The Color of Your Skin Ain’t the Color of Your Heart (10 page)

Other than that we saw no damage.

The barn dried out, then the pasture, and pretty soon we were able to let the horses and cows back outside. Even the cows frolicked a little at first, and the horses ran and ran from fence to fence the whole length of the pasture. It was some time, however, before we could take the cows out to any of their usual fields, since they were covered in mud. It took several weeks both for the mud to dry up and the grass to start growing back up through it again. But eventually the green returned to the fields and woods and landscape.

There was one place that didn’t return to green—the enclosed area around the pig shed. It remained a muddy, stinky, brown mess all through the winter!

L
OOKING
A
HEAD

12

O
NE AFTERNOON
K
ATIE LEFT THE HOUSE AND
said she wanted to go to her secret place in the woods to see how much damage the flood had caused to it.

I was curious myself, but I knew that if Katie had wanted me to go with her, she’d have said so. There are some things a person’s got to do alone. Emotions and thoughts don’t stir around inside you in quite the same way when other people are around, and the kinds of thoughts and feelings that get moving when you’re alone are good for you. I knew this was one of those times for Katie. She’d been going to her place in the woods since she was a little girl. It was where she learned to get in touch with herself and nature, where she learned to write poems and think and pray. And now that she was slowly becoming a woman, it was important to touch some of those things of the past every once in a while to feel whatever they might make her feel and let those feelings mature her all the more. It’s the same way it had been for me when I’d wanted to go back to the McSimmons place.

She returned about an hour later. She was in a quiet mood.

“It was sad, Mayme,” she said. “All the green was gone and it was muddy everywhere. But at least the big rock hadn’t gotten washed away. And everything will grow back.”

She sighed and smiled. “I was thinking on the way back to the house,” she went on after a minute, “that if the water could change the landscape so much, what if it got into the cellar during the flood. So I thought we should look.”

We went into the parlor, pulled back the rug, and lifted the door in the floor.

“Oh, we’ll need a lantern,” said Katie as she began to step down into the darkness. “Would you mind getting one from the kitchen?”

A few minutes later we were standing down on the hard dirt of the cellar looking about. Nothing was changed. And except for a little wetness in two of the corners and along one of the walls, there was no sign of the flood.

Katie glanced about. There wasn’t much there, just the old chest where we’d found her uncle’s clothes and a few pieces of old furniture with stuff heaped on it, an oak barrel for storing potatoes, several lanterns that looked like they were rusting, and some shelves with a few things piled on them.

“It looks all right,” said Katie. “At least the flood didn’t ruin everything.—Maybe I should bring one of those lanterns up,” she said, walking over toward where the furniture had been stored.

She tried to pick up the largest of them, an old ornate oil lantern of brass with a huge round base.

“Ugh!” she said. “It’s too heavy!”

“Do you want some help?” I asked.

“No, we’ll get it later if it turns out we need it.” We climbed back up into the house and closed the door after us.

The flood had come on us so suddenly in the middle of our picking cotton that we hadn’t really had the chance to think or talk about what it might all mean. But I came on Katie one day in her papa’s office sitting at the big desk of her mama’s going through papers again.

“What are you doing?” I asked.

She looked up and smiled kind of sadly.

“Just looking at all of this and seeing if I can make sense of it,” she answered.

“Can you?”

“Not much. But with picking the cotton and everything, I’d been so excited about paying off that loan to Mr. Taylor that I hadn’t really thought much about the second loan. With all the cotton I thought we were going to pick, especially with Henry’s and Jeremiah’s help, and with the money that’s still in the bank, I wasn’t even thinking about it or worried about it. But then the storm came and now there’s not going to be any more money coming from anywhere.” ‘

‘Don’t you think what we got will be enough?” I asked.

“I don’t know. The money left over from the first time wasn’t enough. That’s what Mr. Taylor said.”

“What about the cotton piled on the wagons in the barn?” I asked.

“I don’t know,” said Katie. “But it’s not as much as we picked the first time—before Henry and Jeremiah came. It’s only two wagons and one of them isn’t even full.”

“When should we take those wagons into town?”

“I don’t know. Maybe we should ask Henry.”

Next time Henry came out to check on us after Shenandoah County was starting to dry out, we did ask him. He said he’d try to find out how prices were and whether we ought to sell it now or keep it through the winter.

“But what you worried ’bout money fo’, Miz Kathleen?” he said.

Katie glanced at me. I knew she was wondering how much to tell him.

“Like I mentioned before, my mama had a loan at the bank,” she said after hesitating a minute. “We paid part of it with the last cotton we picked. But I don’t think there’s enough to pay the rest. And I don’t know how to get any more money.”

Henry nodded as he listened.

“Yep,” he said, “money’s hard ter come by when you ain’t got none, dat’s fo’ sho’. But dere’s ways er gittin’ it.”

“What ways?” asked Katie.

“Same ways you got it afore—jes’ takes a mite longer, dat’s all.”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, we cud plant dose fields er yers wiff mo cotton nex’ year, an’ den dat cotton’d grow up an’ up an’ we cud pick it jes’ like you done las’ time, an’ wiff me an’ Jeremiah helpin’, I figger you cud git hit in afore nex’ year’s rain.”

“Could we … could we really plant more!” asked Katie excitedly. “How, Henry … when can we do it?”

Henry chuckled. “Well, jes’ hold on ter yerse’f, Miz Kathleen,” he said. “First we gots ter plough up dat ol’ groun’ an’ we cudn’t do dat till spring. Den you’d hab ter spend some er las’ year’s money fer seed from Mr. Watson.

