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Laurie Sinclair groaned and placed a hand in on the small of her back when she stood up straight and placed the okra she had just picked into her basket. She looked over her land and frowned. What was once acres of cotton and corn fields were now covered with weeds. All she had left now was a small patch of corn, okra, potatoes, and a few tomato plants. She no longer grew cotton; there was no point to it. She was almost all alone now and could not till the land by herself and grow enough and pick enough to sell. What the woman grew now was for her and Moses’s survival.She would sell most of what she grew in the city, the rest she would store for food for herself. Pickle some okra, store the corn in the bin, and stew and jar some of the tomatoes. The rest she would load on her cart and hitch up the old mule, a mule too old to plow a field any longer, and take to Milledgeville and try to sell. With luck she would make enough money to survive the winter, just barely she knew. She would have to buy feed for the few chickens she had left, chickens that she had rounded up from the woods two years ago; the ones that had escaped the clutches of Sherman’s bummers and then his army.She knew she would be offered charity from her neighbors and other good Southern Folk when she went into the city of Milledgeville, but she wouldn’t take it. She was never one for charity and she also knew that they didn’t have much and some even less than her. The ones that had more and were well off and had money meant they had been working for and or dealing with the Yankees. Laurie, as most decent folks, would as soon as spit on them before she took as much as a wooden nickel from her former friends and neighbors who had signed their loyalty pledge to the Union.She hated going into the town, but it was necessary. She hated seeing the Yankee soldiers in their blue uniforms strutting around like peacocks and speaking to the women in a manner no true gentleman would. The rich Yankee carpetbaggers now owning shops that once belonged to good, decent Southerners turned her stomach. The Yankee wives of the carpetbaggers strutted around in expensive but tacky dresses and looked down their noses at the southern woman. Women, who even in their now poverty, were still prideful and were more of a lady than they ever could be.The former slaves walked around in cheap suits as the Yankee politicians promised them land of their own and jobs if they voted this way or that way; only to give them a handful of Yankee Greenbacks and whiskey, lots of whiskey.Reconstruction they called it. It was martial law and an occupied army made up of thieves and men who were less than honorable. The only reconstruction that took place was to make the Yankee carpetbaggers rich and make the Southern people suffer as much as possible for losing the War.Of all their boasting of fighting to free the slaves, the Yankees had little understanding of the black race. Most treated the former slaves no better than the cruel overseers on the plantations they worked. Others were frightened of them. Yankee women refused to hire former mammies, who were gentle and loved by the white children they raised, in fear they would mistreat and some even believed eat their babies.Well, they’re free now, Laurie thought, even if the Yankees don’t want them they have their freedom if you can call what they still have to endure freedom. She never did like to the idea of owning another person and thought it was morally wrong.She would argue with her husband at times, a good man by all means, about the wrongs of owning another person. He would tell her that they did not mistreat their slaves, they did not beat their slaves, they didn’t break up families to sell, and they would not tolerate an overseer who took the whip to a slave. Laurie would just remind him, but they are still not free.While she did feel slavery was immoral, she was no abolitionist. Laurie felt it was a necessary evil. The south was dependent on agriculture and with Eli Whitney’s invention of the cotton gin; cotton had been the main cash crop of the South. The South became economically dependent on slave labor.Laurie set up a school for the young slave children and taught them to write and read, even though it was against the law. Some attended but most didn’t. Their parents were too afraid of what would happen if someone learned their children could read and write.Laurie Sinclair knew that while she struggled to just have a meager meal on the table and some days had gone without, she had it better than most. At least she had her home. Still, two years after she could close her eyes and smell and see the smoke of her neighbors’ homes burning as those blue uniformed demons set torch and fire to their once beautiful houses.Her home was spared, and while not as large as some of the other plantation houses, it was a nice home. Her grandfather had it built when he was young and settled in the area and fought Indians to set claim to what was to become his land.When the Union Army came through, a Yankee cavalry colonel set up his headquarters in her home. He promised Laurie we would spare her home and land and only take a small number of her livestock and leave her enough crops to be able to survive if she shared his bed. Her bed! The bed she and her husband had shared!While Laurie Sinclair was a widow, she was not an old woman. She was thirty-six when the Yankees made their way through Georgia. She married at sixteen and had her first child at age seventeen. She was still an attractive woman to who the Yankee colonel took an indecent liking to.Before the war and before she was married, Laurie Sinclair was considered one of the prettiest girls in three counties. She had several suitors and young men calling on her and asking her father for her hand in marriage. She was a prize for her beauty, her family name, and her land.Laurie was the only child of her parents to live to adulthood. Her mother had two miscarriages and a son who died of fever when he was three. The man who married Laurie Campbell would marry into a well-respected family and inherit her father’s land, home, and bank account.Almost the entire county was shocked when Laurie wanted to marry a young man from Louisiana. She rejected proposals from more suitable men to marry her husband.He had only lived in the county for a few months, was almost penniless, and rumor was he was running from the law In New Orleans for killing a man in a duel. No one, however, could not deny he was extraordinarily escort bursa handsome, charming, and a gentleman.At sixteen, Laurie fell in love with him and wanted to marry the man four years older than she was and he felt the same about her. Only a month after they had met, he asked her father for her hand in marriage. Laurie’s father said he would have to think about