Page from a Tennessee Journal (AmazonEncore Edition)

over here, now.” She had no time to cajole her son with soft-sounding words. Even a three-year-old had to recognize the sound of danger in a mother’s voice. Without moving her head as the rider approached, Annalaura hissed at Lottie with lips moving as little as she could manage.
    “Quit those weeds, and come over here slow.” Annalaura’s whispered, no-nonsense command caught the girl openmouthed.
    Fright replaced surprise on the child’s face as she instantly dropped her fresh-pulled weed, bent double, and walk-ran to her mother. Annalaura’s eyes remained on the horse and rider.
    The visitor could only be a white man because no colored would be out riding the lanes when it was harvest time. Besides, no colored could afford a horse like the gray Annalaura saw approaching her. Dread as heavy as the Tennessee heat landed on her bare head. With her hands on the shoulders of both Henry and Lottie, she pushed them further behind her skirt. Without moving her head, she slid her eyes from side to side in a frantic attempt to locate Doug and Cleveland. She thought she spotted swaying in the tobacco stalks some fifteen rows distant. She prayed that both her boys would stay quiet and out of sight. Just before the rider slowed his horse enough to see her face, Annalaura dropped her eyes to a spot at the middle bricks of the smoke house. As the man reined in the gray some twenty yards from where she stood with the two children, she shifted her eyes to the horse’s foreleg.
    “You doin’ any good out there?” Already, the voice was harsh and accusing her of the worst.
    Just as she feared, the rider was the owner of the acres her family tenant farmed—Alexander McNaughton. She gave Henry and Lottie securing pats as she raised her head in line with the horse’s flank. It was a carefully practiced motion that let her lift her eyes up to the rider’s trunk so she could, at least, read his body movements with him unaware that she was watching.
    “I’m doing right fine, suh.” She kept her voice low with just the right amount of practiced servility in it. She saw McNaughton’s brown-booted foot, covered by his faded work pants, stiffen in the saddle. She gauged him looking over the acres. She kept her neck bent and her eyes busy as she waited minutes for him to speak again.
    “Don’t look right fine to me.” The suspicion in his voice came as no surprise to Annalaura.
    She stilled her shaking shoulders. It was now her job to tell this white man that summer sun couldn’t stop a determined colored woman from doing what she had to do, man or no man.
    “Yas, suh.” She made sure he heard the contriteness in her voice that she had been found out in a little white lie. “We’s workin’ hard at it, suh.” She drew out his title in one long bowing-and-scraping breath. “Gonna bring it in for you, suh. Just like last year.”
    There. She had opened her battle plan. Remind him of the bumper crop her family had given him at the last harvest.
    “Last year ain’t this year, now is it, woman?” He shot her his first warning.
    But, warning or no, Annalaura had too much to lose not to fight back.
    “No, suh. It surely ain’t.”
    McNaughton twisted in the saddle to scan the acres on the other side of the smoke house. She took the opportunity to raise her eyes a fraction of an inch while she still kept her neck bent low. When she watched the middle of his blue work shirt swivel back around in her direction, she saw his trunk incline slightly in the saddle toward her.
    “These shoots ain’t nowhere near tall enough.” He let the accusation hang in the air for her ears to take in.
    She knew this was not the time to answer. Suddenly, McNaughton’s face came within line of her lowered vision as he bent over in the saddle to rest a forearm on his knee. Her racing heart picked up a pace, and she squeezed Henry and Lottie’s faces into the folds of her hiked-up skirt. Little Henry coughed and she eased up just enough so the child could breathe. This white man was staring at her and her children.
    “Those the only pickaninnies you got with you?” The words coming out of McNaughton’s mouth lacked the same bite as the earlier ones, and to white ears, may have been heard as soothing.
    But not to Annalaura. Without calculating the impact of her every word, she lifted her chin, and for a brief instant, looked directly into this white man’s face. Her own inside warning system pounded through her ears, but her words