Angels Watching Over Me (Shenandoah Sisters Book #1) (9 page)

Shaking and crying, she gagged again and looked away, then made herself turn back into the parlor. Now she saw the bloodied body of one of her brothers slumped beneath the window, the rifle still clutched in his stiff hands, and that of her father next to the trapdoor, where his body had slid off it as Katie had climbed out of the cellar.

Katie stood, incapable of movement, unable to utter a sound, unconscious that she was now an orphan . . . unconscious of anything. She only stood rigidly with arms clutching herself, all physical and mental functions frozen into uselessness. She was unaware that even her few movements across the floor had already stained her feet and nightgown with the blood of her proud Southern heritage.

How long she stood in a stupor of shock, she wouldn’t have been able to say. Death was all around. Blood was splattered everywhere—some dried black, some in pools so thick it was still red.

Suddenly Katie heard footsteps behind her. In the midst of the awful silence, the sound frightened her back to reality.

She nearly leapt out of her skin and spun around. Her muscles tensed in readiness to flee.

There stood a lanky black girl near her own age whom she had never seen before.

That girl was me.

M
AYME
11

N
OW I RECKON IT’S TIME YOU HEAR A LITTLE about my part of this story.

I know how it is when you’re trying to keep track of what’s going on, and the storyteller jumps about till you get so confused you can’t tell what happened when. And now here I am doing that same thing.

But sometimes it just seems that’s the best way to tell something. And like I said, I’m so used to having Katie beside me telling her part of this that I’m a little befuddled myself knowing how to explain it. So I reckon you’ll just have to keep track of it the best you can—which I’m sure you’ll be able to do—until I somehow get the whole thing laid out for you.

I may have said earlier that Katie’s brain was in the habit of moving a mite slow, though her imagination was alive as could be. I was just the opposite. She hadn’t had to think or make decisions. But I had. Where she was a dreamer, I was practical. There isn’t a thing wrong with either kind of person. I reckon it takes both to make a world, and if we were all alike it’d be a pretty boring place.

I
had
to be practical. I’m not saying I didn’t have time to dream, because you can dream and let your imagination go where it wants whatever else you might be doing. But the work was hard, and I didn’t really think much about dreaming. I just did what I had to do. That included telling stories, like I said, but somehow that was different, more like just a way to pass the time.

I was the oldest of five kids. I grew up telling stories to little Samuel, and after him came three more little ones, Rachel, Robert, and Thelma. Seems my mama was always expecting a baby, and I had to not just tell the young’uns stories, but I had to take care of them too—feed them and change their dirty diapers and wash their clothes and anything else that was needed while Mama was out working the master’s garden or trying to get our clothes clean down at the stream.

So I learned mighty quick to fend for myself and do what needed to be done.

It was a hard life, being a girl in a slave family. Mama depended on me, and that’s how life was. My daddy and all the men worked in the master’s fields all day. When he and the men came back to the slave quarters every night, they were so tuckered out, it was all they could do to sit at the table and eat the watery stew Mama and the other women had made that day.

It was a hard life for women too, and for children like me. Everybody had to work—work was what we did. It was the only life we knew. When the sun came up, we got out of bed and started working. We worked till we fell asleep that night.

But Sundays were different. After the chores were done, the master let us have the whole afternoon and evening to ourselves. That’s when the old men told stories and people gathered round. Then in the evening there would be a big fire and lots of singing.

How I loved the singing! It wasn’t the kind of music Katie and her mother made from notes on a page that somebody had written down. Our music came from our insides—from our souls, I reckon you’d say, and from our feelings. Our music was about us and about our way of life, and sometimes it could lift a body right up to heaven, it was so pretty.

That’s where I started to learn about religion too, from the singing and the stories. It seems that the harder the times got, the more we sang songs about people in the Bible, about others who’d had to work hard, who’d suffered too.

But Monday always came again, and then the work would begin the minute we got up.

But children don’t know a hard life from an easy one. Youngsters just cope with what they’ve got to cope with and don’t think about it.

I didn’t think about it either. I just did what I had to do. I reckon that’s where I got my common sense and practicality, in the same way that Katie hadn’t yet learned to do too much for herself. Maybe that’s why God saw fit to bring me and Katie together—so that our differences could fit together to help us be more than either of us could have been by ourselves.

The man I called ‘‘Papa’’ died when I was twelve. I don’t know why. I think he got sick from something. Death was part of slave life. Somebody was always dying. Mama was expecting again. The master said she could stay on in the cabin till the new baby was two. Then she’d need to marry again or be sold off.

Mama cried for a day or two. Then the tears dried up, and we went on doing what we had always done.

Sometime after that I came upon Mama one day sitting alone on the bed with a strange kind of look on her face, kinda happy and sad at the same time. I guess it’s what you’d call nostalgic, but I didn’t know that word then. She was holding a funny-shaped little blue thing.

‘‘What’s that?’’ I asked.

‘‘Just a reminder of a long-ago time, chil’,’’ she said, smiling that peculiar smile again.

‘‘What does that word on it mean?’’

‘‘Dat ain’t a word, chil’. It’s a reminder of the tears of life dat sometimes a body can’t help, an’ some memories are best left unremembered.’’