Den we cud plant it all right. Might take us er while. We ain’t got dat macheenrey like I seen McSimmons usin’. But we cud do hit all right.”

“When can we start!”

“We gots ter wait till spring, Miz Kathleen.”

The minute Henry’d put the idea in Katie’s head about planting and harvesting a new crop of cotton, her spirits rose and she couldn’t wait for spring to come. Having that to look forward to made the fall and winter months go both faster and slower at the same time.

We’d been together now, the five of us, for more than half a year and gradually we were running out of things. We had to spend some of Katie’s money in the bank for flour and sugar and other food, though we had more milk and cheese than we could eat.

We’d done some vegetable canning in the summer, but the flood destroyed what was left of the vegetable garden too. There were a lot of apples on the trees roundabout, so we went out picking and making and canning applesauce so we’d have it through the winter.

Henry helped us plant a new batch of potatoes and sweet potatoes with cut-up pieces from what we still had left over in the root cellar. And of course we kept making cheese and churning butter. And we had plenty of eggs.

Another thing we were running out of was meat. Katie mentioned this to Henry and his solution was simple enough.

“You got enuff hogs out dere—we’ll butcher one ob dem, an’ maybe one er yer cows too an’ smoke an’ cure an’ salt it an’ you’ll hab plenty er meat fer winter.”

“Ugh!” said Katie. “I don’t think I could stand to watch.”

Henry laughed. “You’d rather starve dan kill some ol’ hog!”

“No, I don’t suppose,” said Katie. “It just sounds so horrible.” Katie’s squeamishness didn’t stop Henry. The very next week he came out planning to butcher one of the hogs.

“Do we have to watch, Uncle Henry?” asked Aleta.

“No, chil’, you don’ hab ter watch me kill it,” said Henry. “But you two older girls,” he added, looking at me and Katie, “you’s gwine hab ter help me lift it into da pot. So you jes’ fill yer biggest tub plumb full an’ git a good hot fire aneath it, ’cause we gots ter hab boilin’ water ter git a good scald on dat dere pig. You take care ob da fire an’ I’ll take care ob da killin’, an’ we’ll hab dat ol’ hog sliced an’ hangin’ in yer smokehouse an’ in dat brine barrel in no time.”

I was used to things like that, so I helped Henry most of the afternoon, and Aleta and Katie came and went as much as their stomachs could handle.

Aleta was gradually warming up to
Uncle Henry,
as she called him now. She was starting to grow like a weed. So was William! He was getting chubby and round, and even Emma was putting on a little weight. She was calming down too. Whenever Henry came to visit, Emma followed him around like a puppy dog, like she had Katie earlier. Henry was so kind and tender to her. I doubt if a man had ever been so kind to her, and Emma drank it in. She’d have done anything for Henry. For all I knew, she’d hardly known her father. Henry was just about as gentle a man as I’d ever seen. As kind as he was to all of us, you could tell he had a special place in his heart for Emma and William. Maybe it was because he knew they had no one else. And as the months passed, he became the father she’d never had.

Slowly the winter passed. There was more rain now and then, and it turned colder, but no more flooding.

A V
ISIT
AND AN
A
TTACK

13

O
NE DAY A COUPLE WEEKS BEFORE
C
HRISTMAS
, late in the day, Jeremiah came to call. It had been a warm day and sunny and everything smelled wet and warm and nice. Jeremiah was all cleaned up and he had a sheepish look on his face when he came to the door. I knew immediately that he hadn’t come to help us with our chores.

“How do, Miz Mayme,” he said. “I thought … uh, maybe you an’ me could go fer a walk.”

I nodded and went outside with him.

We walked away from the house. Dusk was settling in. A huge full moon was just rising over the trees. It was just about as nice an evening as I could imagine. It was quiet as we walked. Neither of us seemed to have anything to say. He glanced around a few times, almost like he thought somebody else might be around or watching us, though I don’t know who it could have been because Katie and the others were all still inside. Then he seemed to settle down and took my hand and we just kept walking and walking till we were in the woods by Katie’s secret place and the house was out of sight. I wanted to show him the little meadow and to see what it was like in the moonlight, though I didn’t want to without Katie’s permission.

Gradually we started talking.

“What you gonna do now dat yer free?” Jeremiah asked. “You gonna keep working fer Miz Katie? You gonna work fo’ her forever?”

“I don’t know. I hadn’t thought about it,” I said. “But I could never leave Katie.”

“Why not?”

“She’s my friend.”

“But she’s white.”

“She’s like a sister to me. It doesn’t matter what color she is.”

“Seems ter me it matters. Whites an’ blacks is different, ain’t they?”

“Not down inside,” I said. “Don’t you figure if you could open us up, our hearts’d be the same color?”

“I don’t know. I reckon I never thought ’bout dat.”

“What about you?” I said. “What are you going to do?”

“I’d like ter save a little money,” said Jeremiah enthusiastically, “an’ maybe git me a livery er my own someday.”

“That sounds like a fine idea, Jeremiah.”

“My daddy’s happy enuff ter work fer Mr. Guiness,” he went on. “It’s all he knows. He’s pleased enuff ter hab a job an’ ter be a free black man. But now dat young folks like you an’ me is free, maybe we can do eben more—jes’ think, a black man
owning
something. Don’t it jes’ soun’ right fine!” His voice was excited as he thought about it.