Reckless Lives: A Tale of the Old South

Scarlett and Michael meet

Michael snuck out of the house after his studies and found his way into the fields.

“Michael! That’s your name ain’t it?” The voice was coming from a girl bent over with a red kerchief on her head.

 She introduced herself as Scarlett once he stopped staring.

She was slight and had delicate features that appeared almost white. Her fingers moved nimbly over the cotton bolls as if she had been born to do the work.

Michael was surprised she spoke to him. The fieldhands didn’t usually speak to him, because he lived in the Big House and every time they did see him, he was accompanying Lizzie.

Scarlett's father had sold her into this thing called slavery, to get her off his plantation and onto someone else’s. 

He hoped Scarlett would be light enough that he could pass her off as his wife’s child. When she was two, Scarlett looked so like him, it was eery, but it was obvious her mother had been a slave. That was when he knew he needed to get her out of the house to save his reputation and his marriage. His wife had been able to tolerate baby Scarlett, but she was not happy when the product of his indiscretion with her slave woman, Melody, began toddling about and getting into everything.

What choice had he had? Patsy had asked Scarlett to take the edge off her father's betrayal. He couldn’t just leave her in the house with his wife getting more angry by the day, and he certainly couldn't walk out and see his own daughter laboring on his plantation. The guilt would surely eat away at him. So, he had done the only sensible thing he could do, and taken little Scarlett with him to the Henderson place, home of a good friend and kind master, the next time he rode out. So he wouldn’t have to watch her suffer.

She could suffer all she wanted as long as he didn’t have to watch! Scarlett thought bitterly.

Scarlett remembered being part of the Henderson household, at least for a couple of years. She didn’t remember much from that time, aside from an argument she’d had with Lizzie. The next thing she knew, Patsy was picking her up and carrying her, kicking and screaming to her cabin, to live out the rest of her days as a field hand. Scarlett tried to run back to the Big House for three days. Each time, Patsy picked her up before she even got inside, gave her a slap on the rear and took her back to the fields. After a few weeks of moping in Patsy’s cabin, crying helplessly and not knowing what to do while Patsy worked, Scarlett decided it would not be so lonely to go out and pick cotton with the rest of the slaves.

It was a monotonous task, but over the years she had become extermely skilled at it. She sometimes lost herself in the task and even enjoyed it...not that she would ever tell that to a single living soul. She could keep the task going and still hold up her end of a conversation, as well as if there was nothing to do besides talk. She was proud of her picking ability; she only wished she had more time and opportunity to improve herself.

Scarlett scarcely stopped to introduce herself, and she was back bent over the bolls, stripping the cotton faster than the Egyptian locusts in Moses' Egypt. Of course, Scarlett was far from a plague. She had once overheard Mr. Henderson comment on her work to another visiting plantation owner. He had called it a stroke of good fortune that Scarlett had come to his plantation. She had been tempted to follow him back home afterwards and ask questions, but Patsy had it drilled into her head that she was not to enter the Big House ever again, unless she was summoned for.