A story

The day was dark and murky, or so it was for the blacks in the 1700s. Night was cold and day was hot, food was scarce if they didn’t do their work. Blood trickled down their fingers because of the cotton they had to tend. These people were slaves, and they had nowhere else to go. Owners raped their women slaves, while making the men work harder. Slaves tried to escape, most not succeeding. Those not successful were given a beaten to a crisp. On some rare occasions the owners loved them. Loved them so much that they wanted them to stay with them forever, this is why they never gave them their freedom. Until the civil War came, making the slaves free, yet having us still separated until the 1980s. This story is about a girl falling in love with a man and having a family behind everyone’s back.1

In early autumn a little girl was running along the stream, giggling and having fun. Not looking at where she was going, she didn’t notice the mud. Falling down from her long skirts she did, her whole body was covered in the filthy mud. Her long golden locks were as black as the night, she didn’t look like herself. The sun was up high in the afternoon, she started to skip around not caring that her dress looked like rags, that the mud had made her skin look extremely dark.2

White men walked past her, and looked back in shock. This young black girl was in the streets they had thought. They picked her up and took her to their home; she didn’t realize what was happening. They were holding her in a way that she couldn’t even look down at the filth that was covering her whole entire body. The sun was setting high above the sky, her parents were worried, and the white men threw her in their wagon, not noticing the mud that they had taken off from when they held her. Not noticing the white arm that had been uncovered. She shook her hair out and as the mud was lifted from her golden curls, they turned into a driveway, leaving her in that wagon. 3