The Black Rose by Tananarive Due Page B

realized she would not have enough material to make coats for both Sarah and herself, she just went to work on Sarah’s. “What ’bout chu?” Sarah asked her, realizing that the coat’s sleeves were too short for her sister. At that, Louvenia just shrugged.
    For Sarah, there was no more time for games of any sort during the workdays. The endless cotton fields saw to that.
    The cotton began blooming in dots of white by the middle of August, and picking began in September. Sarah thought longingly of the time when she’d been so small that Mama let her ride on her sack while she picked, and she didn’t have to do any work, dozing to the rhythm of Mama’s movement up and down the rows. This was the first time Sarah would be expected to work as hard as any other grown-up cropper, just like Louvenia. With a sack around her shoulder that dragged the ground, Sarah went with her sister to their field at dawn, where the downy white cotton plants they’d planted in spring had opened up in a sea.
    We gon’ pick all this cotton? Sarah asked herself in amazement, since the task looked as fruitless as trying to collect snowflakes. Yet she started at one end of a neat row of plants and slowly worked her way to the other side, her hands yanking to pull off the cotton bolls while the sun bullied her from above. She knew she had to pick the soft cotton free of the clinging bolls and throw only the cotton in her sack; that was the most important thing, Papa used to tell her. She cried out and sucked on her fingers when the bolls pricked her, but she couldn’t pause long because she knew she had to fill her sack. Papa told her he’d been whipped as a boy when his oberseer saw him tossing bolls in the sack with his cotton. Sarah also remembered figures Papa had told her, that every acre of a cotton field grew about one bale’s worth of cotton, and that he said he could pick two hundred pounds of cotton in a day. The more cotton she and Louvenia picked, she knew, the more they could catch up on their lost wages so they wouldn’t have any debts to Missus Anna they couldn’t pay. If they couldn’t pay their debts, they couldn’t stay in their house. There were no games to make of that.
    It seemed to Sarah that as soon as she and Louvenia dragged their feet home at night and surrendered to their pallets, morning was already glowing outside and it was time to go back to the fields. She never felt rested, and her muscles ached. She was so sore from reaching for the plants that it hurt to stand up straight.
    And even on days they weren’t picking, they had to work just as hard on the washing. The night before washing day, they walked to collect the dirty clothes from two nearby white families who paid them fifty cents each week to do their wash. By the time they got the clothes and returned to their cabin, it was after dark, so they ate whatever food they could find for a hurried supper and went to bed. If any of the clothes looked particularly dirty, they soaked them overnight. Then, in the morning, they dragged the clothes, two washtubs, and as much firewood as they could carry to the river. They filled the tubs with water from the river until they could barely carry them even between the two of them—one tub was for washing, one for rinsing—and began their work. They had to boil the clothes, wring them out, rinse them, and wring them out again. Then they brought the damp clothes home and hung them on the line outside their cabin, hoping it wouldn’t rain overnight.
    All along the riverbank, other Negro women like Missy Laura were there washing, too. Often the women were singing, but Louvenia and Sarah rarely sang along, their brows knitted with concentration as they scrubbed and beat out the dirty spots in the laundry so their customers wouldn’t complain. Any complaints, no dollar. Sometimes Sarah rubbed fabric against the washboard so hard that it felt like it was grating her hand, and she especially hated the hot job of