A Day to Pick Your Own Cotton

by Michael Phillips

  ALONE WITH MY THOUGHTS

  31

  THE SUMMER WENT BY AND SOMEHOW WE MANAGED to survive and no one bothered us. Though the work was hard sometimes, it wasn’t anything like it used to be for me, and we had enough of a routine by then that the days seemed almost normal. Working hard as a free person was a lot different than working as a slave.

  “Katie,” I asked one morning, “what day is today?”

  “Uh, Tuesday, I think,” she said.

  “I mean the number of the day.”

  “You mean the date,” she said and went and looked at the calendar.

  We hadn’t paid that much attention to the days and weeks, and I hardly knew how to read a calendar. Mostly we’d been keeping some track of the time by getting newspapers once in a while, but Katie had only been into town twice more.

  “It’s August twenty-second, Mayme,” said Katie. “That is, if it’s Tuesday.”

  I smiled.

  “Tomorrow’s my birthday,” I said.

  “Mayme, why didn’t you tell me? How old are you going to be?”

  “Sixteen.”

  “That’s old, Mayme. You’re practically a grown-up!”

  I laughed.

  “You’re a year older than me again,” she said.

  “Not a whole year.”

  “Well, it sounds like a year.—We will make you a cake.”

  “You don’t have to do that.”

  “I want to! We’ll have a party and dance and sing again. Let’s teach Aleta the slave songs!”

  I laughed to hear Katie getting all excited.

  “Do you think she’ll sing them?” I asked.

  “She likes you now, Mayme. She just had a daddy that didn’t understand about black people. But she’s getting over it.”

  “She’s still a mite distant from Emma.”

  “That’s true, but Emma’s different from you, Mayme. It’s funny to think that she was a house slave, but you weren’t, when you seem to know a lot more than she does. I thought house slaves were usually the smartest.”

  “Not necessarily,” I said. “Sometimes it was all because of looks or manners—they’d put slaves in houses that were lighter in skin color or were the prettiest. I know my skin ain’t so dark as some, but I sure ain’t pretty.”

  “I think you are, Mayme.”

  “That’s nice of you to say, Katie, but most white folks aren’t of the same mind when they look at me.”

  Telling Katie I had a birthday coming was all she needed. She ran off to tell Emma and Aleta what she’d found out and what she wanted to do. For the rest of that day, she and the other two had all kinds of secrets. Katie would tell me to stay out of the kitchen, and then I’d see her running upstairs and she’d glance at me and giggle and tell me to mind my own business.

  I began to wish I’d never said anything about my birthday!

  When I woke up the next morning, I heard Katie already downstairs. I got dressed and went down. Aleta was still asleep, and Emma sat in a chair nursing William and watching Katie.

  “Good morning, Katie,” I said as I walked into the kitchen.

  “Happy birthday, Mayme!” she said, glancing toward me from the counter, where her hands were full of flour. “I’m starting on your cake. I hope it won’t be a flop.”

  “Happy birf ’day, Miz Mayme.”

  “Thank you, Emma.”

  “Are you sure you don’t want any help?” I asked.

  “But it’s your birthday cake!” she laughed.

  “I can still help.”

  Then Katie got a serious expression on her face and looked at me, still stirring the batter.

  “You’ve done so much for me, Mayme,” she said. “I want to see if I can do this for you all by myself. I know it’s only a cake, but there aren’t many ways to show you how grateful I am. So maybe this is something I can do that will mean more than just being a cake.”

  Her words warmed my heart so much!

  “I understand, Katie,” I nodded. “That’s real nice of you to say. I’ll look forward to it. But you won’t make me eat it all by myself, will you? You’re going to share it with me?”

  “Oh yes! I’ll make it, but we will all eat it!”

  I went outside. It was still early. The sun was up and it was already warm, but it was that early morning kind of quiet. I took in a deep lungful of the warm air and looked around.

  I thought I’d like to go on a walk, a birthday walk, just to be alone for a while. I went back inside.

  “Katie,” I said, “would you mind if I went to your special place in the woods?”

  “Oh no, Mayme. I would like you to go there.”

  “Thank you,” I said.

  “That will be my birthday present to you,” said Katie. “From now on it will be your special place too.”

  I went back outside and walked slowly to the woods.

  Everything felt so fresh early in the morning like this. Even the woods felt different. There was still dew on the grass. Some of the pine trees were so wet that drops of water dangled from their needle tips, waiting to fall. Birds were everywhere in the trees, chirping and singing. I saw one little rabbit scamper by in the distance. Then I remembered how Katie said animals came to her secret place more at night and in the early morning than any other time. So as I crept through the trees, I tried to be real quiet.

  I got to the opening into the little meadow, tiptoeing as softly as I could.

  There was a deer standing drinking from the stream!

  And the raccoon Katie had told me about was a little ways behind it, walking slowly across the grass!

  I stood there watching, not making a sound.

  Black folks loved to catch raccoons to eat. But I couldn’t imagine eating either of those two beautiful creatures.

  As I watched, the raccoon ambled off and into the woods with his hind end up in the air and wobbling back and forth.

