LATER THAT DAY, AFTER HEARING HER STORY, I got to feeling real guilty for being so hard on Emma when she’d first come. She was in the same fix as I had been. I was glad Katie’d taken her in and was ashamed of how I’d behaved. But all that was behind us now.
“How’s you gwine make dis place look right, Mayme?” asked Emma that evening when we got back around to talking about what to do next.
“I don’t know,” I answered. “First thing, we gotta clean everything up so it looks more tidy—the junk that’s around, the weeds in the garden.”
“Elvia used to weed the garden,” said Katie.
“All right, that’s good,” I said. “And you gotta try to think back to other things your mama and the others did. We gotta do things to make the house look lived in too, like making sure a fire’s always burning. On warm days we don’t even build a fire. But maybe we should have one burning every day so there’s smoke coming from the chimney. And the slave cabins all looked deserted too.”
“But no one’s there. How can we make it look any different?”
“I don’t know, maybe building a fire there too, so it’ll look like somebody’s cooking.”
“Just build a fire for no reason—we can’t do that every day.”
“Why not?”
“It seems like a waste of time.”
“Not if Mrs. Hammond comes again, and it keeps her from getting too nosy.”
“Who’s Miz Hammond?” asked Emma.
“A busybody white lady from town,” I answered. “She’s a suspicious type who we don’t want asking too many questions.”
“I don’t think she’ll come again, Mayme,” Katie put in.
“But she might. Didn’t you see how she was looking at us when we were in her store? She was mighty curious, I know that much. And she didn’t like me no how.”
“I don’t think she likes anyone who’s black.”
“That’s all the more reason we gotta be careful. You never know about somebody like that.”
“Then we’ll put clothes out on the line to dry and maybe have a horse tied in front … I don’t know, Miss Katie. It was your idea to pretend to make the plantation look like your mama and the slaves were still here. And I’m telling you it looks mighty deserted. So we gotta find things to do to start pretending, like you said that night you thought of it.” Katie was quiet a few minutes.
“You’re right, Mayme,” she said, starting to look around herself. “I hadn’t realized how much work it would be. We’ll have to start doing those things every day.”
“What else do we needs ter be doin’?” said Emma, already starting to think herself one of us and getting excited too as she began to catch on to Katie’s scheme. “I kin help. Please let me help!”
“You need to get yourself strong again,” said Katie, “and take care of William,” she added, nodding to the little bundle asleep in her lap. “When the time comes, you’ll get to do plenty of work around here—won’t she, Mayme?”
“I reckon so,” I said, smiling over at Emma. “Don’t you worry none, girl—there’s gonna be plenty for us all to do.”
“I kin work, Miz Mayme. I’ll work real hard!”
I turned again to Katie.
“You lived here with your mama, Miss Katie,” I said. “You know what it was like. So you have to remember the things we need to do.”
“I’ll try, Mayme.”
“We’re gonna have to go into town again too. We’re gonna need things, and we need to keep Mrs. Hammond thinking that everything’s normal.”
“The first thing I’ll start doing is to weed the flower garden,” said Katie. “I’ll do that today.”
“And I’ll clean up the broken dishes. You’ll have to show me where you put the garbage.”
The next day we both worked pretty hard. Emma tried to help some but was mostly in the way, pestering us with her scatterbrained talk all the time. I must admit, she tried my patience! But we were a little excited now that we had a plan and knew what we needed to do. It wasn’t much, but even by the end of that day I thought the outside looked a little tidier, and Katie had made the flower garden look real nice.
Every once in a while the old Katie would suddenly erupt from out of nowhere.
“I hate all this work and this dirt and sweat!” she burst out once in the middle of the afternoon.
Usually I didn’t say anything and she’d calm down and remember that everything was different now, and then slowly start in working again. Or she’d take a look at Emma and then she’d realize that we had a new mama and her little baby to take care of and that was even bigger and more important than just keeping Rosewood functioning.
It had to be a lot harder for the other two than it was for me. I’d had to work hard all my life. But tragic circumstances had thrown us together, even though we were from two different worlds—maybe even three different worlds—and now we had to learn to survive together. As Katie seemed to recognize the fix we were in, knowing that we had to depend on each other and help each other, she’d seemed to grow up again all of a sudden, like she had when Emma had come and William had been born. She was turning into a grown-up girl who was ready to take charge.
We were tired by the end of the day. But as we worked and talked, more ideas kept coming to us. Pretty soon I found myself thinking that maybe we could make Katie’s plan work after all.