A Day to Pick Your Own Cotton

by Michael Phillips

  It went a lot faster with four of us than the last time we’d washed and I’d done all the scrubbing myself. Katie was really learning how to work hard! Every once in a while I’d glance over and think to myself, Is this the same Katie? I hadn’t ever known her mother, but I doubted she could have been a harder worker than Katie when Katie got going.

  We did three loads of different wash, and scrubbed and wrung out and rinsed and wrung out again all morning. By noon there were clothes and sheets and towels and linens and stockings and quilts and aprons and dresses all hanging from the line, and we were almost finished. Our arms were so tired from the scrubbing that they were about ready to fall off! The last of the quilts were so heavy when they got wet, we didn’t scrub them as hard as the rest—we mostly just stirred them around and let them soak in the water, though the wash water was pretty dirty by then too. But we were just getting too tired to scrub them any harder.

  “I’m tired,” said Aleta.

  “Me too, Miz Aleta,” said Emma.

  “And me,” I said, “but we’re almost done.”

  The day was hot by then too, and we were sweating like horses out for a hard ride.

  Katie was just wringing out one of the last work dresses when it fell back into the rinse tub. The water from the splash came up and hit her in the face.

  “Oh, that cold water felt good!” she said.

  Instead of picking it back out, she just stood there for a minute, as if she was too tired to do anything. Then she started to laugh.

  All of a sudden she slammed her hand into the water toward where I was standing on the other side of the tub, sending a big spray of water all over the front of my dress.

  “Katie, what are you doing!” I cried.

  She was laughing all the harder by now. She swatted the water again. I jumped away. Then she picked up a bucket and scooped it half full of water and ran toward me. I saw what she was about to do and tried to run. But it was too late. I felt a flood of water all over my back, followed by a shriek of laughter.

  “Katie,” I yelled, “I can run faster than you!”

  I dashed for the nearest bucket and then back. But as I was dipping it into the rinsing tub, Katie was pouring another bucketful over my head.

  “Ohh!” I exclaimed. “Just you wait!”

  It was cold, but after the first shock it felt good!

  I spun around and there was Katie running across the grass. I went after her with my own bucket of water. I tried to throw it as I ran but only got one of her shoulders wet.

  By now Aleta had a bucket and was chasing us both. I didn’t see her coming, and the next thing I knew water was dripping from my head again.

  “I got you, Mayme!” she cried.

  “Yes, and now I’m gonna get you!” I said, turning and chasing after her.

  She howled in a frenzy of terror and fun and ran away from me. Katie was running to one of the water pumps to fill up her bucket again, and within another minute, an allout water war had begun.

  At first Emma just stood watching, too bewildered at the sight to enter in. Sometimes I wondered if her brain just went a little slower than other folks’. But finally, after laughing at the rest of us, it seemed to dawn on her that she could join us in the fun herself. But I think she was still a little intimidated at the thought of being too free with white folks, so when she finally started splashing water about, it was always toward me. Before long she was running and laughing and shrieking too.

  All four of us were running around back and forth between the clotheslines, the barn, and the house. Within ten minutes we were soaked to the skin from head to foot. But after all the work and the heat of the day, it felt as good as swimming in a creek.

  Pretty soon we were laughing too hard to keep running and were just taking turns pouring buckets of water on each other. Aleta and Emma were laughing as hard as me and Katie.

  Right in the middle of it, as we were standing there dripping and starting to think about going back to finish hanging up the last few things, Aleta interrupted our laughter.

  “There’s somebody coming,” she said.

  NEW WINDOWS

  25

  ALETA’S WORDS QUIETED US ALL IN A BIG HURRY! We looked where Aleta was pointing to see a wagon coming from the road into the yard. It was too late to do anything about it. The man rode up in front of us as we stood there soaking wet, watching him approach.

  He looked down at us with a curious expression. All of our dresses were dripping water down onto the ground. I can’t imagine what he must have thought to see two white girls and two black girls in such a mess. He stared at me a second, then turned back toward Katie.

  “Your mama home, Kathleen?”

  “Uh, no … no, she isn’t,” answered Katie, wiping at her hair, which was dripping down all over her face.

  “I heard you had some broken windows you wanted me to fix.”

  “Oh yes—that’s right. I’ll show you.”

  He got down off the wagon and Katie led him toward the house, her feet squishing in her boots, still trying to wipe her hair back out of her face as she went.

  “You girls look a mess,” the man said.

  “Yes, sir. We were doing the wash and started throwing water at each other.”

  “I can see that,” said the man.

  “Who’s the tall colored girl? Ain’t seen her before. She’s got an uppity look in her face.”

  “She, uh … works for us now,” said Katie. “She used to be a slave.”

  “Yeah, well I reckon a lot of things is changing now for everybody. I didn’t recollect you having a younger sister, Kathleen.”

  “Uh … no, sir,” said Katie and kept walking.

  Aleta and Emma and I gradually started moving back in the direction of the rinse tub, but I was trying to listen to Katie and the window man at the same time.

  “There are the windows, Mr. Krebs,” said Katie, pointing to the four broken ones. “My mama’s not going to be home till later. Can you fix them and she pay you later?”

