Miss Katie's Rosewood

We'd been through a lot together, Katie and me. First we were strangers. Then we began thinking of ourselves as sisters trying to survive together. Then we found out that we were actually cousins
.

But mostly we were friends. And that made all the difference in the world.

And now these two friends, Kathleen Clairborne and me, Mary Ann Daniels—Katie and Mayme as we called each other—were just about grown-up young women. It was hard to imagine, but I was twenty and when you get to be that age you look at things a little differently than you do when you're fourteen or fifteen. That's how old Katie and I were in the spring of 1865 when we met just after the war ended. Now it was 1870. The South had changed and things were dangerous.

As I said, I was twenty and Katie was nineteen. We loved our North Carolina home, the plantation called Rosewood in Shenandoah County, but my father and our uncles (Templeton Daniels was my father, Ward Daniels was my uncle, and they were both Katie's uncles) had been encouraging us to think about our future. Their sister, our aunt Nelda, had visited Rosewood a
while earlier and had invited us north for a visit. She had written a few times since too, telling us about a girls' school for young women in Philadelphia where we could get more of an education than either of us had ever dreamed possible.

It wasn't that my papa or Uncle Ward were anxious to see us leave Rosewood. If they could have had their way, they would keep us there permanently. But they wanted what was best for us, even if it meant leaving for a while to attend school in the North. They recognized that things were changing for women as much as for Negroes. They wanted to give us every opportunity to do as much with our lives as possible.

The idea of being separated wasn't one any of us liked. But Katie and I gradually realized that maybe my papa and Uncle Ward and Aunt Nelda were right, and that we needed to see what schooling might offer two girls like us who weren't really girls anymore. If we didn't take advantage of schooling pretty soon, it could be too late. That's not the kind of thing you can do after you start a family.

My beau, Jeremiah Patterson, was in the North, and not so very far from our Aunt Nelda's in Philadelphia. That gave me another reason for looking forward to the trip. I hadn't seen him in over six months, since just after his daddy Henry's marriage to Josepha, our cook and friend. And Robert Paxton, Katie's young man friend, had just moved to Hanover, Pennsylvania, also not so very far away from Philadelphia.

So we decided to take the train north to visit Aunt Nelda for three or four weeks, to visit the school in Philadelphia and see if we liked it there. And also hopefully to arrange a visit with Jeremiah and Rob.

We planned to go north in May.

Even without Jeremiah's help, the six of us at
Rosewood (my papa and Uncle Ward, Henry and Josepha, along with Katie and me) had got the fields ready and the year's cotton crop planted. We'd even managed to get ten more acres planted than the previous year. So it would be a good time for us to be away. The weather would be good, the cotton would keep growing, and we'd be back in plenty of time for the harvest. And we needed a good harvest too, because a few debts had piled up over the past year or two.

At least that's how we had it planned.

But one thing about plans . . . you never know when something's going to come along and upset them.