Orphan Girl Read Free

and we were dirt poor. They had to give the Trust half of the cotton and a third of the corn as payment on the land and mule. All we had left when the debts were paid was a hand full of dust.
    My mama’s favorite saying was, “No matter how hard we try, we cannot have all things to please us.”  I would always ask her why. Why couldn’t we have things to please us?  She would say, “Until we’ve all gone home to Jesus, we can only wonder why.” Then she would say that after we died and went to Heaven, Jesus would explain it all.
    Sometimes, I thought it would be nice just to die and go on up to Heaven so that Jesus could explain it to me. Then, maybe I would understand what my mama meant… Looking back on it now, that’s kind of silly it‘n it… I was just a child though- I reckon all it takes is a tiny seed of memory planted when we are young for us to look back and remember what it was like as a child.
    Before my folks passed away, I didn’t know we was poor. Sharecropping was the only kind of life I had ever known, and where we lived, that was all I knowed too. I had never been off the farm, but one time in my life before then.
    My folks were not the first to die. Annabelle died first. She was the apple of Mama’s eye. Mama tried her best to give that child everything she wanted. Mama never wanted to see her cry, but poor little Anna was sickly from the day she was born.
    Out in the fields, when we were picking cotton, Mama would say to me, “Gilly, I don’t want you girls to end up like me. Promise me that as soon as you are old enough, you will leave this godforsaken place and take Anna with you.” I didn’t rightly know what she meant by that back then, but I always promised her that I would.
    Mama would say, “I’ve had a hard life of tears, everyday I’ve ever known.” and then she would tell me, “I took a hard row to hoe, Gilly. When I’m dead and buried, it’ll be because of that.” I remember those days well… and I thank God they’re long gone.
    I will always have me a picture of Mama and Anna in my mind, Papa not so much. Even though he outlived them by several years, its hard for me to picture him close up, just out in the fields a plowing. Anna’s in the churchyard and so is Mama. They have no life a tall now, just a few words written on a stone.
    Anna was the first to die. She died one day while Mama and Papa were out in the fields. Mama usually took both of us young’uns with her. I was old enough to drag a sack, and I would pick as much cotton as I could, but Anna, she were not old enough to pick cotton, she’d sit and play in the red delta dirt while the rest of us worked.
    That day, the day Anna died, she was too sick to go into the fields and even though Papa was grumbling about it, Mama left me at the house to care for her.
    About mid-morning, Anna got awful quiet. She just kept lying in bed, sleeping, so I left her be. I knew she felt bad, she had been moping around for days. Before she fell ill, she was always chattering away, and as busy as a cat in a sandbox.
    I had looked over at her when I heard the clock strike ten times; she was still sleeping. Then, when I looked at her a little while later, her lips were blue. Back then, I did not know what that meant. I reckon I was about six years old at the time, old enough to help around the house as well as out the fields, but not to recognize death.
    I was peeling potatoes like Mama told me to do. I knew her and Papa would come in from the fields about noontime to eat; they would be hungry. I did not want the wrath of my papa’s razor strap. He was a coldhearted, hard man. If looks could kill, I reckon I would have been dead many times over right alongside Anna and Mama.
    After Anna passed away, Mama seemed to fade away. I think all the life she held inside her, left her the day they buried Anna. I watched her dry up like a pot of beans left too long on the stove.
    Her belly was big with child when she passed away. At the