Soldier's Lady (Carolina Cousins Book #2)

Michael Phillips

Description

From Bestselling Author Michael PhillipsThe young women of Rosewood face new challenges--and old enemies--when a wounded black soldier rides into town. Micah Duff is an educated, spiritual man, and even though he and "scatterbrained" Emma are very different, the two soon fall in love. But an ambitious white man who can't afford any skeletons in his closet--or a black son--plans to get rid of Emma and her boy for good. Can Micah save them, as he once saved Jeremiah? Or this time will he be too late?

Informations

• Publié par: Baker Publishing Group
• Date de parution: 01 mars 2006
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781441211361
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 3 Mo

Extrait

© 2006 by Michael R. Phillips
Published by Bethany House Publishers 11400 Hampshire Avenue South Bloomington, Minnesota 55438 www.bethanyhouse.com
Bethany House Publishers is a division of Baker Publishing Group, Grand Rapids, Michigan. www.bakerpublishinggroup.com
Ebook edition created 2012
Ebook corrections 04.15.2016 (VBN), 09.21.2019
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means—for example, electronic, photocopy, recording—without the prior written permission of the publisher. The only exception is brief quotations in printed reviews.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is on file at the Library of Congress, Washington, DC.
ISBN 978-1-4412-1136-1
Scripture quotations are from the King James Version of the Bible.
Cover design by John Hamilton Design Cover photograph by Steve Gardner, PixelWorks Studio
To our friends from many years ago of Campus Christian Fellowship (CCF) and InterVarsity at Humboldt State University. With you we learned, we studied, we questioned, we laughed, we struggled, we prayed . . . and we grew into faith. What can be a more powerful foundation for lasting affection than that! Judy and I still look back at those days and those friendships as among the richest in our lives, for which we are eternally grateful. We think of you often and miss you. The hearts of all those who were part of those special bonds will forever be united with us by ties of love. How dear you are in our memory!
C ONTENTS

Cover
Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication
Prologue
1. River of Baptism, River of Death
2. Buffalo Soldier
3. Stranger at Rosewood
4. Reunion
5. New Friends
6. Ambitions
7. A Mighty Fine-Looking Man
8. Reading, Writing, and Ranching
9. Cows and Confusion
10. A Trip
11. Complications in Charlotte and Elsewhere
12. Master and Mistress
13. Sometimes It Hurts to Be Black
14. Storm and Stories, Laughter and Tears
15. Boy in Chicago
16. Streets for a Home
17. Mentor
18. Reflections
19. Confusing Thoughts
20. Stories, Dances, and Memories
21. Baptism
22. A Conversation to Remember
23. Learning to Read
24. Altercation
25. Weed Jenkins
26. Emma Hears a Voice
27. Another Baptism
28. Shakedown
29. Unexpected Feelings
30. Give Me Jesus
31. The River’s Claim
32. Confrontation
33. Grief, Healing, and More Tragedy
34. Another Conversation at the River
35. Plans
36. Happy Day
37. Farewell
Epilogue
Author Biography
Books by Michael Phillips
Back Cover
P ROLOGUE

As those of you who know something about me already know, I like to tell stories. When I was young, I used to make up stories to tell my little brother. We were slaves and life was hard, and stories helped the time pass easier.
As I got older, I realized that the best kind of stories weren’t made-up “stories” at all. They were true stories. They were just what happened.
So that’s how I first started telling about my life during and after the war, and about the people I grew to love through those times—Katie and her uncles, and Emma and Josepha, and Henry and Jeremiah. And I came to see that everybody’s life is a story worth telling, because everybody’s life is a “true story” just like Katie’s and mine.
But it’s sometimes hard to tell someone else’s story. You have to try to think like they would think, and feel the kinds of things they feel. To tell someone else’s story you have to “get inside” them, and that’s a mighty hard thing to do. But then that’s what makes another person’s life worth telling—that inside part of them that’s the real person God made.
If there’d never been a war and if slavery hadn’t ended, maybe I’d have grown up to be one of those old white-haired slave women rocking in a chair with little black children all around, telling them all the old slave stories and singing them the old colored spirituals.
But the war did come, and slavery did end. I used to be a slave, then I was a free black girl. Change came to blacks like me all over the South. Change came to whites too. It was a time when this country was turned upside down in the way folks thought about the color of people’s skin. So the stories I’m telling are the stories of black folks learning to be free and about white folks learning to live with free black folks, and about those times after the war when it was dangerous to be black, but also exciting. It was a time when things were changing so fast you could hardly keep up with them, in good ways and bad ways both.
I reckon I say that because there were good people and bad people, of both colors of skin. And some of the stories I have to tell are about both kinds of people.
What happened in those days involved danger and heartbreak because, though there are lots of happy memories, they were frightening times. But those of us who lived through them discovered how deep love can be. Because when it weathers change and danger, love comes through stronger than ever.
So I reckon you’d say those times taught us to endure heartache, but mostly they taught us to love.
R IVER OF B APTISM , R IVER OF D EATH
1