‘‘Where’d you get it, Mama?’’ I asked.

She looked at me deep in the eyes, then down at the pin, then up at me again and smiled. Then she put it away with her Bible, and I don’t recollect seeing it again, excepting every once in a while on a special day like Christmas when she’d hang it from a chain around her neck. But she never answered my question . . . and I never asked about it again.

Nothing much changed right after that. My grandpapa lived with us too after Grandmama died, but he was getting too old to work in the fields. The master wasn’t too happy about our cabin full of people with none of us working in the fields. When the new baby was two months old, Mama went to work out in the fields with the men.

A while after I got to be fifteen, I recall a day when the master and two of his sons came down to the quarter. He visited a few minutes with Grandpapa. Then Grandpapa called out to fetch me and Samuel, who was now eleven. We came and stood while the master looked us over head to toe. Behind him, the master’s oldest son was looking at me real ugly-like.

We both knew what it was all about. Slaves had value to their masters in one of three ways. Strong men worked. Strong women had babies. And children were raised to do one or the other—or else be sold. Boys grew up to give the master more work. Girls grew up to give him more babies. If he didn’t think they’d do either very well, or if he needed what money he thought they’d bring, he’d sell them. The time had come when the master was thinking what would be best to do with me and Samuel when our time came.

He looked Samuel over, probably asking himself when he could start taking Papa’s place in the fields. He was feeling the muscles of Sam’s arms and looking over his shoulders and chest, wondering how much he was going to fill out, while my brother stood there staring straight ahead still as a statue. Then he came over to me to do the same. People nowadays probably think it a pretty awful thing for a man to do, but back in those days a slave was his master’s property and he did whatever he pleased with them, same as he would a wagon or a cow or a saddle.

He walked up to me and started looking me over too. He stuck a couple fingers in my mouth and pried it open so he could see all my teeth. Why didn’t I try to bite his fingers off , you’re maybe wondering. Because I didn’t want my back bleeding from a whipping, that’s why. I’d already had two whippings in my life, the worst from the master’s son, and I didn’t want to ever get another one.

Then he stood back and looked at my front, and his eyes paused a few seconds at my breasts, which were starting to bulge out a bit under my dirty apron. Out of the corner of my eye I saw his two sons wink at each other, and I didn’t much like the way they were looking at me. Then the master nodded to himself and turned back to my grandfather.

‘‘A mite scrawny,’’ he said, ‘‘and not much of a looker. Still, she might fetch seventy-five dollars. You got any of your young bucks in mind to bed her down?

Otherwise I’ll get what I can for her.’’

I didn’t hear what my grandfather said.

It didn’t matter. I didn’t get bedded by any of the sixteen- or seventeen-year-old slave boys, or sold either.

Because two weeks later is when the renegade soldiers came.

M
ASSACRE
12

I
DIDN’T KNOW AT THE TIME WHO THE SOLdiers were.

I didn’t know that the war was all but over, or that the South was breaking up and in chaos, or that deserters or marauders were roaming everywhere. All I knew was that a war had been going on between North and South, that the two sides wore blue and gray, and that somehow we slaves were in the middle of it. Sometimes we’d see soldiers riding by, and once or twice you could hear cannon fire way off in the distance. But mostly we went about our work.

Some said the soldiers from the North, Mr. Lincoln’s soldiers, were trying to set us free. But it was hard to think of any white man—even if they wore blue and talked funny—as friends to colored folks.

I was down at the creek fetching water when I heard horses galloping toward the shacks and barns of our colored town—which now I reckon folks would call a collection of hovels—where we slaves lived. Our men were mostly in the fields, so no one could have put up much of a fight. It was all over too quick for that.

A thunder of riders was coming so fast I could feel the ground shaking under me. With the shouts and horses and the dust and dirt flying, it looked to my eyes like a hundred men bearing straight for the houses, yelling and shooting. I heard screams from Mama and the rest of the women. Then gunfire and more shouts. Terrible sounds filled the air all around me. Horrible screams and loud explosions from the guns all mingled together in an uproar that was deafening.

I dropped my water bucket and ran toward the quarter. But about halfway back I stopped and hid behind a tree. Whatever was going on, it was clear it wouldn’t do a girl like me a bit of good to run out into the middle of it.

What I saw from behind the tree filled me with more terror than I’d ever felt before or since. If I hadn’t been wide awake, and known I was awake, I’d have figured it for a nightmare. It was as grisly as the worst nightmare you could imagine.

The riders were shooting and trampling everybody and knocking everything over and riding around recklessly with their horses kicking and rearing all over the place. They were shouting out horrible curses, and when I think back on it now, I figure they were taking out their anger toward the North and Mr. Lincoln on this little group of slaves, like we were the ones who had caused it all. The horsemen—and I later found out there were fourteen of them—were laughing and cussing like they were enjoying it.

What kind of men would do that? I’ve been asking myself that all my life. What kind of people actually enjoy hurting others? I can’t think of anything to call them but savage as a meat ax, just plumb evil. If ever there’s a day of reckoning when all the things everybody’s done gets put right by God, then bad men like that will surely face some horrible punishment for such awful deeds. Seeing what I saw that day sure made me a believer in hell, because no hell could be too bad for men who could do what they did.