The Book of Lost Friends(10)
I think it’s about a farm.
i bet this book stooped.
About a pig.
It’s about George Orwell’s satire of Russian society.
Somebody actually copied the summary from the back cover. There’s hope.
And then, It’s about a crazy lady who gets in a accident in the morning and hits her head. She wanders off into a school, but she’s got no clue what she’s doing there.
Next day, she wakes up and don’t come back.
CHAPTER 3
HANNIE GOSSETT—LOUISIANA, 1875
I mash the big field hat down hard to hide my face while I slide from shadow to shadow in the morning dark. It’ll be trouble if I get seen here. Both me and Tati know that. Old Missus won’t let no croppers near the Grand House till Seddie lights the morning lamp in the window. I get caught here at night, she’ll say I come thieving.
It’ll give her cause to tear up our land paper. She don’t like the sharecrop contracts and hates ours more than most. Missus’s plan was to keep all us stray children and work us for free round the Grand House till we got too old to put up with it. Only reason she let Tati take us to her sharecrop land was because Old Mister said that Tati and us strays oughta have the chance at working our own plot, too. And because Missus never thought that one old freedwoman and seven half-growed kids could make it, farming on shares for ten years to earn our land, free and clear. It’s a lean, hungry life when three of every four eggs, bushels, barrels, and beans you draw from the field go right back to pay the debt for the land and goods at the plantation store, since croppers ain’t allowed to trade anyplace else. But that thirty acres is nearly ours, now. Thirty acres, a mule and outfit. Old Missus can’t stand the fact of it. Our land sits too close to the Grand House, for one thing. She wants to hold the land for Young Mister Lyle and Missy Lavinia, even though they got more interest in spending their daddy’s money than in farming fields.
But that don’t matter. No mystery what’ll happen if things get left up to Old Missus, and I hope we ain’t soon to find out that’s how it is. Tati wouldn’t have hurried me into the boys’ work clothes and sent me scurrying up here if there was any other way to discover what sort of ill wind has brought that girl in the hood cape sneaking up to Goswood Grove by the dark of midnight.
She might’ve meant for that cape to hide who she was, but Tati recognized it right off. Tati’s old fingers had worked late by the light of the bottle lamp, sewing up two capes just alike for last year’s Christmas—one to fit that high-yella woman Old Mister keeps in style down in New Orleans, and one for the fawn-pale daughter they made together, Juneau Jane. Old Mister likes to dress them the same, mother and daughter, and he knows Tati’s trustable to always keep her sewing work hid from Old Missus. All us know better than to even mention the names of that woman or that child round here. Be safer calling the name of the devil.
Juneau Jane coming to Goswood Grove ain’t a good sign. Old Mister hadn’t been seen at this plantation since day after Christmas, when the word come that Mister’s fine gentleman son had got hisself into another difficulty, this time in Texas. Been only two years since Mister sent the boy west to dodge a murder trial in Louisiana. The time spent on the Gossett lands in East Texas ain’t improved Young Mister Lyle’s behaviors, I guess.
Doubt anyplace could.
Four months ago that Old Mister left, and no word of him since. Either that little tawny-pale daughter of his knows what become of him or she’s here to find out.
Child’s a fool, coming to Goswood this way. The Ku Kluxers and White Camellias catch her on the road, they might not guess what she is just by looking, but no decent woman or girl goes about alone after dark. Too many carpetbaggers, road agents, and bushwhackers round in these years since the war. Too many young rowdies mad about the times, and the government, and the war, and the Louisiana constitution giving black folks the vote.
The kind of men that prowl these roads at night ain’t likely to care that the girl’s just fourteen.
Juneau Jane’s got courage, or else she’s desperate. Reason enough for me to sneak past the brick pillars that hold the Grand House’s first floor eight foot off the ground, and shinny through the coal trap into the basement. Years past, the boys used it to come snitch food, but I’m the only one of Tati’s strays still skinny enough to get in this way.
I don’t want one thing to do with this mess, or with Juneau Jane, but if she knows information, I got to find out. If Old Mister is gone from this world and this left-hand child of his is here seeking after his death papers, I’m bound to get my fingers on our cropper contract at the same time. Make myself into a thief, which I never been. Don’t have a choice about it, though. With no husband to stand in her way, Old Missus will burn them papers quick as she gets the news. Nothing the rich folk like better than to rid theirselves of a cropper right when the land contract’s coming due.
I take a few steps, light and careful, one at a time. At corn shuckings and circle plays, I got the dancing feet of a butterfly. Graceful, for a gangly thing, Tati says. I hope that holds out. Old Missus has Seddie sleeping in a little space off the china room, and that old woman’s got light ears, busy mouth. Seddie loves to tell tales to the Missus, cook up trouble, cast curses on folks, get somebody a swat with that riding bat Old Missus carries round. Seddie’ll slip a little poison on anybody that crosses her—put it in the water dipper or top of a corn pone cake—make them sick enough to die or wish they would. The woman’s a witch for sure. Even sees things when she’s sleeping, I think.