Miss Katie's Rosewood

by Michael Phillips

  Jeremiah was so nervous. I might have felt a little sorry for him if I hadn’t been nervous myself. If Jeremiah was going to say what I expected him to say, I’d been thinking some already about what I would say too.

  “I talked ter yo papa da other day,” said Jeremiah after we had walked a ways. “I been aroun’ here close on three years an’ you an’ I’s gettin’ older. An’ I figger it’s time we wuz thinkin’ ’bout some things. So I . . . uh, axed yo papa if he thought I wuz da kind er young man he’d approve ob ter be wiff you. And he said I wuz an’ dat he’d be right proud ter call me son. An’ den he shook my hand an’ tol’ me ter talk ter you, an’ so here I am an’ I reckon I’m axin’ if you’d like ter be my wife.”

  My, oh my! He just blurted it out all at once!

  Sometimes you have too many words and they come out so fast you stumble over them. Sometimes you don’t have enough words and you can’t think of anything to say. But this was a time when I had a mountain of words I wanted to say, but couldn’t manage to get a single one out!

  “Of course I want to be your wife, Jeremiah,” I said softly. “I can’t imagine being married to anybody but you. I’m so happy when I’m with you. I love you and . . . I reckon my answer’s yes.”

  Again my mind came back to the present. Jeremiah and I had grown up too!

  “—to have and to hold from this day forward, for better, for worse, for richer, for poorer, in sickness and in health, to love and to cherish, till death do you part, according to God’s holy ordinance?”

  “I do,” said Jeremiah, then glanced at me with a smile.

  And finally he turned to me.

  “Do you, Mary Ann Daniels,” he said, “take this man to be your wedded husband, to have and to hold from this day forward, for better, for worse, for richer, for poorer, in sickness and in health, to love and to cherish, till death do you part, according to God’s holy ordinance?”

  “I do,” I said.

  Reverend Paxton paused briefly, looked at all four of us again, and then went on.

  “Inasmuch as you, Robert, and you, Kathleen, and you, Jeremiah, and you, Mary Ann, have declared before God and these witnesses your wish to be united in marriage, and have pledged love and fidelity each to the other, I now pronounce you—you, Robert and Kathleen, and you, Jeremiah and Mary Ann—man and wife.”

  Jeremiah kissed me as Katie and Rob embraced and kissed.

  “Ladies and gentlemen, please come and greet Mr. and Mrs. Jeremiah Patterson, and Mr. and Mrs. Robert Paxton!”

  Then from everywhere a crowd swooped upon us with hugs and kisses and congratulations.

  Within minutes Mrs. Hammond and Josepha and Aunt Nelda and Mrs. Mueller and Lucindy Eaton were bringing food and drink out of the house to set on several tables and somebody had begun to play lively dance music with a violin. The festive spirit of the day continued.

  It wasn’t just greeting us that went on for the next several hours. Everybody was visiting everyone else too. It was like a reunion of many friends—a whole community gathering. We’d never been at anything like it in Greens Crossing, especially with so many people of different color!

  I was surprised to find out that Mrs. Davidson and Lucindy Eaton were already good friends, and that Lucindy had stayed with the Davidsons during her journey on the Underground Railroad. So too were Mr. Davidson and Mr. Mueller. The only people missing were Micah and Emma, who sent us a telegram. It wasn’t as good as their being there, but it was nice to know they were thinking of us.

  Midway through the afternoon I saw my papa and Mr. Davidson walking off slowly together with their backs to me. They seemed to be in earnest conversation about something. How I would have loved to hear that talk!

  For what seemed an hour I hardly spoke more than a few words to Jeremiah or Katie or Rob because of all the people wanting to talk to us.

  Then came a moment when I bumped into someone behind me. I turned. There was Katie! For a second in the midst of the commotion, we were alone in our new white dresses.

  “Mayme!”

  “Oh, Katie.”

  The next instant we were in each other’s arms and both crying. Again I remembered that first day we’d met and how, not even knowing each other, we had found solace in each other’s embrace. I guess those hugs, then and now, were sort of like bookends, with a whole lot of stories in between.

