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

Shenandoah County northeast of Charlotte, between the Piedmont Plateau and the Blue Ridge Mountains, they couldn’t yet feel them either.
    They would feel them soon enough. So would Katie. So would I.
    Four years later, destiny would bring us together. When that time came, cruelty and terror would be carried on those winds of change. For many in both races, the storm would bring heartache and destruction. Lots of good folks would die for the cause that both North and South called freedom. Others would learn to grow strong, though it wouldn’t be easy, and that kind of inner strength would cost them many tears.
    But most people alive in 1861 knew nothing of the significance of the times, or realized that history was about to be made. Or that they would be part of it.
    Kathleen O’Bannon Clairborne didn’t know it. Neither did Mary Ann Jukes.
    We were both oblivious to the fact that we were living in a newly created nation calling itself the Confederate States of America. We had not heard of Fort Sumter, almost two hundred miles southeast on the South Carolina coast, where troops were already gathering to defend the right of those Southern states to maintain their independence.
    And so Katie went on with her life as she always had. The slaves did their work and she played with her dolls.
    But winds of change were in the air. Folks would have no choice but to come awake eventually.
    Even two little girls.

S PECIAL P LACE
2

    M O’NIN’ TO YA, M IZ K ATHLEEN ,’’ CALLED out a colored woman as Katie walked by. Katie glanced toward the workers and smiled.
    The large woman was carrying a bucket of water to the field where the men were digging and hoeing. She was as little aware of events about to engulf her as the daughter of the plantation master who owned her. The slave woman had heard bits and pieces about Abraham Lincoln and Jefferson Davis, who had become presidents of their two countries a few months earlier. But if someone had told her that a year and a half later the man called Lincoln would issue a proclamation declaring that she, her husband Mathias, and their three children were free, she would no more have been able to grasp it than to think the sun would not rise tomorrow.
    White and black alike through the South were steeped in the tradition of their cultures. Change was not something they were expecting. But both Katie and the slave woman would have to get used to it eventually. For by now the events bringing change to their lives could not be stopped.
    Katie continued past the toiling Negroes. Another dirt path intersected with the one she was on. She took it to the left, and gradually realized she had come around to the opposite side of the field.
    She stopped and gazed across it. Yes, this was the same field. She had never gone this way before, but she recognized the woods just beyond. Books and music, like I said, were her usual companions. But recently she had discovered a special place, and she had made friends with nature.
    She left the road and entered a large grassy field. By and by she found herself walking through scattered pines at its far side, coming a few minutes later to the brook which wound through the wood. A small pond lay at the center of a tiny secluded meadow, and then the brook flowed out again at the other side.
    This was her own private place. No one else in the whole world, or so Katie thought, knew of it. Katie had learned to love animals, beginning with her beloved Rusty, and now she talked to squirrels and brought them things to eat. She always told Rusty to sit down and behave himself so the other animals wouldn’t be afraid. And even though he was only a year old and full of a pup’s energy, he seemed to sense what she meant and always quieted when she came here.
    There were fish in the pond. Deer came to drink from its edge. Both had become her friends. The fish didn’t know it. But the deer did. And gradually they had grown used to the small girl’s presence. They were