Ole Jim and a Boy in Blue

WC: 300

It was late afternoon, a sultry day in September. In the middle of a cotton field an old Negro man was moving along slow, bent at the waist and chopping at weeds with a vengeance, like a man possessed by the devil himself.

“Git boll weevil, no place for you to hide. Ole Jim gonna cut the thistles down. Ain’t no place for the burdock here, not in the Master’s cotton,” the black man sang.

Jim stopped, leaned against his hoe and rested, removed his straw hat and wiped sweat from his grievous eyes. The linen Mistress Emily had given him gave little respite from the Georgia sun. He stuffed the dirty rag back into his pocket and looked over his shoulder.

“Come by here, Lord…come by here.”

On both sides…front and back, cotton surrounded Jim. As far as he could see, the white bolls fluttered, glistening in the afternoon sun. “Ole Jim gots a long row to hoe, Lord,” the black man sang.

Jim raised his hoe again, ready to give the weeds another blow. He stopped in midair, lowered the hoe and gazed down into the shadows beneath the cotton.

There…under the leaves, a boy dressed in blue pulled a drum closer to his side, putting it between himself and Jim.

Man and boy stared into one another’s eyes.

The boy finally spoke. “What are you looking at?”

“Ole Jim never seen nothin’ like you in the fields. What you doin’ here in the Master’s cotton?” Jim asked.

“Hiding.”

“You hidin’ from the soldier men?”

“Yes, from the Rebs. I’ve got to get north, beyond Chickamauga, old man?”

“North is where freedom be…maybe I show you the way.”

After dark, two strangers, man and boy snuck through Confederate lines heading north, one seeking safety and one seeking freedom.