In her large, shadowed blue eyes lingered more dark secrets and sufferings than a child her age should know. She didn't look older than three, but she was eight years old and small, so pitifully small, and weak. I couldn't bear to look at him for too long, for fear I would cry.Ĭurled up on my lap was my younger sister. We looked at each other and felt sad with the memories the tune brought back. Chris played "Oh Susannah," singing softly in a sweet melancholy voice that touched my heart. He began to pluck on the strings of the guitar strapped to his shoulder. But when he saw her sickly, pale face, he frowned and worry darkened his eyes.
If he hadn't looked at Carrie he might have even been happy. His expression was confident he almost looked happy. His straight and finely shaped nose had just taken on the strength and maturity that promised to make him all that our father had been-the type of man to make every woman's heart flutter when he looked her way, or even when he didn't. His darkly fringed blue eyes rivaled the color of a summer sky, and he was in personality like a warm sunny day-he put on a brave face despite the bleakness of our situation. Chris was seventeen years old and strikingly handsome with long, waving blond hair that just touched his shoulders, then curled upward.
Oh! The relief to be gone from that state of our imprisonment! For the first time in years, I began to relax-a little. Just as she was finally seated, we passed over the state line between Virginia and North Carolina. It took her forever to pull herself onto the bus, then lug inside the many bundles she carried with her. It stopped for rest breaks, for breakfast, then to pick up a single huge black lady who stood alone where a dirt road met the concrete interstate. Our nerves grew frazzled because the bus stopped often to pick up and let off passengers. At some time in our life we had to believe in someone. Was ever a word more wonderful than that one? No, even though the cold and bony hands of death would reach out and drag us back, if God wasn't up there somewhere, or maybe down here on the bus, riding with us and looking out for us. We sat, all three, pale, silent, staring out the windows, very frightened by all we saw.įree. How pitifully delighted we should have been to be riding on a bus that rumbled slowly southward.
How exuberantly alive we should have felt to be freed, at last, from such a grim, lonely and stifling place. Warm perfume for vapor cold- I smell the rose above the mold! O'er the earth there comes a bloom Sunny light for sullen gloom
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