The Color of Your Skin Ain’t the Color of Your Heart by Michael Phillips Page A

pour into the river over yonder. That’s what must be making the river so high. And you’re right, Rosewood’s right in the middle.”
    Before we could think any more about our worries, suddenly we heard a mournful moo and saw a helpless cow rushing by out in the middle where the river was moving fast, struggling to keep its head above water.
    “Oh, Mayme!” cried Katie. “Can’t we do something!”
    “I’m afraid there’s nothing we can do for it now, Katie. Once a river like this takes something, it’s not going to stop till it gets to the ocean.”
    We watched as the poor cow disappeared and then we just kept standing there. If anything, the rain began to pound all the harder on our heads.
    “I’m scared, Mayme,” said Katie after a minute.
    “I know,” I said. “Me too. But we’ll be okay. I’m sure the water could never reach the house.”
    “But it’s only fifty yards away from the slave cabins.”
    “I know. But the house is quite a bit higher. Look—” I said as we turned around behind us—“the road goes up from the colored town. It can’t possibly get much higher.”
    As we turned back around to face the swirling river and looked down, we saw that our boots were in the water. Just in the time we had been standing there, the river had risen another inch.
    Without saying anything more, we both stepped back and slowly began making our way back to the house. Despite my optimistic words, I was worried too. If the water was rising this fast, there was no telling what might happen.

D OVER AND R ED
    9

    D AY AFTER DAY THE DREARY GRAY CONTINUED , and the rain kept falling from the sky. Everything was gray and brown. The two brown rivers and lake of water surrounding us met the endless gray of the rain and sky off in the distance in every direction you looked, broken only in a few places by trees.
    And still the water from the lakes surrounding us from the river and Katie’s stream kept rising and getting closer and closer to the house. Three days after Katie and I had gone to look at it, the water from the main river had not only reached the furthermost slave cabin, it had completely covered the porch and floor and was rising up the outside of the wall and making its way to the others. On the other side of the house, the lake from the stream that went through Katie’s secret place in the woods was lapping at the grass and trees in front of the house only a couple hundred feet from the porch.
    But as frightening as it was to watch the water getting nearer and nearer, the worst of it was that the water was now trickling into the barn from the low-lying pasture next to it. That field wasn’t connected to the river itself but had become a little lake of its own just from the rain. The cows were all clustered at the open and covered end of the barn where they could get out of the weather. We had no choice but to let the pigs take care of themselves in the rain and mud, getting what shelter they could in the little pig shed, where they crowded in on top of each other at night. Trying to feed them was horrible and messy but we did what we could. I suppose they were fat enough that a few days without food wasn’t going to hurt them anyway. And there was certainly plenty of water in all the troughs!
    The main problem was the five horses. Their stables too were half covered from an overhanging roof of the barn and opened into the outside pasture, where they mostly stayed when it was nice. But even the covered area sat at the low side of the barn, and it was the first to get flooded by the water trickling in from the fields. Almost from the first of the flood we’d had no choice but to take them all the way into the barn. There wasn’t much room with all the equipment and the two full wagons of cotton, but there was no other place for them to stay.
    But as the storm continued, though the cows made a terrible racket too, we knew the horses were most miserable of all. You could tell they were getting