Every fair morning she went to the field with her skirts tied up short with a string around her hips to keep them out of the dew. Field work was no hardship to her. All her people before her had been field hands. Hoeing cotton was no more than a game. The hoe in her hands became a sharp seeing edge that slipped in between the tender stalks and carefully cut out hiding grass blades. She could guide it without thinking or with her thoughts on something else.
On rainy days she sewed at home, and the needle in her fingers became a shining eye that ran ahead, leading the strong blind thread behind it, sewing cloth into garments for her child.
Her time to go down was not far off. The next change in the moon might bring it, and yet she was still light-footed and deft-fingered, thank God.
One morning while she was hurrying home from Grab-All, where she had been to buy a few more lengths of cloth to finish some of her baby's clothes, a terrible spasm of pain seized her body. It scarcely passed before it came back and seized her again, tearing her bones and sinews apart, fairly cutting at her very heart-strings. Lord, how scared she was. She cried for help as loud as she could, but nobody was in hearing distance, and her child was born
