A FTER BREAKFAST THE NEXT MORNING, WHEN our chores with the cows and pigs and chickens were tended and we had Emma and William taken care of for a spell, we saddled up two horses. Then we set out for a ride around the farm, with Rusty and the other two dogs barking and chasing along with us.
First Katie led me down the sloping hill toward the colored cabins about half a mile from the main house.
“This is where our slaves lived,” she said as we rode up, then slowed to a stop.
We sat on the horses for a few seconds just looking at it. Everything was so quiet. There wasn’t much to say. One colored village looked about the same as any other. This run-down collection of cabins could have been where I lived, or where any slaves lived. I had the feeling Katie was seeing it through different eyes now, after being to where I’d lived. It was probably hard for her to think that these shacks had once been people’s homes, people just like me, people that her own daddy had owned and who he had likely treated no better than my master had treated us.
Both of us were looking at the world through different eyes than we had just a short time before. Just the fact of slavery was dawning on Katie more than ever, I think. And I was seeing things different too, ’cause now I wasn’t living in a place like this anymore.
After a while we continued on.
“That field there,” Katie said, pointing to the right, to a stretch of land behind the cabins. “I know that’s our main cotton field.”
I looked where she was pointing. The field was full of growing cotton. It was just like our cotton fields, and I had hated them. The field was getting full of weeds between the rows too, now that there was no one to hoe and cut them down. How many hours had I spent in fields just like this, from when I was so young I could hardly remember.
“I’m not sure about the one beyond it, over past those trees. But those woods over there,” she said, “that’s my secret place. I don’t think any of our fields are past it. I don’t remember ever seeing our slaves or mama going out past there.”
We rode on to the second field Katie had pointed to beyond the one growing with cotton. It took us about five minutes to get there. It was full of stalks of green that were about three feet high by now. I figured it was probably wheat.
We kept riding to the left, in the opposite direction from Katie’s woods. We crossed a little stream and then came to the river and passed along its bank on our right, which Katie said was one edge of Rosewood’s boundary.
We crossed over the road leading toward town and gradually made a great big circle going to the left all the time. As we went Katie showed me several other fields—some large, some small—all with crops growing in them, mostly cotton.
“I think I remember seeing our slaves working here,” she said. “And over there I went with my mama once when she had to talk to Mathias.”
“That’s corn there,” I said. “We could pick that easy enough when it’s ripe and have plenty to eat for a long time.”
“What’s that growing there?” asked Katie, pointing off in another direction.
“I ain’t sure,” I said. “I don’t recognize it, though it might be tobacco. Your mama and daddy have a tobacco drying barn?”
“I don’t think so. You mean a barn different than for cows?”
I nodded. “I reckon you’d know if you had one. I ain’t seen anything that looks like one. It must be something else.
Or maybe this field belongs to someone else.”
That thought seemed to startle Katie and the two of us looked around, half expecting to see someone staring at us, wondering what two girls—and one of them colored—were doing in his field. But we saw no one.
Eventually we came back behind the house from the opposite direction from where we’d started by the road leading to Mr. Thurston’s.
“That’s one of the other fields where we take the cows,” said Katie, pointing off toward our right.
“The grass is getting tall,” I said. “Doesn’t look like it’s been grazed for quite a spell. We’ll bring them over here tomorrow.”
We got back to the house and walked around there. I wanted to see everything else I hadn’t noticed or paid attention to before.
A well house sat to one side of the barn, though with the pump inside the kitchen, we only used the pump there to keep water in the troughs for the pigs and cows and horses. There were two wooden troughs connected to each other but angling off into two different directions, one that the pigs could get to from their fenced-in pen, the other for the horses and cattle at the edge of the pasture that sat next to the barn. When the cattle were out grazing in the fields for the day, they drank from the stream that ran through it, the same stream that went through Katie’s woods on its way to the river.
Besides the well house, there were several other little wood buildings and sheds I hadn’t paid much attention to—a tool house, a gardening shed, the smoke house, and a little shed that sat on top of the ice cellar. Besides the main big barn, there was a smaller barn that housed more tools and equipment and the blacksmith shop. Connected to the main barn were the stables for the horses. The horses came in and out by themselves, usually staying out in the field that the stables opened to when it was sunny, and coming in under cover of the stables and barn when it rained. The horses took care of themselves pretty much, though we fed them oats every day.
There was so much equipment, and so many different parts to the plantation that neither of us knew about, I didn’t see how we could ever make it seem like things were really normal.