Free The Ballad of Lucy Whipple by Karen Cushman

said, "I can't rent a bed to a colored man. All my other boarders would leave."
    "Not Jimmy."
    Mama commenced chopping vigorously, as if she had to make up for that minute of rest. "Probably not Jimmy, but everyone else."
    "Why?"
    "Because lots of people think colored folk aren't fit to live with white people."
    "Why not?"
    "I don't exactly know why not. Scared maybe. Anyway, Mr. Scatter would never allow it."
    "But, Mama, what will happen when it rains and snows and the ice—"
    "Lord, Lucy, don't pester me. Your friend can sleep in Sweetheart's old shed and I'll make him breakfast and supper for ten dollars a week if he'll eat it outside. That's all I can do."
    I ran back to Ranger Creek and told Joe.
    "Now that's mighty nice, young lady, but I'll be fine—"
    "No, you won't be fine when it rains ice for days at a time and you have no food and no fire and no shelter. Be reasonable, Joe."
    "I suppose I could manage ten dollars a week if I traded some of this dust and maybe got me a town job. But..."
    "But what, Joe? Spit it out." I sounded to my own ears like Mama.
    "Out here where I see no one but you, I am a free man. But I worry that Mr. Sawyer or some other white man will find me and take me off to be a slave again. A town, even a little town, is too dangerous for me. I best stay out here."
    "You have to come. You've never seen winters like we got here, with ice storms and buckets of rain." Besides, I liked having him around. We were friends. I enjoyed his stories, and he admired my reading. Not many people admired anything I did. "Please, Joe."
    Joe was silent. Then he sighed. "Well then, Miss Lucy, now I got me this fine place to live, all I need is a name."
    I stopped my gleeful hopping and spinning to ask, "Isn't Joe your name?"
    "Mr. Sawyer, he called all the men Joe so's he didn't have to bother remembering who was who. I think I need me a real name that belongs only to me."
    I thought of
The Count of Monte Cristo
under my pillow. "Maximilian," I said. "Maximilian is such an elegant name."
    Joe rubbed his chin. "Maximilian don't seem to suit me, missy."
    "Ivanhoe or Damian or Appassionato?"
    "No, seems like I don't feel like an Appassionato, thanks all the same."
    A few days later, when Joe showed up to claim his bed in the shed, I said, "I have a present for you."
    "You ain't got no call to get me presents, missy."
    "Nevertheless, here it is." I stretched out my fist and slowly opened it. The hand was empty.
    Joe looked at me.
    "It's a name. For you. My father's name. Bernard."
    "Bernard." Joe rubbed his beard. "Bernard. It's a mighty fine name, missy. A name I'd be proud to carry. Bernard."
    "There's more," I added, sticking out my other fist. "A last name." He blinked.
    I opened my hand. "Freeman," I said.

CHAPTER ELEVEN
S PRING 1851
In which a wandering preacher saves Butte's body

and Amos Frogge's soul, and my new

Massachusetts scheme goes awry
     
    Clyde Claymore came riding into Lucky Diggins with the wildflowers the next spring. He was a big man, tall and bulky, dressed in rusty black linsey-woolsey and a wide-brimmed black hat. He rode into town on a mule so small that Clyde's enormous square-toed boots dragged in the mud. I thought Clyde could more easily carry that mule than the mule carry Clyde.
    I first saw him from the boarding house porch, where the broom and I were engaged in our constant war against mud.
    "Young lady," he boomed as though calling in a canyon, "where is the town of Lucky Diggins?"
    "This is it," I said.
    "The rest of it, I mean."
    "This is all."
    "All? This little place?"
    Surprised, I looked around. California was now one of the great United States of America, and Lucky Diggins was booming. The town boasted Mr. Scatter's saloon and a new drinking place opened by a gambler called Poker John Lewis, a general store of wood as well as the boarding house with a real porch, the smithy, the card parlor, a supply store with picks and axeheads and shovels, a restaurant that served