  After another minute the deer raised his head. I don’t know how, but he seemed to sense that I was there. He looked toward me and just stood. For a minute it almost felt as if our eyes were seeing into each other. He didn’t make a sound or twitch a muscle for the longest time. Then all of a sudden he bounded away and was gone.

  I sat down on one of the big rocks and started thinking. This was my first birthday without my family. Maybe Katie was right in what she said about me growing up. Of course, no one grows up on one day more than any other. Just because this day was August twenty-third didn’t mean I would do more growing than I had yesterday. But birthdays help you look at yourself every year and kinda take stock of where you’ve come from.

  More important, I reckon, they give you a chance to ask yourself where you’re going.

  So many changes had come in my life in the last few months—both bad and good, I reckon—that I couldn’t help getting confused every now and then about just who I was … who I was supposed to be. Just a few months ago I’d been a black slave girl worried about getting sold or whipped or bedded down by some boy a few years older than me. All of a sudden my whole family was dead, I wasn’t a slave anymore, and I was living with a white girl, trying to pretend we were running a white man’s plantation.

  That’s a lot of changes in a big hurry!

  But deep down inside, was I still the same person? I felt the same in some ways … but different in others.

  Who was I anyway? What did the words Mary Ann Jukes really mean? If sometime after I was dead and gone, somebody heard that name, what would they think? What kind of person would they say Mayme Jukes had been?

  For the first time in my life, I had to try to figure out who I was apart from my parents and my brothers and sisters, apart from Master McSimmons, even apart from Katie … who was I just for myself? I guess Katie and I had to think about that more than most folks. I figure it’s something everybody’s gotta face sometime in their life—who they are. But me and Katie got put in a situation where we had to think about it sooner than most. I don’t know if Katie was
thinking of such things yet. But then I was a little older, so I figured I oughta be thinking about them sooner.

  Then it occurred to me that maybe when you’re trying to figure out who you are and what your life means, it’s not enough to ask it just for yourself. There was one person who would always be with you no matter what happened. Even if everybody else in the world deserted you, or even died, He’d still be with you.

  That person was God.

  So maybe when a body was trying to figure out who they were and what their life meant, He was the one to ask to help figure it out.

  “God,” I said quietly. “What is going to become of me? What kind of person do you want me to be? Who do you want me to be down inside?”

  I drew in a deep breath in the quiet morning and kept staring into the stream as it gurgled and trickled past me.

  Then the thought came to me, and I don’t know if it was an answer to the question I had just asked or not. But what came into my mind were the words, I want you to be my daughter. That’s the kind of person I want you to be. And I want to share your life with you.

  I remembered hearing some of the excitable colored preachers talking about the voice of the Lord calling out from heaven. Whenever I heard them talk that way it always made me a little afraid. I thought it would be like thunder or lightning or something.

  But if God had just spoken to me as I sat there in the woods, it wasn’t anything like that. It had been soft and still, the kind of voice I probably wouldn’t have heard unless I was being real quiet myself. It reminded me of the early morning when I felt God telling me to stay at Rosewood.

  And it felt good inside.

  A SPECIAL BIRTHDAY

  32

  WHEN I GOT BACK TO THE HOUSE, I’D PROBABLY been gone an hour. Katie was still in the kitchen and was just pouring the cake into the pan to bake.

  “I’ll go get started on the cows,” I said.

  “I’ll be out to help in a few minutes,” said Katie.

  Most of the rest of the morning went pretty normal. Katie had made a stew and was roasting sweet potatoes from the root cellar to go with the cake. She wouldn’t let me help with any of it, though she asked me a few questions about what to do now and then.

  We ate early in the afternoon and then had the cake. Katie had made sugar icing to spread all over the top of it, and had written the words Mary Ann Jukes in a thin line of brown molasses over the top of it. It was real good too! I ate so much I thought I would pop. Besides the cake, Katie had made candy.

  “They’re called molasses chews,” she said as I ate one and got it stuck in my teeth. “It’s heated molasses and butter. Emma and I made them yesterday. That’s why we had to keep you out of the kitchen.”

  “You helped make these, Emma?” I asked.

  “Dat I did, Miz Mayme,” replied Emma proudly.

  “Well, thank you—they’re really good.”

  “Now, stay right here,” said Katie. “I’ll go get your present!”

  She jumped up from the table and ran upstairs and came back a minute later.

  She handed me a little box. I shook it and heard a jingling sound. I opened it, and it was full of coins.

  “But … this looks like a lot of money!”

  “It’s only a dollar,” said Katie. “You enjoyed buying that handkerchief so much, I wanted you to have enough that you could buy yourself a really special birthday gift, either at Mrs. Hammond’s or that same store where you got your handkerchief.”

  “But … a dollar!” I said. “You only had a dollar and thirty-seven cents left over from Mrs. Hammond’s. You can’t give me this much.”

  “And the ten dollars from the bank, Mayme. We’ve got lots of that left.”

  “I found some more money in the cigar box in the pantry,” she said. “I don’t know why I didn’t think to look there sooner. There was a little over two dollars in it.”