  “Yeah. Just take me about an hour. I’ll cut the glass and get ’em glazed. I’ll send her a bill.”

  “Thank you, Mr. Krebs,” said Katie. “Well, I guess I should see about the washing.”

  Katie walked back to where we were standing watching.

  “He’s going to fix the windows,” she said, as if it was nothing out of the ordinary.

  We continued with the last of the wash, not saying much now, both Katie and me glancing kinda nervously toward the house every now and then.

  “Emma,” said Katie after a minute, “you’d better go back in and change your clothes and tend to William so he doesn’t start crying.”

  “Yes, Miz Katie.”

  “She can’t go in like that,” I said. “Miss Katie, why don’t you take her around and through the front door so he won’t see her. Aleta and me will finish up here. We can do that, can’t we, Aleta?”

  “Yes,” said Aleta.

  Katie and Emma left, and the man didn’t seem to be paying any attention to us anyway. Katie came back a few minutes later, and it took us about an hour to finish getting the rest of the things hung up on the lines. We were still wearing the wet things we had on. And it felt good in the hot sun. Before we knew it, the man was walking back out toward us.

  “The new windows are in, Kathleen,” he said. “Tell your mama they’re fifty cents apiece. I’ll write it down and leave it with Mrs. Hammond.”

  “Yes, sir,” said Katie. “Thank you, Mr. Krebs.”

  He went back to his wagon and a few minutes later was clattering back down the road toward town. As we watched him leave, Katie turned to me.

  “That wasn’t so hard,” she said with a kind of pleased expression on her face.

  “He didn’t seem to mind that it was just us,” I said. “But we still gotta be careful.”

  Suddenly we heard a splash. We turned, and there was Aleta sitting in the middle of the rinse tub with her clothes all still on.
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  We ran over to her laughing.

  “What are you doing?” laughed Katie.

  “Taking a cold bath,” she said. “It’s so hot, it’s like going swimming.”

  As we watched I had to admit it looked like a pretty good idea at that! Katie was obviously thinking the same thing.

  “I’ll go get the soap from the house,” said Katie. “I want to take a bath too! I’ll wash your hair under the pump, Aleta.—Would you wash mine, Mayme?”

  “If you’ll wash mine!”

  While Aleta was playing and splashing in the water, Katie and I went back inside and got some clean towels and soap and a scrubbing sponge.

  We came back outside, then took off our dresses and took turns getting each other all clean.

  Even with my underclothes still on, that was about the best bath I’d ever had! We got Emma back out, and she and William cleaned up real nice too, though she howled a little at the cold water from the pump on her head and back.

  When we were done, we pulled the stopper from the bottom of the tub and let the water drain, where it ran in a little trough that had been dug from under it out to the field. Since most of our clothes we’d been wearing were hanging on the lines, we put on robes of Katie’s mama’s till the things on the line had started to dry, which didn’t take too long in the heat.

  After that, for most of the rest of the summer, we took cold baths outside almost every day.

  As we were walking back to the house, I realized that Aleta had been listening carefully before when Katie had been talking to the glass man.

  “Where is your mama?” she asked.

  The question took Katie by surprise as much as it did me. She glanced over at me, but all I could do was shrug. I didn’t know what to say.

  “She’s not here,” answered Katie after a bit. “She’s gone for a while.”

  “Where’s she gone?” said Aleta. “Why haven’t I seen her?”

  “She’s gone for a long time, Aleta,” said Katie. “That’s why Mayme and I are here together, and why we have to work so hard.”

  A REQUEST

  26

  IWAS OUT AT THE WOODPILE THE NEXT DAY GETTING ready to chop some firewood when I heard a soft step behind me. I turned, surprised to see Aleta standing there. For an instant I stiffened inside, getting ready for whatever hurtful thing I was about to hear. But then I realized that there was a different, almost timid expression on her face.

  “Mayme,” she said, and her voice was as different as the look on her face. “Would you please tell me another story about Mr. Rabbit and Mr. Fox, like that one you told us a few days ago?”

  “Did you like it?” I asked.

  She nodded. “But I couldn’t understand it very well,” she said. “And I fell asleep before it was done. Why did you talk in such a funny voice when you were telling it?”

  I smiled and put down the ax, then sat down on the chopping block.

  “You want to sit down?” I said.

  Aleta sat down on another piece of wood opposite me.

  “That voice is the way my uncle tells the old stories,” I said. “Miss Katie likes to hear them that way so she’ll know how the stories sounded to me when I was a little girl.”

  “You heard it from your uncle?”

  “Not my real uncle. When I was a slave, we called all old black men uncles. They’re the ones who told the old stories that they’d heard when they were young from the uncles before them.”

  “Were you really a slave, Mayme?”

  “Yes I was, Aleta.”

  “Was it hard?”

  “Real hard.”

  “Why aren’t you a slave now?”

  “ ’Cause some bad men killed my family, and I ran away and came here. Miss Katie … Miss Katie’s family,” I added, feeling a twinge of guilt as I said it, “they took me in and let me stay here and work for them. After that, I found out all the slaves had been set free.”

