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

Then Grandpapa called out to fetch me and Samuel, who was now eleven. We came and stood while the master looked us over head to toe. Behind him, the master’s oldest son was looking at me real ugly-like.
    We both knew what it was all about. Slaves had value to their masters in one of three ways. Strong men worked. Strong women had babies. And children were raised to do one or the other—or else be sold. Boys grew up to give the master more work. Girls grew up to give him more babies. If he didn’t think they’d do either very well, or if he needed what money he thought they’d bring, he’d sell them. The time had come when the master was thinking what would be best to do with me and Samuel when our time came.
    He looked Samuel over, probably asking himself when he could start taking Papa’s place in the fields. He was feeling the muscles of Sam’s arms and looking over his shoulders and chest, wondering how much he was going to fill out, while my brother stood there staring straight ahead still as a statue. Then he came over to me to do the same. People nowadays probably think it a pretty awful thing for a man to do, but back in those days a slave was his master’s property and he did whatever he pleased with them, same as he would a wagon or a cow or a saddle.
    He walked up to me and started looking me over too. He stuck a couple fingers in my mouth and pried it open so he could see all my teeth. Why didn’t I try to bite his fingers off , you’re maybe wondering. Because I didn’t want my back bleeding from a whipping, that’s why. I’d already had two whippings in my life, the worst from the master’s son, and I didn’t want to ever get another one.
    Then he stood back and looked at my front, and his eyes paused a few seconds at my breasts, which were starting to bulge out a bit under my dirty apron. Out of the corner of my eye I saw his two sons wink at each other, and I didn’t much like the way they were looking at me. Then the master nodded to himself and turned back to my grandfather.
    ‘‘A mite scrawny,’’ he said, ‘‘and not much of a looker. Still, she might fetch seventy-five dollars. You got any of your young bucks in mind to bed her down?
    Otherwise I’ll get what I can for her.’’
    I didn’t hear what my grandfather said.
    It didn’t matter. I didn’t get bedded by any of the sixteen- or seventeen-year-old slave boys, or sold either.
    Because two weeks later is when the renegade soldiers came.

M ASSACRE
12

    I DIDN’T KNOW AT THE TIME WHO THE SOLdiers were.
    I didn’t know that the war was all but over, or that the South was breaking up and in chaos, or that deserters or marauders were roaming everywhere. All I knew was that a war had been going on between North and South, that the two sides wore blue and gray, and that somehow we slaves were in the middle of it. Sometimes we’d see soldiers riding by, and once or twice you could hear cannon fire way off in the distance. But mostly we went about our work.
    Some said the soldiers from the North, Mr. Lincoln’s soldiers, were trying to set us free. But it was hard to think of any white man—even if they wore blue and talked funny—as friends to colored folks.
    I was down at the creek fetching water when I heard horses galloping toward the shacks and barns of our colored town—which now I reckon folks would call a collection of hovels—where we slaves lived. Our men were mostly in the fields, so no one could have put up much of a fight. It was all over too quick for that.
    A thunder of riders was coming so fast I could feel the ground shaking under me. With the shouts and horses and the dust and dirt flying, it looked to my eyes like a hundred men bearing straight for the houses, yelling and shooting. I heard screams from Mama and the rest of the women. Then gunfire and more shouts. Terrible sounds filled the air all around me. Horrible screams and loud explosions from the guns all mingled together in an uproar that was