sunset.
“What you mean?”
“When this is all done.”
“When what is all done?”
“When this war is over. And the Negro is free.”
“Well, I’ll likely be a ...” I didn’t know what to say, for I weren’t thinking of the whole bit succeeding. Running to freedom up north was easier, but I had no absolute plans on it that very moment, for setting with her made every minute feel joyous, and time passed quickly and all my plans for the future seemed far off and not important. So I said, “I’ll likely buy a fiddle and sing songs the rest of my life. For I enjoys music.”
“Henrietta!” she scolded naughtily. “You never allowed you can sing.”
“Why, you has never asked.”
“Well, sing for me then.”
I sung for her “Dixie” and “When the Coons Go Marching Home.”
We was setting on a swinging bench that the Old Man set up, hung from the ceiling, and as I sat next to her and throwed my singing at her, her face softened, her whole body seemed to grow soft as a marshmallow, settling in that swinging chair, listening. “You sing beautiful,” she said. “But I don’t favor them rebel songs. Sing a religious song. Something for the Lord.”
So I sang “Keeping His Bread” and “Nearer, My God, to Thee.”
Well, that done her in. She got just dumbstruck happy by them songs. They buttered her up to privilege, practically. She set there swinging back and forth, looking righteously spent, and soft as biscuit dough, her eyes looking moist and dewy. She squirmed a little closer to me.
“Gosh, that is beautiful,” she said. “Oh, I do so love the Lord. Sing another.”
So I sang “Love Is a Twilight Star” and “Sally Got a Furry Pie for Me,” which is an old rebel song from back in Kansas, but I changed “furry pie” to “johnnycake,” and that just cleaned her up. Knocked her out. She got right syrupy, and her brown eyes—by God, them things was pretty as stars and big as quarters—set upon me and she put her arm around me on that bench and looked at me with them big eyes that liked to suck my insides out, and said, “Why, that is the most beautiful song I have ever heard in my life. It just makes my heart flutter. Would that you was a boy, Henrietta. Why, I’d marry you!” And she kissed me on the cheek.
Well, that just ruint my oats, her grazing on me like that, and I made it my purpose right then and there to never go near her again, for I was a fool for her, just a fool, and I knowed no good was gonna come of them feelings.
It was a good thing the Old Man set Annie on the porch as lookout, for a constant source of trouble lived just down the road, and was it not for Annie, we’d have been discovered right off. As it was, it set the whole caboodle off in the worst way. And as usual, it was a woman behind it.
Her name was Mrs. Huffmaster, a bit of trouble that Becky had mentioned. She was a barefoot, nosy, dirty-to-the-corn white woman who walked the road with three snot-nosed, biscuit-eating, cob-headed children, poking her nose in every yard but her own. She wandered that road before our headquarters every day, and it weren’t long before she invited herself onto the front porch.
Annie normally seen her through the window and dived for the door just before Mrs. Huffmaster could get to the porch so she could hold her out there. Annie told Mrs. Huffmaster and the neighbors that her Pa and Cook runned his mining business on the other side of the valley, which was the excuse for them renting the old farm. But that didn’t satisfy that old hag, for she was a nosybody who gobbled up gossip. One morning Mrs. Huffmaster slipped up onto the porch before Annie seen her and knocked on the door, aiming to push it open and step inside. Annie spied her at the last second through the window just as Mrs. Huffmaster’s foot hit the porch deck, and she leaned on the door, pinning it shut. It was a good thing, too, for Tidd and Kagi had just unpacked a carton of Sharps rifles and primers, and had Mrs. Huffmaster walked in, she would have stumbled over enough rifles and cartridges laying on the floor to pack a troop of U.S. Cavalry. Annie kept the door shut as Mrs. Huffmaster pushed against it, while me, Kagi, and Tidd scampered around, putting them guns back in the crate.
“Annie is that you?” the old hag said.
“I’m not proper, Mrs. Huffmaster,” Annie said. Her face was white as a sheet.
“What’s the matter with this door?”
“I will be right out,” Annie sang.
After a few hot minutes, we got them things put up and Annie slipped out the door, pulling me along with her for support, keeping the woman on the porch.
“Mrs. Huffmaster, we is not prepared for guests,” she said, fluffing herself and setting in her bench on the porch, pulling me next to her. “Would you like some lemonade? I’ll be happy to get you some.”
“Ain’t thirsty,” Mrs. Huffmaster said. She had the face of a horse after eating. She looked around, trying to peek in the window. She smelled a rat.
There was fifteen men setting in that house upstairs, quiet as mice. They never went out during the day, only at night, and they set there in silence while Annie chewed the fat and run that nosybody off. Still, that woman knowed something was up, and from that day forward, she made it her business to stop off at the house anytime. She lived just down the road, and made it known that Cook had already got her dander up by romancing one of the neighbors’ daughters, who her brother had expected to marry. She took that as an affront of some kind, and made it her business to come by the house each day at different times, with her ragged, barefoot, dirty children trailing behind her like ducklings, poking her nose around and picking at Annie. She was a rough, uncouth woman who belonged more in Kansas Territory than back east. She constantly picked on Annie, who was refined and sweet and pretty as a peeled onion. Annie knowed it weren’t her business to ruffle that woman’s feathers in any way, so she took it standing up, calm as lettuce.
It got so that each afternoon at some point Mrs. Huffmaster would stomp onto the front porch where Annie and I sat and bark out, “What is you doin’ today?” and “Where’s my pie?” Just straight out bullying and poking. One morning she stomped up there and said, “That is a lot of shirts you is hanging out on your back line there.”
“Yes, ma’am,” Annie said. “My Pa and brothers has a host of shirts. Changes ’em twice a week, sometimes more. Keeps my hands busy all day washing ’em. Ain’t that horrible?”
“’Deed it is, especially when but one shirt will serve my husband two or three weeks. How you get so many shirts?”
“Oh, by and by. My father bought them.”
“And what does he do again?”
“Why, he’s a miner, Mrs. Huffmaster. And there’s a couple of his workers live here, work for him. You know that.”
“And by the way, where is your Pa and them digging again?”
“Oh, I don’t ask their business,” Annie said.
“And your Mr. Cook sure do have a way with girls, being that he romanced Mary up the road. Does he work in the mine, too?”
“I reckon he does.”
“Then why’s he working the tavern down at the Ferry?”
“I don’t know all his business, Mrs. Huffmaster. But he is a dandy talker,” Annie said. “Maybe he got two jobs. One talking and one digging.”
And on and on it went. Time and again Mrs. Huffmaster invited herself inside the house, and each time Annie would put her off by saying, “Oh, I can’t finish cooking yet,” or point to me and say, “Oh, Henrietta here is ’bout to take a bath,” or some such thing. But that lady was moved to devilment. After a while she stopped being friendly altogether, and her questions took on a different tone. “Who is the nigger?” she said to Annie one afternoon when she come upon me and Annie setting out reading the Bible and conversating.
“Why, that’s Henrietta, Mrs. Huffmaster. She’s a member of the family.”
“A slave or free?”
“Why, she’s a ...” and Annie didn’t know what to say, so I said, “Why, I’m in bondage, missus. But a happier person in this world you cannot find.”
She glared at me and said, “I didn’t ask if you was happy.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
