Angels Watching Over Me (Shenandoah Sisters Book #1) (2 page)

She paused and smiled at me with that same funny kind of expression on her face. Now that the years have passed and I’m older, I realize it was a look that said how much she loved me. Then she passed the back of her rough black hand across my cheek and spoke again.

‘‘So you jes’ keep tellin’ yor stories,’’ she said, ‘‘an’ you pay ’tention to what’s in dat head of yors. ’Cause da good Lord’s giben you a gif ’ most folks ain’t got.’’

I nodded, but I only half understood what she was trying to say. It takes a lot of years before young folks can really catch on to what their mamas and papas tell them when they’re young.

At first, like I said, I just told stories to my little brother Samuel, and I never had much thought about writing anything down. I loved to listen to the yarns the old slaves would spin around our nightly fires, and I’d tell Sammy those stories too, sometimes adding stuff of my own to them. I especially liked the ones about Mr. Rabbit and Mr. Fox. They were my favorites of the old tales.

I didn’t even know how to write when I listened to the first stories and started passing them on to Sammy. But by the time I was ten or so, Mama had taught me to write.

It was uncommon the way she knew how to read and write. Not many slaves had schooling. In fact, lots of their owners got real nervous about slaves learning things like that. But she’d been born to a house slave, and when she was little she listened when the master’s children were getting their lessons. She sure didn’t get her hands on books too often, but when she did, she ate up the words like she was starving for them.

Anyway, Mama started to bring me every scrap of paper she could find, most of the time taking wrappings from the trash heap and cutting them all down to the same size. Then I started to write things down, kind of like a diary, I reckon. And ideas for made-up stories too. Keeping my diary on those scraps of paper we collected, just like Mama said, helped me through some hard times, and helped me remember things it was important to remember.

So that’s how my storytelling all got started. Right now I’m holding a special leather-bound diary in my hands that’s nearly as old as I am. How I came to have such a special keepsake is something that’s an important part of what I’ll be telling you. But for now you should know I’ve written down things in it from some of those long-ago pieces of paper, and it sure is going to help me remember important events of my life that I want to tell you about.

I’ve got something else in front of me as I write. It’s small and blue and white and gold, but I can’t describe it more than that without telling how it came to be, and I’d be getting ahead of myself to do that just yet. But these two things along with my mama’s Bible, are all I have left from those days way back then. Putting all those memories into words is going to take every ounce of energy and clear thinking I can muster. So I’ve got the diary and my memory, such as it is, to help me piece together the events as well as the thoughts, and especially the
feelings,
that shaped my life and Katie’s.

Just hang in there with me for a minute, and I’ll explain who Katie was.

The particular time I’ve been talking about, I must have been maybe six or seven, and of course that was before I was writing anything down. My brother was born about three years after me, so that would have made him three or four, which is probably the age when an older sister starts telling a young’un stories.

If that’s when I told my first story, that would be more years ago than you likely can imagine, especially some of you who think even thirty or forty is old. I’m not planning to tell you exactly how old I am, but the fact is, I’ve done a lot of living since my earliest storytelling days.

I remember the first time I ever saw an automobile, and, land’s sakes, I was petrified and fascinated all at the same time. When the new century arrived, I was still living in Shenandoah County, and by then it was one thing after another—telephones and cameras and electricity and whatnot—that were all announcing themselves faster than I could catch my breath.

So it’s probably not hard to see why I have a difficult time remembering exact dates of things. And if you asked me about any of those stories that I told Samuel, I’d answer that I could no more recall them than I can tell you what happened on the day I was born.

You are probably wondering what has made me want to go back and relive that life back in Shenandoah County, North Carolina. Especially when some of those days were pretty awful. Well, something has happened that will explain why I’m digging around in my past. Mine and Katie’s.

But, anyway, I can’t quite recollect exactly how all those stories for my little brother got into my head— which ones I heard from other black storytellers and which ones I made up. I think some of them got mixed up with the old slave songs too, because we all loved to sing. And sometimes when I sing those songs now, I seem to be able to recollect things right clearly. But gradually those early years of my life are slowly fading away, kind of like I’m looking off in the distance on a cold, sunny winter morning, when the fog gets thicker and thicker until you can’t make out anything at all. That’s how it is when I try to think of Samuel now.

Memory’s a funny thing. Some bits of it come back easier than others. Sometimes I can remember something that happened when I was seven better than what happened yesterday.

But what I remember most clearly starts when I was fifteen.

That’s how old I was when I first laid eyes on Katie.

I can’t help thinking of those years, and the changes this world’s seen since way back then. That’s what folks call nostalgia—recollecting back on times from another era when the world was a different sort of place.

Lots of stories . . . lots of memories come into my mind. Good memories, happy memories. And sad memories too, and some even full of terror, because those were as hard times as anyone would ever want to live through.

I probably told Katie my stories too—at first to keep her mind off being afraid. But I never dreamed the story that folks eventually would ask me about most was my own and Katie’s.

It’s not just a story. It’s what truly happened.

We weren’t so very different from any two other girls, except of course that one of us was white and the other colored. And that we lived together through the last part of the War Between the States.

