Free Angels Watching Over Me (Shenandoah Sisters Book #1) by Michael Phillips

life, being a girl in a slave family. Mama depended on me, and that’s how life was. My daddy and all the men worked in the master’s fields all day. When he and the men came back to the slave quarters every night, they were so tuckered out, it was all they could do to sit at the table and eat the watery stew Mama and the other women had made that day.
    It was a hard life for women too, and for children like me. Everybody had to work—work was what we did. It was the only life we knew. When the sun came up, we got out of bed and started working. We worked till we fell asleep that night.
    But Sundays were different. After the chores were done, the master let us have the whole afternoon and evening to ourselves. That’s when the old men told stories and people gathered round. Then in the evening there would be a big fire and lots of singing.
    How I loved the singing! It wasn’t the kind of music Katie and her mother made from notes on a page that somebody had written down. Our music came from our insides—from our souls, I reckon you’d say, and from our feelings. Our music was about us and about our way of life, and sometimes it could lift a body right up to heaven, it was so pretty.
    That’s where I started to learn about religion too, from the singing and the stories. It seems that the harder the times got, the more we sang songs about people in the Bible, about others who’d had to work hard, who’d suffered too.
    But Monday always came again, and then the work would begin the minute we got up.
    But children don’t know a hard life from an easy one. Youngsters just cope with what they’ve got to cope with and don’t think about it.
    I didn’t think about it either. I just did what I had to do. I reckon that’s where I got my common sense and practicality, in the same way that Katie hadn’t yet learned to do too much for herself. Maybe that’s why God saw fit to bring me and Katie together—so that our differences could fit together to help us be more than either of us could have been by ourselves.
    The man I called ‘‘Papa’’ died when I was twelve. I don’t know why. I think he got sick from something. Death was part of slave life. Somebody was always dying. Mama was expecting again. The master said she could stay on in the cabin till the new baby was two. Then she’d need to marry again or be sold off.
    Mama cried for a day or two. Then the tears dried up, and we went on doing what we had always done.
    Sometime after that I came upon Mama one day sitting alone on the bed with a strange kind of look on her face, kinda happy and sad at the same time. I guess it’s what you’d call nostalgic, but I didn’t know that word then. She was holding a funny-shaped little blue thing.
    ‘‘What’s that?’’ I asked.
    ‘‘Just a reminder of a long-ago time, chil’,’’ she said, smiling that peculiar smile again.
    ‘‘What does that word on it mean?’’
    ‘‘Dat ain’t a word, chil’. It’s a reminder of the tears of life dat sometimes a body can’t help, an’ some memories are best left unremembered.’’
    ‘‘Where’d you get it, Mama?’’ I asked.
    She looked at me deep in the eyes, then down at the pin, then up at me again and smiled. Then she put it away with her Bible, and I don’t recollect seeing it again, excepting every once in a while on a special day like Christmas when she’d hang it from a chain around her neck. But she never answered my question . . . and I never asked about it again.
    Nothing much changed right after that. My grandpapa lived with us too after Grandmama died, but he was getting too old to work in the fields. The master wasn’t too happy about our cabin full of people with none of us working in the fields. When the new baby was two months old, Mama went to work out in the fields with the men.
    A while after I got to be fifteen, I recall a day when the master and two of his sons came down to the quarter. He visited a few minutes with Grandpapa.