  “Are you happy, Mayme?” asked Katie as we stepped back and she looked deeply into my eyes.

  “Oh yes!”

  “Me too.”

  “I’m so glad,” I said. “What a wonderful day. Thank you for everything.”

  “We’ll always stay friends . . . promise?”

  “What else would we be—of course!”

  “Marriage won’t change it?”

  “Never. We will always be sisters, cousins, and friends.”

  Katie embraced me again.

  “Have a happy life, Mayme,” she whispered. “I love you.”

  “You too, Katie. I love you too.”

  THE REST OF OUR LIVES

  61

  It was the two men, not Katie and me, who suggested that we spend the first part of our honeymoon together. That afternoon we were accompanied by half the wedding party to the late train through Hanover to Philadelphia, where we had made reservations at a hotel. We spent two days there in Philadelphia, then took the train to New York City and spent four days there sightseeing together. Then Katie and Rob took the train west to Pittsburgh, then on to Cleveland, and finally back home, while Jeremiah and I went north to see Boston before we came back home.

  By the time we arrived, Papa and Uncle Ward were out of Mr. Evans’ main house at New Rosewood and had moved to what was by now known as the Old Farm. Rob and Katie moved into the big house.

  Jeremiah and I moved into the small house, though the men had already begun remodeling it to add two rooms so that it would be big enough for a family.

  Henry had bought ten acres of the property on the western border with good pastureland. He and the other men had already laid the foundation and put up the first walls for what would be Josepha’s new home. In the meantime Henry and Josepha, though they had plenty of invitations to do otherwise, were camping out right there as the new house went up. At the wedding, when news of the building project spread around, Mr. Mueller from Hanover and Caleb Eaton and many of the men from the area joined together and came to help. It wasn’t exactly like a barn raising, but almost. Within two weeks, Henry and Josepha had walls around them and a roof over their heads. There was still a lot to do inside, but they were snug and out of the weather and Josepha was happy as she could be. Henry took a job at the livery in Hanover for a while, but his dream now that he had land to call his own was to raise horses.

  Rob continued to be deputy to John Heyes for another four years, though he helped Papa and Uncle Ward with the crops on the land that still belonged to all four of us. When Heyes retired as assistant sheriff, Rob was offered the job by the county sheriff in York. After that he had too many responsibilities to help on the land as much.

  Jeremiah continued to work in the mill, though he also helped with the crops and animals and other work about the place whenever he could. Gradually we planted less acreage in crops because we didn’t really need to, and besides, we all had our own gardens and livestock to look after.

  Two years after the wedding, Jeremiah and I had a baby girl. We named her Kathleen Ann. She was followed by a boy, Henry Micah, then two more girls, Sephira Ruth and Emmaline Abigail. Josepha was the happiest and most attentive grandmother you could imagine. And my papa and Henry were so proud of their little black grandchildren!

  Rob and Katie had three children, two boys and a girl—Richard Daniels Paxton, Rosalind Mayme Paxton, and David Templeton Paxton.

  My papa and Uncle Ward spent the rest of their lives as men of the earth at the Old Farm. They kept talking about going to California and wrote to Micah and Emma about it, but they never made it. Increasingly they became i
nvolved with Henry and his horses as they got older. Just like in Greens Crossing, everyone called them the Daniels brothers. But unlike in Greens Crossing, everyone loved them.

  Henry finally began to raise and sell horses. He sold half interest in a promising young filly to a trainer in Kentucky, who took the horse to the third running of the Kentucky Derby where she placed third. You should have seen Henry all dapper and dressed for the race, and Josepha in a new expensive dress and widebrimmed hat! They looked like distinguished black aristocrats from some foreign country! Their horses began making money after that, and within a few years their little plot of land, which they called Patterson Acres, became known as a training center. Rich men were always coming and going to get Henry’s advice on horses and training methods. He came to be recognized as one of the region’s most knowledgeable breeders and trainers.