Nowadays I know some folks take offense at calling black folks colored, though I can’t myself see what all the fuss is about. I reckon they think it’s an insulting word and that we ought to call ourselves black, though I’m not actually black, just a nice dark brown. Yes, I do think of it as ‘‘nice.’’ It’s how the good Lord made me, and since He is good and He said His creation was good, my skin color must be nice!

Back then we even called each other niggers, though everybody’s all up in arms about that word too. Seems a little silly to me. A word is just a word, to my way of thinking. One word’s as good—or as bad—as the other. What matters is who you are, not what folks call you. What we lived through back then, Katie and me, was a lot more important than what we were called. No better or no worse than being called ‘‘white trash,’’ I suppose.

What I was saying is that because Katie and I were white and black, once we got used to it, the difference between us made us even closer—not because we got to be the same but just because we
were
different. But we were different in more ways than the color of our skin. Something about contrasts makes people stronger, I think. That’s sure how it worked in our case.

Years later, when we got older, Katie and I couldn’t even sit together on the train. She sat in front with the white folks, I sat in the colored section. That kind of thing riles a lot of black folks, and I understand that. But for my part, I can’t get too upset about it. It’s just the way it was. Maybe it shouldn’t have been, but it was, and I didn’t figure it was my job to fight it. I’ve got a little different view than most about all that. Laws can be passed to help even things out, but when it all comes down to it, there’s only one way for hearts to be changed and real freedom to get around to everybody. In the meantime, I figure it’s my job to live my life like the Lord wants me to, not try to set the whole world straight.

Not that I don’t think black folks ought to be able to vote and sit where they like and live where they want to and be who they want to be. But if my years on this earth have taught me anything, it’s this: the kind of person you are inside is a heap more important in the long run than the rights you have, where you sit, what you’re called, and whether you vote.

As I sit here telling our story, or should I say getting ready to start it—though it’ll take more than just this first book to get it told, and so far I’m just trying to get my thoughts moving in the right direction—I look down at my wrinkled brown hands on the arms of my chair, and in some ways I can hardly recognize them. These hands of mine have done a lot of things—picking cotton, rocking young’uns, holding a rifle, burying kin.

I reckon the reason I’m telling you all these snippets of my history is to get the idea into your heads that the days I’m going to talk about were a long time ago. But it’s not just the kind of time you measure in years. You can’t understand my story without realizing how different everything was back then. Like I said, some black folks nowadays get real angry about these rights and those rights, but I doubt most of you younger ones listening to me—or should I say reading this—have any idea how much better you have it. Maybe all this hubbub over rights has to happen, though sometimes it makes me a little uncomfortable. The anger over it all somehow doesn’t seem right to me. Everyone in my family was a slave, and I was a slave. And we tried to make the best of it. That’s just how it was. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying slavery ever should have happened. Or that people shouldn’t have gone to war abolishing it. But for us back then in Shenandoah County, we just made a life for ourselves in spite of it.

That is, until the year everything changed.

But wait just a minute while I tell you a little bit more about Katie. What I’m fixing to tell isn’t really a story at all. It’s just who we were, what we did. Katie’s life and mine were two streams that ran together and blended eventually into a bigger stream that I guess became a kind of story.

At first whenever we told people about it, Katie and I always described our early years separately, even though the two stories came together soon enough. I started recounting in my own words things I’d heard her tell about first, and then later I started laying it all out through her eyes. So I think what I’m putting down here is one story, a single, unbreakable strand made with two different threads.

For those of you who didn’t ever meet Katie, and who may not know me either, my name is Mary Ann Jukes. All my life, folks have just called me Mayme. And Katie was christened Kathleen O’Bannon Clairborne. She was born on a large Southern plantation a few miles west of Greens Crossing, Shenandoah County. I was born on a large Southern plantation a few miles east of Greens Crossing. That’s the only part of our beginnings that have much in common.

I’m going to ask you to send your imaginations back a long, long time to when this country fought a war with itself. The year was 1861. That’s when Katie always began her part of the story. That’s where I’ll begin too. Katie was still ten that spring, and I was eleven. But we didn’t know each other yet, even though in miles we weren’t that far away from each other. But in other ways, we might as well have been on opposite sides of the world.

It all took place northeast of Charlotte, North Carolina, where Shenandoah County and the town of Greens Crossing are located.

W
INDS OF
C
HANGE
1

A
HOT SUN ROSE THAT SPRING DAY OVER THE peaceful landscape.

That’s how Katie always began to tell it. I reckon the same sun came up and shone down over us both that day, though we were in a different part of the county and all my family were slaves on another plantation six or eight miles away.

The slaves in their quarters, Katie said, looked outside early, saw the heat rising in waves from the damp ground, and sighed.

The fields would be hot, the work hard. The winter had been a mild one, and slave work during those months was more mild too. Today they would feel the beginning of the intense labor that always came at this time of the year. Rolling hills and valleys in that region stretched for hundreds of miles in every direction. Its soil was rich and fertile. In it grew lots of things that brought prosperity to those who owned it.

But it wasn’t a very good place or a happy time to be alive if your skin was black. My people knew that as well as the slaves of Katie’s father.

He came out from his early breakfast to announce they would complete the ploughing of the eastern fifteen acres today. If the warm weather held after last week’s rain, they would move straight to the northern twenty-eight which bordered the river, the master told them. He wanted it ready to plant by next week. The wheat was already in. Now it was time for the cotton.