WHEN WE GOT BACK TO KATIE’S MAMA AND papa’s house, Emma was in a fix of excitement and worry waiting for us. We’d been talking excitedly and laughing all the way back from town. Having Emma running outside the moment she saw us, going on and on about how she thought we were never going to come back, reminded us right quick that no matter how much we might have fooled Mrs. Hammond, we still had problems of our own right here.
By then we were tired and hungry. We went inside and sat down and tried to eat something while Emma kept talking without taking a breath.
“William was fussin’ real bad, Miz Katie,” she said. “I cudn’t git him ter stop no how.”
“What did you do?” asked Katie, speaking softly to calm her down.
“I fed him, Miz Katie, an’ den he went ter sleep, but I thought you was neber gwine git back.”
“Well, we’re back now, Emma,” said Katie. “And we won’t have to go back into town again for a good while yet.”
After we’d had something to eat and drink, we set to unloading the supplies and taking care of the buggy and horses.
“We gotta start making plans, Miss Katie,” I said later that day.
“What kind of plans?” she asked.
“We gotta figure this whole thing out and decide what’s to be done. We can’t do everything around here, so we gotta decide just what we can do and what we should do, which fields to tend and which parts of your mama’s plantation to keep up.”
“But I don’t know anything about tending fields, Mayme.”
“I do. I been working in the fields since I was eight. But besides the fields, we gotta tend to other stuff to make it look like your mama’s still running the place.”
“Like what kind of other stuff?”
“You gotta try to think back to everything your mama did.”
“All right, I see what you mean.”
“So tomorrow, Miss Katie,” I said, “here’s what I think we oughta do … that is, if it’s to your liking. I don’t want to tell you what to do, but—”
“Mayme, please don’t talk like that,” interrupted Katie. “I could never do any of this without you. I’ve told you that before. You’re smart, Mayme, just like I told Mrs. Hammond. You have more common sense than me.”
“You been showing a heap more smarts about Emma than me.”
“I don’t know—we’ll help her out together. But I don’t know what to do about so many things. So I want you to just keep saying what you think and telling me what we ought to be doing.”
“But it’s your plantation, Miss Katie. I don’t wanna be presuming too much and—”
“For now, Mayme, it’s our plantation … yours and mine.”
“That can’t hardly be, Miss Katie.”
“If it’s mine, like you say, then right now I’m giving half of it to you.”
Her words silenced me on the spot. I didn’t know what to say.
“All … all right, then, Miss Katie,” I said, fumbling for words. “If that’s the way you want it, I don’t reckon I can keep arguing with you.”
“It is the way I want it, Mayme. So what were you getting ready to tell me?”
“What I was gonna say a minute ago is that I think you oughta show me all around to everything. We’ll saddle a couple of horses, and then we’ll ride everywhere and you can show me your mama’s plantation.”
“Our plantation now.”
“All right, then, our plantation … the fields, the slave cabins, what’s growing where … everything.”
“I don’t know if I know where it all is, or exactly which fields were my mama and daddy’s.”
“Well, do the best you can, and probably you’ll remember as you go places where you saw your papa or his slaves working at one time or another. But we gotta try to figure out what’s yours and what we oughta do with it.”