Angels Watching Over Me (Shenandoah Sisters Book #1) Read Free

returned to the plantation house to finish his breakfast. The male Negroes hitched up the teams, loaded the tools and themselves in three wagons, and set out for the fields. Their women would follow with water and food once the domestic chores were done.
    By noon the sun had climbed high, and the damp heat felt more like June than April. No breeze offered relief. Even spring days could get downright uncomfortable in North Carolina, but it was a lot hotter than usual for this early in the season.
    A white girl slipped along a wide dirt pathway between two partially cultivated fields. Out of that same dirt her father’s cotton crop would be sprouting in white puffy balls four months from now. A golden retriever bounced along at her heels. Rusty had been her constant companion since her father brought him home for her as a pup a year before.
    The girl was Kathleen Clairborne. She always told this part of her story as if it were somebody else. She sometimes described it as the time before the person inside her woke up. I reckon everybody’s got to come awake sometime. This happens at different times and different ages. Sometimes it’s circumstances that wake people up, sometimes pain or hardship. It’s an odd thing I’ve noticed as I’ve seen more of life—happiness alone doesn’t usually do much to help folks wake up on the inside. What wakes people up the quickest is some kind of tragedy or grief. Most of the time, I suppose, it’s just getting older and starting to think .
    It’s sad, though, that some people never do seem to come all the way awake no matter how long they live.
    But as Katie looked back later on the little girl walking in the fields, she said it felt like she was a different person then. She hadn’t come awake yet.
    She had as few worries in the world as a girl can have. Her carefree gait suited this kind of a Saturday. She understood as little about cotton, which the black people were digging the earth to make ready to grow, as she did about the growing season. Neither was she aware of the great amount of slave labor required to make a plantation owner such as her father a wealthy man. Katie wore nice frocks decorated with ribbon and lace and played with expensive dolls that came from places like England or France. But she had never given any thought to why she had them. Her life was full of music and books and pretty things.
    Nothing particular had driven her outside that Saturday morning. Her actions, Katie said later, were guided by impulse, not decision. She had tired of playing inside and now simply found herself moving along the road eastward away from the house with one of those dolls under her arm. She had not decided to go for a walk. She just found herself doing so. Katie did what came into her head and took what happened in life, without wondering where it came from or why.
    Flies buzzed about, and bees busily conducted their springtime business, and they had plenty to do because there were wild flowers blooming all across the moist, green, humid countryside. In the heat, Katie had slowed her movements to a lazy stroll. Even Rusty had decided to save his energy and simply sniffed at the grass on each side of the path.
    I can still smell the land on a day like that. There’s nothing like the moist earth in the South after a spring rain. Now and then the distant low of a cow could be heard as Katie walked along, though in the heat, even their moo s sounded weary. A thin haze lay over the hills in the distance, as it usually did. The earth and its inhabitants were alive with growth and activity. Yet at the same time a sleepy tranquility hung over the land, subdued under the smokelike mist clinging to the mountains in the west.
    More changes were in the air, however, than Katie or her father, or than I or my family where we lived, or than anybody realized. New breezes were blowing— that’s how Katie used to describe it. But the slaves with sweat pouring off their black foreheads in