After freedom came, the land where Meema and her family lived had no longer been called a “plantation.” It had become a “farm,” but there wasn’t much of a difference in the lives of the Black families; after the Civil War, they were sharecroppers, which was very close to being slaves. The Black families of Wood Place barely broke even at the end of the yearly cotton harvest.
They lived in poverty. They wore ragged clothes. They didn’t eat that well, either. Thirteen years after the so-called war to end slavery, whenever somebody Black in Chicasetta encountered white men in the town proper or out on country roads （even in the daylight）， that somebody Black was shaking and obsequious. They looked at the ground and hunched their shoulders. They were frightened of being lynched, now that Black bodies no longer were worth valuable currency on the slave market. When white men demanded to know their allegiance to other white, powerful landowners in the county, when they pointed their shotguns at a dark chest, asking, “Nigger, who you for?” no one—man, woman, or child—was bold enough to say, “I’m not for nobody but myself. I’m free now.” The Black somebody kept their eyes trained on the red dirt and whispered the names of their landlord. They hoped those syllables would provide a passport.
The church that Meema attended was constructed by Black men, those who had remained on Wood Place after the Civil War. Men who had not relied on their own fortune in their hands, who had not run through the forest away from the south, during the war. These men had stayed on Wood Place, and not because of any fairy-tale promise of good treatment, but because of their wives and children. These were the men who approached Pop George to ask their landlord （and former master） to sell them a parcel of land for the church.
Meema would tell her great-grandson Root that Pop George was the oldest living person on Wood Place. He was beloved to her. In the days before the war, he had been the caretaker of enslaved children, and she had been one of them. He had sat in his rocking chair with a pillow at his back and told stories. Two older children had run errands for him and brought food for the younger ones for meals. When she became an adult, Meema had been a caretaker as well, a “mammy,” the tender of the children of Victor Pinchard. She and her husband and her child and Pop George had shared a two-room cabin that was spitting distance to the big, columned house where the rich, white folks lived.
After the war, Meema and Pop George continued to share the favor of their former master: they weren’t charged rent for their spacious cabin, and no one who lived there had to chop cotton for a living, either. There was a large garden on the side of the cabin, and Meema freely picked peaches for preserves from the orchard on the farm. There were chickens in a coop out back of the cabin. In a pen, always a hog that was butchered every winter. As a very old man, Pop George didn’t work anyway, and Meema’s daughter and grandchildren didn’t do much, either, except take care of the garden and animals. Meema’s only paid labor was providing root remedies to women for their ailments, along with interpreting the dreams of the superstitious. Many of her clients were white ladies.
Thus, Meema and Pop George were “yard niggers.” Pop George stayed in her cabin because he’d always lived with her family, even before she was born. He was very spry, so he didn’t need Meema to help him bathe or walk around. She only cooked for him. In the evenings, they sat together in serenity. If the season meant that light reigned, Meema would pull their chairs outside of their cabin. She would quilt, piecing together discarded scraps from old clothes.
Pop George still would tell stories to children. Though slavery times were over, they were drawn to the cabin where he lived. Sometimes the children’s parents came to visit as well, and maybe it was on one of those visits when one of the men approached the old man, telling him they needed land for a church. Since he had given Meema the only consistent peace she had known, when Pop George asked her to approach their former master instead, she told him she would do her best to acquire the land.
The day that Meema walked up to the big white house, she headed up to the kitchen house, and greeted Venie James, the cook. Meema asked her to send word to Victor Pinchard, the owner of the house and the farm. Please beg his pardon and ask him, could he spare some time for her?
Meema would not tell her descendants the exact exchange that took place in that kitchen between Victor and her, whether he called her “Auntie” in the way of paternalistic white southerners. There was no way he would have given a Black woman the honorific of “Miss” or “Mrs.” That would put her on the level of a white woman, and that would never have done.