“As I said earlier, I trust your devious brain is working through a way out of this pickle. This town is terrifying.”
I set off toward the church, Katherine yapping all the while. I ain’t sure what to expect in Summerland’s house of the Lord. Nothing good, though. Even under the best of circumstances me and preachers don’t mix so well. And these circumstances ain’t anywhere near the neighborhood of good. Katherine and I both stink to high heaven, and I can’t expect that a man of God will want to tolerate our stench any more than we do.
As we walk, Katherine’s voice is getting more and more hysterical. “There’s a separate shopping day for Negroes, I have been called a darkie at least four times today, and I’m pretty sure that Bob called us animals.”
“Bill.”
“What?”
I sigh. “That fella’s name was Bill. Bob was the other one. And you’re a white woman now, so don’t get your knickers in a twist whenever someone says something about Negroes. You’re supposed to enjoy talking down to colored folks.”
Katherine stops and puts her hands on her hips. I pause as well, half turning toward her. Her lips are pursed with displeasure. “How on earth am I supposed to live a lie, one that will surely end up with me dead if anyone discovers the truth?”
I don’t say anything, because she’s right. A couple of years ago a Baltimore shopkeeper named Rusty Barnes was discovered to be a Negro who’d been passing as a white man. A mob looted his shop and burned it to the ground. They would’ve killed Rusty as well if Jackson and I hadn’t managed to sneak him out of the county. There’s nothing white folks hate more than realizing they accidentally treated a Negro like a person.
“Well,” I say after a long pause, “you let me worry about that. We’re in this together, whether you like it or not.” Katherine rolls her eyes, but she keeps up with me when I start walking again. Time to change the subject. “I ever tell you about the garden back at Rose Hill?”
Katherine shades her eyes as she looks at me. “Jane, what are you going on about?”
I pull Katherine up into the shade of the boardwalk. The church is just across the street, a white picket fence setting it off from the rest of the town. “Back at Rose Hill, Auntie Aggie—that was the woman that mostly raised me—would plant a huge garden full of okra and carrots and cabbage, green beans, and black-eye peas, everything you needed to feed a plantation full of hungry people. Everyone had to work the garden at least a couple of times a week if they wanted to eat good, and even my momma would put on her big sun hat and go out and pull weeds. It was a necessity in a place where a trip beyond the barrier fence to the market could mean death.
“One summer, the garden was plagued by a rabbit. This wasn’t no ordinary rabbit, this was a hare of unnatural ability. It would always find a way inside of the fencing, filling itself up on the fruits of our labor. It was, as Momma said, a bastard of a rabbit.”
Katherine gasps and looks around. “Jane! Such language.”
“Let me finish my story. Anyway, Auntie Aggie and a few of the boys put out snares and traps galore, everything from crates baited with carrots and bits of lettuce to complicated tie snares I found in an old frontiersman’s book Momma had from her dead daddy. Nothing worked. Every morning we’d go out and see the parsley munched down to nubs, or nibbles in the cabbage. The frustration was enough to put one off of gardening altogether, truth be told.
“But Auntie Aggie never let it faze her. Every night she would set out the same kind of snare, a simple loop knot that someone had taught her long ago. And every morning, when the rabbit wasn’t caught, she’d retie that snare, same as she did the day before. I asked her once if she was scared the hare was going to eat the whole garden clean before that trap of hers caught him.
“‘Jane,’ she said, ‘look at this garden. Look at the lettuces and those beans! And those tomatoes? They are especially fine this year, don’t you agree? Trust me on this: it’s just nature for creatures like him to get greedy.’ That was all she said to me.”
Katherine’s listening now, her eyes narrowed. “So what happened?”
I grin. “She was right. After nearly two weeks of trying to catch the hare, Aunt Aggie made us a nice rabbit stew from that fat bunny. See, while the rabbit was skinny and hungry, that snare couldn’t catch him, and he was cautious enough to avoid it. But once he got fat, he couldn’t fit through the same holes he used to. I ain’t lying when I say he was big enough to feed darn near all of Rose Hill that night. And tasty? Well, all of his good eating meant even better eating for us.
“The point is, sometimes when the rabbit gets too fat, too comfortable, he makes mistakes. But the gardener, she ain’t got nothing but time. Because even the hungriest rabbit can’t eat the entire garden. At some point the good sheriff will make a mistake, some gross miscalculation, reveal some weakness, and that’s when we’ll find our freedom.”
Katherine is nodding now, her expression thoughtful. “We will be patient gardeners.”
“Yes. We will be the most patient gardeners, and we will fatten up that bunny like nobody’s business. And when that rabbit is nice and plump, we shall set the snare, and let him run right on through it.”
Katherine nods. “Thank you, Jane.”
I smile, because I’m relieved that she didn’t ask the question I’ve been dreading since we got here.
What if we’re not the gardeners, but the rabbits?
One of the biggest challenges
