The Color of Your Skin Ain’t the Color of Your Heart by Michael Phillips

of them, an old ornate oil lantern of brass with a huge round base.
    “Ugh!” she said. “It’s too heavy!”
    “Do you want some help?” I asked.
    “No, we’ll get it later if it turns out we need it.” We climbed back up into the house and closed the door after us.
    The flood had come on us so suddenly in the middle of our picking cotton that we hadn’t really had the chance to think or talk about what it might all mean. But I came on Katie one day in her papa’s office sitting at the big desk of her mama’s going through papers again.
    “What are you doing?” I asked.
    She looked up and smiled kind of sadly.
    “Just looking at all of this and seeing if I can make sense of it,” she answered.
    “Can you?”
    “Not much. But with picking the cotton and everything, I’d been so excited about paying off that loan to Mr. Taylor that I hadn’t really thought much about the second loan. With all the cotton I thought we were going to pick, especially with Henry’s and Jeremiah’s help, and with the money that’s still in the bank, I wasn’t even thinking about it or worried about it. But then the storm came and now there’s not going to be any more money coming from anywhere.” ‘
    ‘Don’t you think what we got will be enough?” I asked.
    “I don’t know. The money left over from the first time wasn’t enough. That’s what Mr. Taylor said.”
    “What about the cotton piled on the wagons in the barn?” I asked.
    “I don’t know,” said Katie. “But it’s not as much as we picked the first time—before Henry and Jeremiah came. It’s only two wagons and one of them isn’t even full.”
    “When should we take those wagons into town?”
    “I don’t know. Maybe we should ask Henry.”
    Next time Henry came out to check on us after Shenandoah County was starting to dry out, we did ask him. He said he’d try to find out how prices were and whether we ought to sell it now or keep it through the winter.
    “But what you worried ’bout money fo’, Miz Kathleen?” he said.
    Katie glanced at me. I knew she was wondering how much to tell him.
    “Like I mentioned before, my mama had a loan at the bank,” she said after hesitating a minute. “We paid part of it with the last cotton we picked. But I don’t think there’s enough to pay the rest. And I don’t know how to get any more money.”
    Henry nodded as he listened.
    “Yep,” he said, “money’s hard ter come by when you ain’t got none, dat’s fo’ sho’. But dere’s ways er gittin’ it.”
    “What ways?” asked Katie.
    “Same ways you got it afore—jes’ takes a mite longer, dat’s all.”
    “What do you mean?”
    “Well, we cud plant dose fields er yers wiff mo cotton nex’ year, an’ den dat cotton’d grow up an’ up an’ we cud pick it jes’ like you done las’ time, an’ wiff me an’ Jeremiah helpin’, I figger you cud git hit in afore nex’ year’s rain.”
    “Could we … could we really plant more!” asked Katie excitedly. “How, Henry … when can we do it?”
    Henry chuckled. “Well, jes’ hold on ter yerse’f, Miz Kathleen,” he said. “First we gots ter plough up dat ol’ groun’ an’ we cudn’t do dat till spring. Den you’d hab ter spend some er las’ year’s money fer seed from Mr. Watson.
    Den we cud plant it all right. Might take us er while. We ain’t got dat macheenrey like I seen McSimmons usin’. But we cud do hit all right.”
    “When can we start!”
    “We gots ter wait till spring, Miz Kathleen.”
    The minute Henry’d put the idea in Katie’s head about planting and harvesting a new crop of cotton, her spirits rose and she couldn’t wait for spring to come. Having that to look forward to made the fall and winter months go both faster and slower at the same time.
    We’d been together now, the five of us, for more than half a year and gradually we were running out of things. We had to spend some of Katie’s money in the bank for flour and sugar and other food,