The Storm Before Atlanta by Karen Schwabach Page A

front of all the slaves. Dulcie had tried to hide her head in Mama’s skirts again, but Missus had grabbed her away from Mama and turned her around and made her face Anne. They had brought in an overseer from another farm to do it. Dulcie closed her eyes tight, but she could still hear the gunshot crack of the whip, even now, six years later, as she walked through the cool running brook in her bare feet.
    That was when she’d first realized that she, Dulcie, belonged to Mas’r and Missus and not to Mama and Papa. Mas’r and Missus had complete control over their lives, and though the preacher might come sometimes and tell the slaves that God wanted them to obey Mas’r and Missus, Dulcie found it hard to believe that anybody, even God, had more power over her than Mas’r and Missus did. She understood that Papa belonged to a different mas’r and missus, and then they had sold Papa further south, and they could do that too. They could kill you if they wanted. It would be against the law, but there wasn’t a chance in a hundred the law would say anything if they did.
    Dulcie remembered the doctor saying that to Missus about Anne, later. “Even if she does die,” he had said,kneeling on the clay floor in the cabin amid the flies and the smell of infection, “since it occurred naturally, in the course of condign punishment, it’s not a crime.”
    And Missus had smiled a secret, satisfied smile that Dulcie found terrifying.
    Not long afterward Mas’r sent Dulcie’s mama away. He hired her out to someone as a cook. “I never break up families,” Dulcie remembered him saying to the white man who came to take Mama away. “But this is only temporary, and anyway, the girl is nearly six already.”
    And Dulcie never saw her mama again. A letter had come once, that someone had written for Mama and that Mas’r had read to Dulcie. But there had been no more letters, and when Dulcie asked when Mama was coming back Missus told her to stop complaining and get back to work.
    After that Dulcie hated Mas’r and Missus, and hated being a slave, and determined that one way or another, one day, she was going to be free.
    And now she was running away to the Yankees.
    Dulcie walked all night. They would have missed her by now, but Missus would think she was just hiding from the inevitable beating. Mas’r and Missus thought they’d succeeded in making their slaves afraid of Yankees. But their slaves never believed anything Mas’r and Missus told them, on general principle.
    When the gray mist of dawn came, Dulcie scrambled up the cliff-steep bank of the stream, eager to find out howfar she had come. At the top she looked down. Below her she could see a white clapboard house, and a yard with a dog in it, fields green with new corn, and a cluster of slave cabins.… Dulcie knew those cabins. She’d grown up in them! She’d barely come any distance at all, after walking all night, and her feet were stone-bruised and wrinkled from the cold stream.
    She needed to leave the stream, to move faster. But which way to go? Quickly she climbed a hemlock tree—she had always been good at climbing. She stood on the highest branch she could get to, the bark rough under her bare feet, and looked out over the surrounding land. To the west of her lay a wagon road, two red lines of Georgia clay stretching into the distance. Clouds of red dust rose all along the road. One dust cloud meant a traveler. Dulcie had never seen dust clouds like this. A whole army was moving along that road. But it was moving away from Dulcie—so it was probably the Secesh.
    A railroad track gleamed silver in the sunlight. Both road and railroad led northwest, in the direction Dulcie believed she had heard cannons from yesterday.
    She heard the distant clap of guns again. It went on and on. Dulcie clambered down. She had to decide which way to go, and fast. The railroad seemed to go in the direction the guns were coming from. And where those guns were, Dulcie would find