Stone River Crossing by Tim Tingle

Author:Tim Tingle
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Lee & Low Books
Published: 2019-05-08T21:03:53+00:00

CHAPTER 31

Morning of Budding Romance

The next morning Martha Tom and her mother were cutting wild onions on the back porch. The sun was barely peeping over the pine trees, and the sky turned a brighter shade of blue with every passing minute. Red clouds streaked across the horizon.

“Maybe we can cook blackberry pudding for Lil Mo,” Martha Tom said, talking as much to herself as to her mother. “Yes, I think maybe I should pick blackberries. Would that be hoke, Ma, if I pick blackberries this morning?”

Ella laughed out loud. She put down her slicing knife and looked at Martha Tom.

“What is it?” asked Martha Tom. “You don’t think he would like blackberries?”

“Martha Tom, do you remember a time, several months ago, when I asked you to pick blackberries?”

“How could I remember something that happened that long ago?” Martha Tom asked, rolling her eyes. Her mother laughed even harder.

“What is so funny?”

“Sweet little Martha Tom, you should remember!”

“Why?”

“Because you and those blackberries are the reason you met Lil Mo in the first place!” said Ella. “Here, take this basket. Stay on this side of the river, please, and go get Lil Mo his berries! We can cook the pudding as soon as you get back. Now go!”

“Yakoke,” said Martha Tom, grabbing the basket and dashing across the fields to Lil Mo’s new home. Then she remembered she was not going to see Lil Mo, not yet. She was going to the riverbank to pick blackberries. She laughed at her own silliness and turned to the river.

Hours later, rolling rain clouds covered the western sky. Martha Tom sat with Lil Mo under a low-drooping cottonwood tree in her backyard. They had just finished a meal of banaha bread and pashofa, thick and creamy corn chowder. Martha Tom was saving the blackberry pudding as a surprise.

“Lil Mo?”

“Yes, Martha Tom?” He always squirmed when she started off a conversation like this.

“What was it like, life on the other side?”

“Very different.”

“I know that. But what did you do when you weren’t working?”

“I worked all the time,” Lil Mo said. They both knew he was lying just to irritate her.

“Hoke, if you don’t want to talk about it, just sit like a log,” she said.

“I can’t sit like a log. Logs don’t sit, they lie down.”

“Were you like this before you met Funi Man?” Martha Tom asked. “Always trying to be funny?”

“It just came easy for me.”

“Lil Mo, I am your friend, and I just want to know.”

“Hoke,” he said, smiling at how they teased each other. Joseph and Koi Losa, his other friends, were never like this. “I’ll tell you what life was like on the plantation. We were afraid most of the time. We didn’t think of ourselves as being afraid. If you asked any of the people who are still slaves right now if they are afraid, they would tell you no. They’d say they have family and friends. ‘What is there to be afraid of?’

“But they would even be too afraid to answer.

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