When This Cruel War Is Over Read Online Free PDF Page B

to read so they could learn about Jesus in the Bible. Mrs. Conway got a letter from Virginia telling her that her brother had gotten his head chopped off by a slave named Nat Turner. He tried to start a revolution to put the black people on top and the white people on the bottom. If that didn’t prove he was crazy, what did? But you could not blame black people for going crazy when you think of what happened to some of them.
    Maybe Nat Turner had a sister like Maybelle. Too pretty to let in the house because the white men would be after her and too pretty to work in the fields because she was worth a lot more money working somewhere else. Slaves like Maybelle were a powerful temptation to owners like Colonel Todd. He had two wild sons.
Jack went off to some expensive northern college named Yale and got himself tamed down and married a rich girl in Alabama. But Andy, his younger brother, no one could tame him. He got thrown out of another northern college and ran up gambling debts in Lexington at the races and God knows where else and suddenly Colonel Todd needed money. That’s when he took Maybelle to Lexington and let them sell her to a whorehouse in New Orleans.
    That was just before the war started and people began thinking of running away because they heard President Abe Lincoln was going to free all the slaves and Colonel Todd said before that happened he’d sell them all to Brazil, they were his property and no damn government was going to touch his property. Before the war no one had run away because Colonel Todd told them white people in the North didn’t want niggers in their backyards and he read them stories from newspapers about whites beating up niggers and Lucy asked Miss Janet if they were true and she said yes, that was why it was better to stay in Kentucky and live a quiet life as her body servant.
    But every time Lucy thought of Maybelle in that whorehouse in New Orleans and Colonel Todd using the money to pay off Mr. Andy’s gambling debts she was tempted to run away and when the war started she didn’t want the slave owners to win no matter how much they spouted about lying Yankees and low-down Irish and Germans.
    When Aunt Rachel finished reading the letter Lucy would take a dab of honey and seal it good enough to fool the woman who ran the Confederate Post Office in a cave near Hawesville. The Confederates had post offices all over Kentucky in caves and barns. They had riders who carried the mail to Virginia or Tennessee or wherever it was supposed to go, right under the noses of the Union men.

    Lucy wished she had someone else to read Miss Janet’s letters for her. Rose Hill was run by Rogers Jameson, Colonel Adam Jameson’s father. He was the one who told Lucy that Maybelle had been sold to a whorehouse. He said that was always what happened to pretty niggers especially light-colored ones like Maybelle. Rogers Jameson looked forward to getting to New Orleans when the war ended so he could enjoy Maybelle. He said he tried to buy her from Colonel Todd but old Master was too scared of Mrs. Todd to say yes. So the colonel sold her way down south where Mrs. Todd wouldn’t know nothing about it.
    Whenever Lucy started thinking about that whorehouse she knew what Maybelle was liable to do: kill herself. They had seen their mother try to do it when Colonel Todd said he was going to sell two of their brothers, Luther and Tom, south to help pay the feed bills when the weevil got into the wheat crop. She cut her wrists with a paring knife and bled all over the kitchen. Lucy would never forget the day she came downstairs and found Maybelle mopping up the blood, screaming, “Momma! Momma!” There was blood everywhere. Lucy mopped it up too and Mrs. Todd poured hot wax in the slashes to stop the bleeding.
    Colonel Todd changed his mind about selling Luther and Tom. A month later they ran away. No one at Hopemont ever heard from them again. Maybe by now they were in the