Free Come Juneteenth by Ann Rinaldi Page B

preacher before she married in December of 1863.

    Now it would be at least two months until Gabe came home again. If he could get away. And who knew when, after that.

    A S IT TURNED out, it was March when he again came home. The end was coming. Soon General Lee's line at the James River at Petersburg and Richmond would have to be abandoned.
    "He doesn't have enough troops to hold off Sherman in the Carolinas," Gabe told us. "I've asked to be sent to help, but it turns out our frontier here would be abandoned to the Indians, and I'm afraid they don't care who wins the war. They just insist on being a threat."
    Mama was distraught. She hugged him. Who was worse, she tried to decide, the Kickapoos or the Yankees?
    With Gabe home, Sis Goose once again was coming up to the room long after I had gone to bed. I would lie there waiting for her, wondering just when it was that things had changed between her and Gabe. And what would become of it.
    The night before he left again for Fort Belknap, Sis Goose came in especially late. Actually, it was near morning. Where had they been?
    Late the next morning, Gabe saddled up and bid
good-bye to us all, telling me to take care of Sis Goose, who stood to the side with tears in her eyes.

    That afternoon I went, as I did most days, to take a plate of supper to Edom in the log house that Grandpa had built.
    "Nice warm fire," he said, stoking it with a poker. "Burned all night long. He kept it burning."
    "Who?" I asked. But I knew instantly, even before he answered.
    "That young brother of yourn. Gabe. In here with that woman of his near the whole night."
    So. This is where they had stayed. How stupid of me. Of course. All the privacy they wanted here. Edom slept in the back room.

    G ABE WAS back at Fort Belknap when the war ended. We kept the ending from the slaves as well as we could.
    The vegetable and flower gardens were planted. All the fences were mended. Fertilizer was put in the fields. But it wasn't enough.
    The cotton must be planted. So must the wheat and corn.
    All the slaves were set to work. Pa, usually a wonderful host, deliberately cut off contact with anyone on the outside. He wanted no news of war's end, no hint of freedom to reach our slaves until he absolutely had to tell them.
    Was it right? We didn't discuss it. Did they suspect? They had no outside information, not even in the slave
grapevine, because Pa forbade the visiting back and forth to other plantations, even by men or women who had wives or husbands there. And they had Sam the overseer's cooperation.

    We became a country unto ourselves.
Did it matter?
we asked ourselves.
Who would be hurt with a couple of more months in bondage?
    I am sure God has that question written down in a dark book in gold print somewhere.

CHAPTER TWELVE
    P A HEARD, through his own connections, which he did not even tell Mama about and which she didn't ask him, that the Yankees were finally coming in June.

    We think he had something to do with the commission of men sent to New Orleans by Governor Pendleton Murrah to make peace terms with the Yankees.
    The men asked if the slaves could remain on their plantations until the crops were gathered. The Yankee officials said no.
    On June 19, 1865, General Gordon Granger issued the Emancipation Proclamation for Texas. Exactly two years and five months after the slaves back in the states heard of it.
    "Sir." Sam the overseer, faithful to Pa up until then, came to the big house to see him. "Sir, I can't hold out no longer. They's bound to find out and if'n you doan tell 'em soon, I'm afeared they'll all walk off from you. If'n you do tell 'em and ask nice, I think you got a good chance of havin' many of 'em stay. With some agreement, of course."
    Pa trusted Sam and agreed. And so he stayed locked in
his study all day and would take no vittles. Nor would he answer the knocks on the door. Mama finally got Sis Goose, whom I suspected he favored as much as me, to knock on the door and call in,