  Jeremiah kept on at the mill. After seven years, when he had worked his way up to assistant foreman, his boss retired and put the mill up for sale. Jeremiah asked if he would have any objection to selling to a black man. The man replied no, saying that Jeremiah was one of his best men. Excitedly, Jeremiah put the matter before his father and Papa and Uncle Ward. Between the three of them, we were able to borrow enough to buy it. Jeremiah didn’t want to make a lot of changes right away until folks got used to the idea of his owning the mill when he was only thirty-one, but after another two years he added a small sign below the main one that said Patterson’s Mill. Jeremiah was so proud of that sign! And gradually that’s what folks called it. He had once told me he’d like to own a livery stable. Now he owned a mill that eventually grew to be bigger even than Mr. Watson’s. Jeremiah was a successful businessman!

  Back in Greens Crossing, Mrs. Hammond finally became a real “Mrs.” when she married Mr. Thurston, who had been a widower for several years. She rented out the apartment above the shop to a single man new to Greens Crossing who also ran the store. She came into town from her new home at Mr. Thurston’s once a week to place orders and keep in touch with the business.

  Sheriff Sam Jenkins was some years later implicated in the hanging of a black man near Charlotte. He and several of his fellow Klansmen were arrested in a temporary wave of anti-violence in Shenandoah County. He did not go to jail, but the scandal cost him the sheriff’s job and he was forced to go to work as a laborer at Watson’s Mill, working alongside two or three black youths half his age.

  With Papa and Uncle Ward gone and not thinking them likely to cause him any trouble, William McSimmons, Jr. eventually ran for Congress to represent North Carolina and won. He and his wife finally realized their dream and spent over twenty years in Washington, where he became a voice in the capital for the new South. Whenever Katie read something about him in the newspaper, she muttered a few angry words and usually threw down the paper in disgust. That’s when she tried to talk Rob into running for office. He only smiled and said that God had given him a work to do and he mustn’t aim too high. Once Katie’s and my story began to become well known, Rob said she ought to run for office instead of him!

  Micah and Emma eventually settled in the small lumber town of Roseburg, Oregon on the Umpqua River. They had five children. After working several years in a lumber mill, Micah was asked to pastor a small black church. His practical spirituality soon drew large numbers of whites and blacks alike, and it became one of the largest congregations in the town. Never a more peaceful and compassionate pastor’s wife had that congregation seen than Emma Duff, whose loving counsel was sought by the women as greatly as was her husband’s wisdom by the men.

  It took several years before we were ready to visit Rosewood again. Of all of us, it was hardest for Katie. She knew how sad it would make her to see the old place again. But by that time our young families were growing and we knew Papa and Uncle Ward would soon be too old for a visit, so we planned a trip back to Shenandoah County. By then the danger to us had passed and Mr. Watson was happy to put us up in the house that had been our home for so long.

  It is impossible to describe the feelings of going back to a place like that after you’ve grown up and been away for a long time. Everything looked the same . . . yet different. The trees and shrubs were bigger, but everything else seemed smaller . . . quieter . . . and for some reason sad. So many memories surfaced. Good and happy memories. Yet they were all tinged with the nostalgic melancholy of long ago.

  Katie and I didn’t talk much when we were at Rosewood. We each had to relive the memories in our own way—Katie walking to her secret place in the woods and finding it overgrown and changed, me riding over to the McSimmons place where no one knew me and all the McSimmons were gone.

  We both walked the fields and along the river . . . took our turns in front of the gravestones that Mr. Watson had kept so nicely groomed, with tears in our eyes . . . rummaged through the barn . . . climbed down into the cellar where Katie had hid on that terrible night and where we’d discovered Uncle Ward’s gold. One day I was standing in one of the upstairs windows and saw Katie in the distance outside, and in my mind’s eye it was almost like she had risen early in the morning and gone out for one final cotton harvest.

  So many memories . . . yet that time was now gone.

  We were now mothers and our own youngsters were scampering about the place without any idea how deep the memories and emotions were inside us. Everywhere those memories were now accompanied by the excited running shouts and laughter of children—our children!

