Underground to Canada Read Online Free PDF Page A

someone. In the jogging wagon, she mainly sang to the little children. Fat Sims didn’t mind this, but he had scowled when she tried talking with Lester or Adam.
    Liza looked at Julilly closely before she answered.
    â€œI came at cotton pickin’ time last summer,” she said, “sold and bought and throwed in here to live like a pig.” Her words were low and soft. Julilly had to strain forward to hear.
    Julilly wanted to ask more questions, but she held back: she wasn’t sure she wanted to know the answers.
    â€œYou been lookin’ at my bent-up back and beat-up legs,” Liza said bluntly. She seemed to read Julilly’s mind.
    â€œOld Sims likes to whip me,” she went on. She looked weary and rested her head on her drawn-up knees. “I tried runnin’ away. I got caught. Old Sims whipped me until I thought I was gonna die.”
    Julilly felt a coldness creeping over her. It squeezed her throat and made her breathing come in jumps.
    â€œThe slaves at Massa Hensen’s place feared it here in Mississippi,” she answered her new friend.
    Liza suddenly relaxed.
    â€œYou know what my Daddy said to me once. He was a preacher where we used to live.
    â€œHe said, ‘Liza, the soul is all black or white, ’pending on the man’s life and not on his skin.’ I figures old Sims got a soul like a rotten turnip.”
    Both girls smiled.
    A bell rang, startling the listless girls in the cabin to action. They began wandering out of the door. Julilly and Liza followed.
    The bright sun was blinding after the shadows of the cabin. Julilly squinted her eyes and then opened them wide. She wondered if she was really seeing the sight before her. Little children, naked and glistening in the sun, were running toward a wooden trough in the yard. A man poured corn meal mush into the trough from a dirty pail. The children pushed and shoved on hands and knees—sucking and dipping in the yellow grain until there was nothing left.
    Julilly stared with disbelief. She began looking for little Willie and the other children who had travelled with her in the wagon. But they weren’t there. They hadn’t yet learned how to suck their food from a trough like pigs. But Julilly knew that they would soon or they wouldn’t eat. She felt sick. Now she understood why the slaves in Virginia dreaded this place called “the deep South.” Liza was right. This plantation was a no-good, rotten place to live.
    Liza yanked Julilly into the line of older boys and girls. They gathered around a black washpot where collard greens bubbled and steamed, and bits of fat pork pushed to the surface now and then. Each person carried a gourd and dipped it in. Julilly shared Liza’s until an old woman came along and handed her one.
    There wasn’t much talk. There was too much hunger.
    Julilly’s gourd was empty and there was nothing more to fill her aching stomach but a dipper full of water.
    There was no gaiety or bounce in the walk of anyone around Massa Riley’s slave yard, Julilly noticed. At Massa Hensen’s, on a day off from work, folks collected in little groups to laugh and sing. Here it was like ghosts being pushed around. The slaves were as thin and frail as shadows.
    Again Liza yanked Julilly by the arm. This time she pulled her back to the cabin to take off her ragged tow shirt and put on a crocker sack full of holes.
    â€œWhat’s this for?” protested Julilly.
    â€œOn Sunday we wash any ol’ rags that we wear for the rest of the week.” Liza became sullen again. She could have been taken for a bent old woman if one forgot to look at the smooth, black skin of her face and her young, hurt eyes.
    The girls dropped their dirty clothes into one of the washtubs in the slave yard and punched them up and down in the steaming water.
    â€œHere’s your ‘battlin’ stick,’” Liza said, handing Julilly a hard solid stick. “Now