  “That’s still not enough to pay back what you owe that man at the bank.”

  “I want you to have this,” Katie insisted. “I want you to get something nice with it. You are free now, and so you deserve to have some money of your very own.”

  I sat staring down at the little pile of coins in my hand.

  “Do you think …” I began, then hesitated.

  “Do you know what I’d like more than anything?” I said again. “I’d like to put this money in the bank. Do you think they’d let me open a bank account of my own?”

  “I don’t see why not,” said Katie.

  “That would make me feel real proud, like a real person, not a slave.”

  “I think it’s a good idea, Mayme.—I have something else for you too,” said Katie.

  She got up again and went to the bookcase. She pulled a sheet of paper out of a book where she’d hidden it. She came back with a serious look on her face.

  “I wrote a poem for you,” said Katie. Her voice was quiet now as she handed me the paper.

  This is what I read:

  “To My Friend.

  May I tell you of something that is better than gold?

  It will still be with you long after you’re old.

  It’s a treasure that increases the more of it you spend.

  I’m speaking, of course, of love for a friend.

  When you discover that treasure, what will you find?

  If you’re seeking true friendship, look for this kind:

  A friend is someone who knows about you what you yourself don’t know.

  A friend sees your faults and still likes you, and helps you grow.

  A friend is someone you can talk to about things you wouldn’t tell another soul.

  A friend is someone you like to be with because they make you feel whole.

  A friend is someone you can laugh with, cry with, and is always true.

  A friend is someone you know who loves you, and that you love too.

  Now let me tell you about my special friend,

  Who came and helped my heart’s grief to mend.

  She lifted my spirits, though our past lives were dead,

  Now we’re trying, like sisters, to look ahead.

  When He sent this wonderful person to me,

  God gave me a gift that turned I into we.

  If I had the riches of the whole world to spend,

  It wouldn’t compare with having you for my friend.”

  I was crying long before I finished reading it.

  “Thank you, Katie,” I said. “That’s the most beautiful thing anybody’s ever said to me in my life. I won’t ever forget this.”

  It was quiet a minute. I sniffed a few times and wiped my eyes. The next voice I heard took me by surprise.

  “I don’t have anything that nice to give you, Mayme,” said Aleta softly. “But I made you this.”

  She now handed me a paper too, with a pencil picture on it. It was of four girls walking along, two white, two black. They were all holding hands. On the bottom it said, Four Sisters.

  “Did you draw this, Aleta?” I asked.

  “Yes. I made it for you, Mayme.”

  “Oh, Aleta—thank you,” I said. “It’s wonderful. It is just as special to me as Katie’s poem. In fact, I think they should always stay together, don’t you? You have made a picture of what the poem says.”

  “I’m sorry I was mean to you before,” said Aleta, looking into my eyes and then starting to cry. “Katie was right,” she said. “You are nice.”

  I opened my arms and she came to me and we held each 206 other for a minute.

  Katie looked away, tears filling her eyes.

  “I din’t make you nuthin’, Miz Mayme,” said Emma. “I’m sorry. I don’ know how ter make nuthin’ wiff my hands like Miz Katie an’ Miz Aleta does.”

  “What are you talking about, Emma?” I said. “You made me that delicious candy. That was a wonderful present.”

  “Dat’s right, I guess I did at dat.”

  “And maybe I’ll just ask you to make me some more when it’s gone
!”

  “Oh, I kin do dat!” said Emma with a big smile of pride. “I’s make you mo as soon as dat’s all gone.”

  Slowly Katie got up and went to the piano and began playing quietly. Pretty soon she was softly singing.

  “How dear to my heart are the scenes of my childhood,

  when fond recollection presents them to view.”

  Aleta and I smiled at each other, wiped our eyes, and walked over and stood by the piano as Katie continued to sing. Pretty soon Emma was humming softly and rocking William gently in her arms where she stood.

  “The orchard, the meadow, the deep tangled wildwood,

  and every love spot which my infancy knew.

  The wide spreading pond, and the mill that stood by it.

  The bridge and the rock where the cataract fell.

  The cot of my father, the dairy house nigh it,

  and e’en the rude bucket that hung in the well.

  The old oaken bucket, the ironbound bucket.

  The moss covered bucket that hung in the well.”

  The nostalgic tune made us all quiet for a few seconds as the music and Katie’s voice faded away. But Aleta was full of energy and immediately clamored for another song.

  This time Katie started playing fast and lively.

  “I come from Alabama with my banjo on my knee,

  I’m g’wan to Lousiana, my true love for to see.”

  “Sing with me, Aleta!” she said.

  “Oh, Susanna, oh, don’t you cry for me.

  I’ve come from Alabama with my banjo on my knee.

  It rained all night the day I left, the weather it was dry.

  The sun so hot I froze to death, Susanna, don’t you cry.”

  Now Aleta and I joined in.

  “Oh, Susanna, oh, don’t you cry for me.

  I’ve come from Alabama with my banjo on my knee.”

  “That’s silly!” laughed Aleta when the song ended.

  “It’s not supposed to make sense,” said Katie. “You teach us one now, Mayme.”