Winds of Promise by Victoria Thompson

Author:Victoria Thompson [Thompson, Victoria]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2019-05-08T08:17:40+00:00

“Maybe you’d better carry her while we walk around. These old arms might get tired and drop her, and I wouldn’t want nothing to happen to Mr. Hunter’s baby girl.”

Sarah felt her smile vanish at the reminder of her lie, but she took little Becky from Jewel, being careful not to touch the woman in the process, and rose to follow her hostess, trying not to feel like the servant.

This house belongs to your husband, she told herself sternly. If only she had the confidence that should go along with such knowledge.

Jewel showed her the small room off the kitchen where she had slept ever since old Mr. Tate had brought her here over twenty-five years ago. Then she took Sarah into the parlor which no one ever used anymore now that Mr. Tate was dead and Mr. Hunter had been gone so long.

Sarah lifted the sheets that covered the furniture and was relieved to find it worn and not at all luxurious. She could feel quite comfortable in this room.

“That’s all on this side,” Jewel said, leading Sarah out into the windy passageway that separated the two halves of the house. “Nobody’s used the bedrooms since Mr. Hunter left for the war,” she added. “A lot of folks come by, slaves on their way to the promised land or what they think is the promised land, meaning the big city and the Freedmen’s Bureau to get their forty acres and a mule that they think the gov’ment’s gonna give ’em, but I don’t let ’em sleep in the house. Never know what kinda folks they are, so I make ’em stay in the barn.”

“Forty acres and a mule!” Sarah exclaimed in outrage, quickly adjusting the baby’s blanket to cover her against the wind whipping through the dogtrot. “Is that what they get from the Freedmen’s Bureau?”

“Not a bit of it,” Jewel replied in disgust, pushing open the door to one of the rooms on the other side of the house. “It’s just a rumor got started somehow, and every slave in God’s creation believed it, seems like. They all set out to get to a Freedmen’s Bureau, and now they’re all starving on the roads. Them that do find the Bureau finds out the truth and about gets their hearts broke. It’s a mighty sad thing, Miz Sarah. All them colored folk what never been off the farm where they was borned and who been took care of all their lives, they all too innocent to know what the world’s really like. They hates their masters for treatin’ ’em like slaves and keepin’ ’em from being free, but they don’t know things’ll be a lot worse once they gets away from home.”

Sarah thought about her own cruel lessons on the same subject and realized Jewel was right. She knew her father would consider her disloyal for feeling sorry for niggers, but she couldn’t help it. Although she still wasn’t quite comfortable being around Jewel, Sarah began to see her as a person for the first time, a person who’d known suffering just as Sarah had.

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