  “Mama . . . look at this!” we each must have heard fifty times during those few days during our visit. The innocent young eyes of childhood—how could they ever know what Katie and I had shared together in that place?

  Then it was time to leave again.

  Rosewood would ever be dear to our hearts. But we had made peace with the past, and now we looked again to the future.

  Our aunt Nelda sold her house in Philadelphia and moved to the Old Farm to take care of her brothers in their advancing years.

  Ward Daniels died at seventy-one in 1885.

  My father, Templeton Daniels, died at seventy-two four years later.

  Aunt Nelda lived on at the homestead, visited every day either by Katie or myself or one of our children or our friends Calebia or Lucindy, until 1898, when, in her seventy-ninth year, she joined her brothers and sister, Katie’s mother.

  Katie cried on and off for days after her aunt’s parting. A generation had passed. Katie was now forty-eight and stood in the front rank of the Daniels and Clairborne lines. That is a sobering thing.

  The three were buried side by side in the Daniels plot on the homestead. That’s when we realized that we wanted something to commemorate our immediate families too. Katie and I had stones made for each of her family who was buried at Rosewood, and each of my family that I had buried at the McSimmons plantation after the massacre in 1865. The bodies would never lie at the Old Farm, but the stones with their names helped us know that they would never be forgotten.

  Jeremiah and Henry were closer than any father and son could be. Henry outlived Josepha by three years. She died at eighty-five; he lived to be eighty-nine and was out with his horses the day before he fell asleep, never to wake up again in this life. I hadn’t seen Jeremiah cry in years, but he wept for the loss of his father.

  Our son Hank and his new wife moved into Henry and Josepha’s place, and Hank continued, in the tradition of his grandfather and namesake, to raise horses.

  After eight years as sheriff, Rob stepped down and began to reassess his future. His father had recently retired from the pulpit and Rob began to feel a renewal of the call of his youth to the pulpit. After much prayer and talk with Katie, he took the pastorate of a small church in Hanover, where he attempted to open minds to the wider possibilities of God’s love—a message readily embraced by many of the Quaker families of the surrounding region.

  As more and more people heard about our story, and as the events of slavery and what came to be called the Civil War faded more distantly into the pas
t, Katie and I received invitations to speak and share our story. At first invitations came from nearby towns and communities. But then we spoke in Baltimore, and then at Aunt Nelda’s church in Philadelphia, and after a while we got invitations from all over, far more than we could accept. It was amazing how many people had heard of us!

  Katie and I kept in touch with Emma by mail through the years. When our children were nearly all grown, we decided to have a new adventure. We were both over fifty. Our hair was graying and I already had three grandchildren and Katie one. We decided to take the train west to Oregon to visit Emma and Micah.

  Who says old people can’t have adventures? We had the time of our lives! Emma was so peaceful and beautiful.

  In 1908 Mr. Watson died, never having married. We received the news first from Elfrida Thurston, then again in an official letter from an attorney in Charlotte, informing us that Herbert Watson of Greens Crossing, Shenandoah County, North Carolina, had in his will left the entire estate known as Rosewood to Kathleen O’Bannon Clairborne Paxton and her heirs, and the assets of the mill known as Watson’s Mill to Jeremiah Patterson and his heirs.

  We were all stunned.

  We sat speechless—Katie and Rob and Jeremiah and I—as Rob set aside the letter he had just read.

  “What will you do, Katie?” I asked finally. “Do you want to go back?”

  Katie smiled and drew in a deep breath.

  “You can’t go back, Mayme,” she said. “Our lives are here now. And goodness, I am fifty-seven. I wouldn’t want to go back. Rob has his ministry here. We have raised our family here. You are here, Jeremiah’s—”

  She stopped and smiled again.

  “I was about to say that Jeremiah’s business is here!” she laughed. “But now that is changed too! Now he has two businesses! This news does make me nostalgic for Rosewood all over again . . . but, no . . . life always moves forward.”

  She looked over at Jeremiah.