Page from a Tennessee Journal (AmazonEncore Edition)

CHAPTER ONE
     
    Annalaura Welles stirred out of her fitful sleep to the certainty of two things. Husband John was gone for good this time, and even with the help of her four young children, she would be unable to bring in the tobacco harvest by the end of August. Though this was coming up the second year she’d sharecropped the McNaughton mid-forty, she still wasn’t used to living in the converted upper reaches of a barn.
    The sky loomed dark through the small window cut at the foot of her sleeping alcove. She owned no clock, but her tired bones told her it was about a half-hour ’til sun rising, and she laid a tentative hand on daughter Lottie’s bobtailed braids as the five-year-old slept soundly beside her. Almost drowning out the child’s soft sighs were the snorts of the three pigs on the bottom level, fifteen feet below. The smell of their fresh dung made its way up through the openings in the floorboards. The cows hadn’t lowed their own good mornings yet, and she wanted her Cleveland to get a little more rest.
    She had to work him like a man, but Annalaura was always mindful that her oldest boy was not yet twelve years old. She fretted just as much over Doug and little Henry. All four of her children would have to step into the world way too soon if she couldn’t sort out this mess John had left her. A moonbeam flooded through the open crack in the roof that McNaughton had neglected to repair during last winter’s snows and she realized she had awakened too early again.
    The first two weeks after John left in early June hadn’t been too bad. She knew going into her wedding thirteen years ago that no man as good-looking as John Welles was going to stay faithful for long to a woman plain as a corn-bread skillet. But now it was mid-August with harvest time closer than she wanted. In all his wanderings, John had never been away from her, or his children, more than two weeks. She reached an arm over her head to locate the splintery rafter beam to guide her as she eased herself to sitting. She had knocked herself in the head too many times to attempt getting up quickly in these tight quarters. She knew colored still lived in some bad conditions in Tennessee, but after all, this was Our Lord’s year of 1913. Even in slavery times, her Aunt Becky and her own grandma Charity had lived better than this.
    She shifted her feet onto the rough, knot-pitted floorboards and raised her body upright with just the merest rustling of the corn husks that made up the mattress John had given her as a wedding gift. Before she stood, she checked again on Lottie, who had barely stirred in her sleep. Annalaura had no intention of awakening her children before sunup, knowing they would get no rest and precious little food until way past sundown. Lottie had squirmed most of the night in the heat of the barn. Sometimes Annalaura could swear that the pigs and the cows below were choking all the air out of her children for their own breathing. Standing, she bunched her nightdress in her hand. The thin fabric felt wringing-wet damp with her sweat. Barefoot and stepping carefully from the planked box McNaughton had built to serve as a bed for his tenant farmers, she avoided all the familiar squeaks and creaks in the wide-apart floorboards as she checked on the remnants of last night’s supper, which would soon serve as today’s breakfast. Annalaura lifted the cracked saucer she’d laid over the remains to ward off the mosquitoes and the mice. She poked at the four hardened biscuits. Though her three-year-old, Henry, had reached for a second, she had to take the crusty bread from his hand and divide it between her two older boys. No amount of explaining that she had flour enough for only ten biscuits a day, and that had to serve the five of them for two meals, could comfort a wailing Henry.
    As she walked across the floor to the clothes nail hanging on the wall above middle son Doug and baby Henry’s little pallet of a bed, she remembered how John had described the place when he first saw it. “This room ain’t big enough to hold three six-foot-high men laid head to foot in either direction.” Then, she had to laugh to keep from crying at how low they lived. Now she was terrified that soon even this sty of a place wouldn’t be theirs.
    In the dimness, Annalaura shimmied her nightdress over her hips and reached for the nail that held her work outfit. As she lifted the gown over her head, her hand brushed her breast. For a