  “What kind of men were the bad men?” she asked. “Were they white or colored?”

  “They were white men.”

  “My daddy says whites are better than coloreds.”

  “He’ll find out someday that’s not true, Aleta,” I said. “All white folks have to find that out sometime. Where does your daddy live?”

  She shrugged and didn’t answer.

  “Is it far away from here?”

  “Pretty far.”

  “How long had you and your mama ridden before you fell?”

  “I don’t know—maybe an hour.”

  “Was your daddy chasing you?”

  “I think so. Mama kept looking back.”

  “Well, Aleta,” I said, “whites can be just as bad as coloreds. And coloreds can be just as bad as whites—if there’s not love in their heart. That’s what makes folks different, not the color of their skin. Some folks have love in their hearts, others don’t.”

  She was still young, but I think she understood what I’d said. She seemed to be thinking about it anyhow.

  “My daddy doesn’t have love in his heart,” she said.

  I didn’t think I’d ever heard anything so sad for a girl to say about her father. It almost made me cry. I waited a minute, then spoke again.

  “Do you want to hear about Mr. Rabbit now?” I asked.

  “Yes … please!” said Aleta, her eyes gleaming with anticipation.

  “How much did you hear before you fell asleep?”

  “I don’t know, but tell it all, tell it to me from the beginning.”

  From the kitchen porch, Katie had come outside, then paused as she saw us together. She was now watching us sitting at the woodpile talking. She didn’t know what we were talking about, but the softened expression on Aleta’s face brought tears to her eyes.

  QUESTIONS IN TOWN

  27

  KATIE,” I SAID ONE DAY, “NOW THAT THERE’S FIVE of us to feed, I think we oughta start doing something to save the milk. And with summer coming and it getting hot, if there’s a drought, the cows could dry up. So we gotta make sure we’ve got plenty of cheese.”

  “Do you know how to make cheese, Mayme?” she asked.

  “Not really,” I said. “You just boil the milk, I think. I watched my mama and Josepha do it once, but I forget what they did.”

  “I think you’ve got to put something in it to make the milk turn to cheese,” Katie said, then added, “I think my mama’s got a book about it.”

  We went to the pantry and looked around.

  “Here’s the book my mama was always using,” said Katie. She laid it open on the counter and started flipping through it. The book was called The American FrugalHousewife’s Guide to Food Preparation and Preservation.

  “Does it tell about cheese?” I asked.

  “I’m looking … here it is,” said Katie, turning the pages.

  She bent down to read for a minute.

  “It says, ‘Take the inner membrane of the fourth, or digestive stomach of a young mammal living on milk, preferably a young calf—’ ”

  “Ugh!” I said. “How are we going to get a calf ’s stomach!”

  Katie kept reading. “ ‘Dry the stomach lining in salt, then, when needed, soak in water. The resultant liquid will contain the fermented enzyme, rennet, which has the property of curdling milk. For basic cheese preparation, heat three gallons of fresh milk to approximately 140 degrees …’ ”

  She stopped and looked over at me. “How can we make cheese if we don’t have this rennet thing and the calf ’s stomach?” she asked.

  “Now that I think about it,” I said, “I think I remember something about using thistles or nettles too.”

  “We could find plenty of those!” said Katie.

  “But maybe your mama has a dried stomach skin around here someplace.”

  “I don’t even like to think about it! And I haven’t seen anything like that.”

  “I wonder if we could get anything to use at Mrs. Hammond’s store.”

  “I don’t know,” said Kat
ie, looking at the book again and reading to herself. “It also says you need salt and cheesecloth. We forgot to get salt last time we went to town.”

  “Do you have any cheesecloth?”

  “I don’t think so. Maybe we should go to town and see if we can get what we need at the store.”

  Thinking of going into town reminded me of seeing Henry in Oakwood. I told Katie what had happened. “I don’t know if I should go with you,” I said.

  “I could go alone,” said Katie. “I think after last time I could do it alone if I had to.”

  “Or we could go to Oakwood instead.”

  “Then we’d have to pay for it,” said Katie, “and I’d rather put it on my mama’s bill at Mrs. Hammond’s so we don’t use up our money.”

  “But what about Aleta?” I asked.

  “Let me talk to her,” said Katie. “I’ll see what she says to the idea of staying with you.”

  The next morning after the cows were out to pasture, Katie and I got the small buggy hitched up and ready for a trip into town.

  We walked into the house.

  “Aleta,” said Katie. “I need to talk to you for a minute. I have to go into town today. I’ll be gone two or three hours.”

  Aleta stared back at her with a blank expression.

  “Would you mind staying here with Mayme and Emma while I’m gone?” Katie asked.

  Aleta glanced over at me.

  “Would you tell me a story, Mayme?” she said.

  “If you’re nice,” I answered with a smile, “I might even tell you two.”

  “Then I don’t mind staying,” said Aleta.

  “Good,” Katie said, smiling. “I’ll get back as fast as I can.”

  Katie got up and she and I walked outside. Aleta followed us.

  “Is there anything else we need, Mayme?” Katie asked as we went.

  “I was just noticing that we are getting a little low on oats for the horses.”