Page from a Tennessee Journal (AmazonEncore Edition)

Henry who lay still and ashen with his eyes closed. She had to feed her children. Stepping outside of the barn she called to Lottie.
    “Come on up for dinner.” As she let the words come out of her mouth, she fumbled in her pocket for the four eggs boiled this morning.
    She moved to the smoke house and the low-simmering pot on the back burner. Filled to the brim with water, it contained less than a cup of dandelion greens. Annalaura looked over at the spot between barn and smoke house where she had gardened so well last year. Except for the brown tops of two scraggly onions, the garden plot was bare. There had been no time to tend it and, worse, no seed money to start it. She didn’t dare ask McNaughton to advance her the seed like most of the other owners would do, because she knew she wouldn’t be able to pay the farmer back. As Lottie headed from the field with Doug trailing behind her, Annalaura checked the sun. She had fed all four of her children with the next to last cup of cornmeal way before sunup, and now it was close to two o’clock and their dinner would be a boiled egg and a pot of water seasoned with no more than the look of a green dandelion. She wiped her forearm over her eyes again. She refused to let them see her cry.
    It took her children less than five minutes to gobble down their egg and skimpy cup of dandelion water. When the little ones turned their faces to her, she saw the futility of asking for more in their eyes. She allowed all four to rest for another twenty minutes, though Cleveland had tried to argue that he was ready to go back to the sticks. She insisted that he lie down on his cot. She put Henry on her lap, and with the hem of her skirt, wiped his dusty toes and tried to push the top of his shoes over them.
    “Cleveland, watch after the others, I’m taking Henry with me to Aunt Becky’s.”
    “But, Momma, the tobacco…” Cleveland tried to protest before Annalaura silenced him with a hand.
    “I’ll be back way befo’ dark to work on the sticks.” She saw the question in Lottie’s eyes but silenced her daughter before it could be asked.
     
     
    If she’d had a buckboard, she could have made the ride to the Thornton back-forty in under fifteen minutes, but with walking and carrying an exhausted Henry, it had taken her close to an hour. He had fallen asleep and his three-year-old weight felt like thirty pounds of unbroken rock. Just as she spotted the cabin in the distance, she shifted the child to her other hip. She hoped the sight of him would keep Aunt Becky from asking too many questions. Annalaura loved her aunt, but the woman had the all-seeing eye of her Cherokee mother. She would know what the trouble was before Annalaura could get out a good word. Annalaura nudged Henry awake as she turned up the path to the old mud-chinked cabin where Aunt Becky had been born a slave on Thornton land sixty years earlier. After the War, she had married a man who called himself Murdock, though Becky never used his name, nor did she ever move away to live with him. Rebecca Murdock had always lived on Thornton land, and she had always been far more than an aunt to Annalaura.
    Geneva Thornton Robbins had been just twenty-nine, and Annalaura four, when the galloping consumption separated mother from daughter. Steps from the gray, weathered front door of the old slave cabin with its iron ring for a knocker, Annalaura rummaged in her head for a memory of that day. Her mother’s face was less than a blur these twenty-five years later. Not even her smell lingered in the adult Annalaura. What was clear as a pond after a springtime thaw was the remembrance of how the four-year-old had begged to be allowed to live with her pipe-smoking grandmother after her mother’s death.
    Grandma Charity’s lap had always been inviting even when Annalaura’s mother was alive. The woman with the strong nose, straight, still-black hair, and cinnamon-colored skin had rocked young Annalaura to sleep many a time. As a youngster, she nestled into her grandmother’s ample bosom and let her drowsy mind take in the stories of the old woman’s own girlhood.
    Charity was just nine when the soldiers marched her entire village out of their North Carolina home. The woman had repeated the story so oft en that Annalaura could almost see the Cherokee cabins. Grandma had always insisted to her doubting granddaughter that the Indian cabins had been much finer than the ones the white men built for their slaves. The