A S THE SUN SLOWLY CREPT ABOVE THE HAZY HORIZON and then inched its way into the sky, it was clear enough to anybody who’d spent much time in North Carolina that this would be a hot and muggy day.
By ten in the morning it was ninety degrees. At noon it was over a hundred. Not a breath of wind came from anywhere. What work there was to be done around the plantation called Rosewood was finished by lunchtime, and no one felt inclined to go out in the hot sun after that if they didn’t have to. The cotton and other crops would continue growing. The weeds in the vegetable garden would keep for another day. The animals would take care of themselves without any help until milking time came for the cows late in the afternoon. It was the kind of day that made the dogs too tired to do anything but lay sprawled out on the ground with their tongues hanging out. The chickens were too listless to make much racket. Only the cattle in the fields didn’t seem to notice the heat. They just kept munching away.
“You want ter go dab dose feet er yers in da ribber, William?” said twenty-one-year-old Emma Tolan to her four-year-old son.
“Dat I do, Mama!” replied the boy eagerly. “Kin we go now?”
“We’ll go right after lunch,” answered Emma.
Forty minutes later, the tall slender black girl and chubby little boy of tan complexion walked away from the house hand in hand. They crossed two fields of green ripening stalks whose cotton the young mother would help pick later in the summer as she had for the past four years since coming to this place. Back then she had been a scatterbrained former slave with a half-white newborn son to take care of, fathered by her former master. She hadn’t been much use to anyone all her life up until that moment, and she knew it. If ever anyone felt worthless as a person, it was she. Though she had been the oldest of the three girls thrown together by the war and left to figure out a way to survive alone, she had needed more taking care of than both the others combined.
On the memorable day when the white girl discovered Emma hiding in the Rosewood barn, she was babbling incoherently and frightened out of her wits, and her labor with little William’s birth had already begun. But she had grown and changed in the four years since that day she had found her way here. The roots of that change had matured slowly and invisibly under the influence of her two friends and saviors, white Kathleen Clairborne, whose plantation it was, and black Mary Ann Daniels, whose home it became.
And new and even more far-reaching kinds of changes had begun to stir in Emma’s heart a month or two ago, in the spring of 1869. These changes had been obvious to everyone at Rosewood—and what a strange assortment of people it was! Emma’s countenance grew quieter. A look of peace and dawning self-assurance gradually came over her face. More often these days, rather than the most talkative, she was the quietest member of the Rosewood family around the kitchen table, sitting content to listen, watch, and observe.
Emma’s soul had begun to come awake.
And that is about the best thing that can ever happen to anyone.
So as she and William made their way to the river on this hot June day, Emma was not thinking of swimming or playing in the water with her son to cool off from the heat. She was going to the river to remember.
She had been doing this so often these last several weeks, since that day she would never forget. Usually she came alone—to pray or sing quietly and let her heart absorb the memory of what she had felt as she had come up out of the water, face and hair dripping, face aglow with new life.
Praise Jesus! were her only words. She had not shouted them as in a camp meeting revival. Rising out of the river’s waters, she had uttered them quietly, reverently, scarcely above a whisper. For the first time in the depths of her being she knew what those two eternal words meant. And her smiling heart had been quietly repeating them over and over since then . . . Praise Jesus . . . Praise Jesus.
Emma Tolan had begun to change before that day. But her baptism sent that change so deep into her heart that she was still trying to grasp it. So she came here every few days—to sit as the river flowed slowly past her, to ponder what God had meant when He made her, and to reflect on what He might want to make of her now that she knew how much He loved her.
She could not know—how could she have known?—that she was being watched.
In this season of peace and happiness in her life, Emma was not thinking of the past, nor of the secrets she possessed, whose danger even she herself did not fully recognize. She was thinking of the wonderful now and the bright future.
But there was someone who was thinking of a dark past—of a time