The Color of Your Skin Ain’t the Color of Your Heart Read Online Free PDF Page A

minute.
    “… just needed a place to get away for a while,” her uncle had been saying as I came in, “… let the heat cool, so to speak.”
    Then I heard Katie’s voice but couldn’t make out what she’d said. A light laugh, but without any humor in it, followed. “To tell you the truth, Katie,” her uncle said, “things have been a little rough for me lately.”
    “Rough … what do you mean, Uncle Templeton?”
    “Just that a man like me doesn’t always make friends, especially in my line of work.”
    “What kind of work do you do?”
    Mr. Daniels sighed. “Let’s just say that sometimes a man can try one too many schemes and it can come back to haunt him.”
    “I don’t understand,” said Katie.
    “Well, maybe it’s good you don’t. But there is more than one place where I have worn out my welcome, shall we say. I told you, those men have been hounding me too and …”
    His voice trailed off, or maybe he turned away. Then I heard him add, “… why I needed a place to come where I could hole up for a spell … but … didn’t expect … more than I bargained for …”
    He laughed again, though sadly this time. “I am sorry about your mama and papa, Kathleen,” he said, “… a good sister to me … try to help you if I can.”
    We didn’t pick any more cotton that day, or the next either, or the next day after that. With Katie’s uncle there, everything was suddenly different. None of us knew what to do. He didn’t say anything about what was going to happen, and Katie didn’t want to ask. Sometimes he was boisterous and friendly, sometimes sober and thoughtful. He was more like a visitor than a family member. He didn’t help and we did our chores and fixed meals and he ate with us and talked like everything was perfectly normal. The clouds kept coming and the sky kept darkening, which seemed to quiet us all the more. It was a strange couple of days. I was anxious to talk to Katie, and I knew the uncertainty was gnawing on her too. But I thought it best to wait until she brought it up. She had to work things out with her uncle first. She and I may have been friends, even best friends. But she and him were family .
    On the afternoon of the third day since he’d come, I was upstairs in the room that we had been calling mine, which used to belong to one of Katie’s brothers.
    I sat down on my bed, or whoever’s bed it was. All my old doubts had come back to plague me about my staying in a white man’s home and sleeping in a white man’s bed and taking the almighty presumptions I had. Everything Katie and I had done and been through together now seemed like a blur. I was again wondering if I should leave … or would have to leave. Katie’s uncle was nice enough. I guess you’d say he treated Emma and me about as nice as any white man possibly could. I hadn’t a single complaint. But he and Katie were white, and I was colored, and there wasn’t any getting around that fact. I figured that one way or another Katie’s uncle would wind up staying here with her and running the plantation now. I didn’t see any other way it could be.
    Unconsciously I found myself starting to go through the stuff in my room, looking at the few things I called my own, then at the things Katie had given me, looking at everything … clothes, her doll, mementos, my scraps of journal paper, and of course the nice journal Katie had given me and the pen and ink to write in it with and my mama’s Bible.
    I don’t reckon I was consciously thinking of it, but I think I was again preparing to leave, like I had a time or two before, wondering to myself what things were really mine, and which I ought to take, and which I oughtn’t to take.
    I was quiet and a little sad, though I was happy for Katie. We’d been worrying all this time about her kinfolk finding out. But now that her uncle Templeton had, I saw that maybe our worries had been for nothing. He had turned out to be a fine man. It was obvious that he