This went on for nearly six weeks. The only solace from that madness was to hive the colored, which got me out the house, or at times, to set out on the porch with Annie in the evenings. That was one of her jobs, to set there serving as lookout and to keep the house looking normal and keep the downstairs presentable to make sure that nobody wandered in and found the hundreds of guns and pikes laying around in crates. Many an evening she asked me to set out on the porch with her, for none of the men was allowed to show themselves, and besides, she saw it as her business to educate me as to the ways of the Bible and living a Christian life. We spent them hours reading the Bible together in the dusk and discussing its passages. I come to enjoy them talks, for even though I’d gotten used to living a lie—being a girl—it come to me this way: Being a Negro’s a lie, anyway. Nobody sees the real you. Nobody knows who you are inside. You just judged on what you are on the outside whatever your color. Mulatto, colored, black, it don’t matter. You just a Negro to the world. But somehow, setting on the bench of that porch, conversating with her, watching the sun go down over the mountains above the Ferry, made me forget ’bout what was covering me and the fact that the Old Man was aiming to get us all minced to pieces. I come to the understanding that maybe what was on the inside was more important, and that your outer covering didn’t count so much as folks thought it did, colored or white, man or woman.
“What do you want to be someday?” Annie asked me one evening as we set out on the porch at sunset.
“What you mean?”
“When this is all done.”
“When what is all done?”
“When this war is over. And the Negro is free.”
“Well, I’ll likely be a ...” I didn’t know what to say, for I weren’t thinking of the whole bit succeeding. Running to freedom up north was easier, but I had no absolute plans on it that very moment, for setting with her made every minute feel joyous, and time passed quickly and all my plans for the future seemed far off and not important. So I said, “I’ll likely buy a fiddle and sing songs the rest of my life. For I enjoys music.”
“Henrietta!” she scolded naughtily. “You never allowed you can sing.”
“Why, you has never asked.”
“Well, sing for me then.”
I sung for her “Dixie” and “When the Coons Go Marching Home.”
We was setting on a swinging bench that the Old Man set up, hung from the ceiling, and as I sat next to her and throwed my singing at her, her face softened, her whole body seemed to grow soft as a marshmallow, settling in that swinging chair, listening. “You sing beautiful,” she said. “But I don’t favor them rebel songs. Sing a religious song. Something for the Lord.”
So I sang “Keeping His Bread” and “Nearer, My God, to Thee.”
Well, that done her in. She got just dumbstruck happy by them songs. They buttered her up to privilege, practically. She set there swinging back and forth, looking righteously spent, and soft as biscuit dough, her eyes looking moist and dewy. She squirmed a little closer to me.
“Gosh, that is beautiful,” she said. “Oh, I do so love the Lord. Sing another.”
So I sang “Love Is a Twilight Star” and “Sally Got a Furry Pie for Me,” which is an old rebel song from back in Kansas, but I changed “furry pie” to “johnnycake,” and that just cleaned her up. Knocked her out. She got right syrupy, and her brown eyes—by God, them things was pretty as stars and big as quarters—set upon me and she put her arm around me on that bench and looked at me with them big eyes that liked to suck my insides out, and said, “Why, that is the most beautiful song I have ever heard in my life. It just makes my heart flutter. Would that you was a boy, Henrietta. Why, I’d marry you!” And she kissed me on the cheek.
Well, that just ruint my oats, her grazing on me like that, and I made it my purpose right then and there to never go near her again, for I was a fool for her, just a fool, and I knowed no good was gonna come of them feelings.
It was a good thing the Old Man set Annie on the porch as lookout, for a constant source of trouble lived just down the road, and was it not for Annie, we’d have been discovered right off. As it was, it set the whole caboodle off in the worst way. And as usual, it was a woman behind it.
Her name was Mrs. Huffmaster, a bit of trouble that Becky had mentioned. She was a barefoot, nosy, dirty-to-the-corn white woman who walked the road with three snot-nosed, biscuit-eating, cob-headed children, poking her nose in every yard but her own. She wandered that road before our headquarters every day, and it weren’t long before she invited herself onto the front porch.
Annie normally seen her through the window and dived for the door just before Mrs. Huffmaster could get to the porch so she could hold her out there. Annie told Mrs. Huffmaster and the neighbors that her Pa and Cook runned his mining business on the other side of the valley, which was the excuse for them renting the old farm. But that didn’t satisfy that old hag, for she was a nosybody who gobbled up gossip. One morning Mrs. Huffmaster slipped up onto the porch before Annie seen her and knocked on the door, aiming to push it open and step inside. Annie spied her at the last second through the window just as Mrs. Huffmaster’s foot hit the porch deck, and she leaned on the door, pinning it shut. It was a good thing, too, for Tidd and Kagi had just unpacked a carton of Sharps rifles and primers, and had Mrs. Huffmaster walked in, she would have stumbled over enough rifles and cartridges laying on the floor to pack a troop of U.S. Cavalry. Annie kept the door shut as Mrs. Huffmaster pushed against it, while me, Kagi, and Tidd scampered around, putting them guns back in the crate.
“Annie is that you?” the old hag said.
“I’m not proper, Mrs. Huffmaster,” Annie said. Her face was white as a sheet.
“What’s the matter with this door?”
“I will be right out,” Annie sang.
After a few hot minutes, we got them things put up and Annie slipped out the door, pulling me along with her for support, keeping the woman on the porch.
“Mrs. Huffmaster, we is not prepared for guests,” she said, fluffing herself and setting in her bench on the porch, pulling me next to her. “Would you like some lemonade? I’ll be happy to get you some.”
“Ain’t thirsty,” Mrs. Huffmaster said. She had the face of a horse after eating. She looked around, trying to peek in the window. She smelled a rat.
There was fifteen men setting in that house upstairs, quiet as mice. They never went out during the day, only at night, and they set there in silence while Annie chewed the fat and run that nosybody off. Still, that woman knowed something was up, and from that day forward, she made it her business to stop off at the house anytime. She lived just down the road, and made it known that Cook had already got her dander up by romancing one of the neighbors’ daughters, who her brother had expected to marry. She took that as an affront of some kind, and made it her business to come by the house each day at different times, with her ragged, barefoot, dirty children trailing behind her like ducklings, poking her nose around and picking at Annie. She was a rough, uncouth woman who belonged more in Kansas Territory than back east. She constantly picked on Annie, who was refined and sweet and pretty as a peeled onion. Annie knowed it weren’t her business to ruffle that woman’s feathers in any way, so she took it standing up, calm as lettuce.