been where I lived, or where any slaves lived. I had the feeling Katie was seeing it through different eyes now, after being to where I’d lived. It was probably hard for her to think that these shacks had once been people’s homes, people just like me, people that her own daddy had owned and who he had likely treated no better than my master had treated us.
Both of us were looking at the world through different eyes than we had just a short time before. Just the fact of slavery was dawning on Katie more than ever, I think. And I was seeing things different too, ’cause now I
wasn’t
living in a place like this anymore.
After a while we continued on.
“That field there,” Katie said, pointing to the right, to a stretch of land behind the cabins. “I know that’s our main cotton field.”
I looked where she was pointing. The field was full of growing cotton. It was just like our cotton fields, and I had hated them. The field was getting full of weeds between the rows too, now that there was no one to hoe and cut them down. How many hours had I spent in fields just like this, from when I was so young I could hardly remember.
“I’m not sure about the one beyond it, over past those trees. But those woods over there,” she said, “that’s my secret place. I don’t think any of our fields are past it. I don’t remember ever seeing our slaves or mama going out past there.”
We rode on to the second field Katie had pointed to beyond the one growing with cotton. It took us about five minutes to get there. It was full of stalks of green that were about three feet high by now. I figured it was probably wheat.
We kept riding to the left, in the opposite direction from Katie’s woods. We crossed a little stream and then came to the river and passed along its bank on our right, which Katie said was one edge of Rosewood’s boundary.
We crossed over the road leading toward town and gradually made a great big circle going to the left all the time. As we went Katie showed me several other fields—some large, some small—all with crops growing in them, mostly cotton.
“I think I remember seeing our slaves working here,” she said. “And over there I went with my mama once when she had to talk to Mathias.”
“That’s corn there,” I said. “We could pick that easy enough when it’s ripe and have plenty to eat for a long time.”
“What’s that growing there?” asked Katie, pointing off in another direction.
“I ain’t sure,” I said. “I don’t recognize it, though it might be tobacco. Your mama and daddy have a tobacco drying barn?”
“I don’t think so. You mean a barn different than for cows?”
I nodded. “I reckon you’d know if you had one. I ain’t seen anything that looks like one. It must be something else.
Or maybe this field belongs to someone else.”
That thought seemed to startle Katie and the two of us looked around, half expecting to see someone staring at us, wondering what two girls—and one of them colored—were doing in his field. But we saw no one.
Eventually we came back behind the house from the opposite direction from where we’d started by the road leading to Mr. Thurston’s.
“That’s one of the other fields where we take the cows,” said Katie, pointing off toward our right.
“The grass is getting tall,” I said. “Doesn’t look like it’s been grazed for quite a spell. We’ll bring them over here tomorrow.”
We got back to the house and walked around there. I wanted to see everything else I hadn’t noticed or paid attention to before.