it, but Laurie knew his answer would be no. That same night, Laurie’s mother asked Laurie if she was pregnant due to the hurry of their wanting to marry.Laurie told her no she was not, but if that was what it took for her father to give his blessing she would go that night to the man she loved small house. She told her mother she would give herself to him as many times as it took for her to become with child.Laurie’s mother believed her daughter had truly fallen in love with the young man from Louisiana and told her daughter she would talk to her father. The next day her father gave his blessing and the young couple were married two months later. Laurie did not want to wait that long, but her mother told her that was the shortest time they could plan a wedding that would be appropriate for their family’s social standing in the county.Even now, two years after the War ended, at age thirty-eight, Laurie was still an attractive woman even if the hardships of the war and the even worse hardships after the war took their toll on her.Her face and arms no longer held the complexion of alabaster skin prized by Southern women who worked hard to keep the sun off their pampered flesh. Now, after two years of working her small patch of land, the sun had at first burned her pale skin at places the rays of the sun could reach and then tanned it. Her hands were no longer soft and delicate, but calloused from her work to scratch out just enough to survive. She had lost a great deal of weight since the War started. Her long red hair was more wild looking without all the brushes, combs, ribbons, bobby pins, and styling she once had time for. Still, Laurie Sinclair was considered a very attractive woman who men desired for honorable and non-honorable purposes.Laurie had spit in the Yankee General’s face when he made her the offer. A week later he and his troops were on the march again. They burned her barn, her fields, took her livestock, horses, and left her only with an old mule. They killed her chickens and pigs for food and stole all her jewelry and valuables she had hidden away before they arrived. The Yankee bummers were like hogs rooting out truffles when it came to searching for valuables. They didn’t find her husband’s shotgun or her father’s Colt Pistol at least nor the twelve twenty-dollar gold pieces her husband had left her before he went to war. They spared her house, however, but not out of any type of kindness.“Don’t torch the house, boys,” The colonel had ordered his men. “She was so willing to please me when she shared my bed,” he told his men with a laugh. “I hadn’t had that much fun or had a woman do things to me she did since the brothel in Atlanta.”“Damn liar!” Laurie shouted back at him as his men laughed at her. If she had her husband’s shotgun in her hands she would have shot the Yankee officer dead right then.Laurie had lost her husband and both her sons to the War. Her husband died at the prison camp Camp Douglas in far-off Chicago after he was wounded and taken prisoner at the Battle of Sharpsburg, called Antietam by the Northern papers. Her oldest son was killed at Gettysburg; he was twenty years old. Her youngest son was only fourteen when he died at the Battle of Griswoldville, only thirty miles from the home he was born and raised in.The fourteen-year-old boy had run away from home to join up when word went out that General Pleasant Jackson Philip was raising a militia to stop a regiment of Sherman’s army from taking the important industrial town of Griswoldville and then move on to Macon. Battle? It was more of a massacre. The Confederate Militia was made up of old men and young boys who faced a battle-experienced Yankee regiment, most armed with the new repeating Spencer Rifle. Reportedly being drunk, General Philp ordered his troops to charge a fortified Yankee position.The Confederate Militia suffered over six hundred dead and twice as many wounded or captured; the Yankees only had thirteen dead and less than fifty wounded. A local newspaper in Macon named it “A Harvest of Death.” It was reported by some confederate survivors that as the militia closed on the Yankee line, seeing that they were facing young boys and old men and the death toll they were inflicted, Union soldiers stop firing and started shouting to the oncoming enemy to stop and flee the battlefield. The brave men and boys of the Confederate Militia kept coming and the Union soldiers had no choice but to start killing again.Laurie took Moses and Della, a strikingly beautiful house slave whose father was African and her mother was a Cherokee Indian, with her to Macon to claim the body of her youngest and bought him home. The graves of her oldest and her husband were just tombstones over empty graves.Many women in the area had lost sons and husbands to the War, but Laurie was considered a hero and respected for the sacrifice of losing her husband and both sons for the Cause. Laurie damned the Cause and wanted her family back.The woman had cried when her husband and sons went to war, but that was the last time anyone had seen her shed a tear She cried in her bed alone for months after the death of her husband and then her sons, but she would be damned if anyone saw her mourn. That was until the day the Yankees burned her out and took all she had.The one cow she had, a skinny thing, she was lucky to have, would need hay. The cow was a blessing and she was lucky to have it. Big Mose said he had found it that spring in the woods. Laurie suspected he stole it, but she didn’t care. It was a Godsend and if he stole it from one of the Yankee carpetbagger families that had stolen her former neighbor’s land then all the better. Laurie turned her head when she heard the voice of a man cursing.“Moses, you know I don’t tolerate that kind of talk,” she chastised the man but had a smile on her lips.“I’m sorry, Misses. Sinclair,” the man replied and held up a shovel that was now in two pieces. “Broke the shovel handle digging up them taters, ma’am.”“Well, it was bound to happen as old as that thing is. We’ll get another one from town,” she assured the man.“We bursa merkez escort ain’t got the money for a new one, Mrs. Sinclair,” the man answered.“We’ll make do, Moses, we’ll make do,” she told him.Laurie looked over Moses or as most called the man, Big Mose. Laurie always called him by his given name and always had. He was called Big Mose for a reason. The man was the biggest man Laurie had ever seen. Moses was a young man, only twenty-two, or maybe twenty-three. Laurie could not rightly remember the year he was born even though she had been there helping his mother when she gave birth.Both his parents were long dead. His mother died of fever from childbirth and his father died when Moses was three from several bites by a cottonmouth snake.Moses was a giant of a man who stood about six foot six or six foot seven inches tall. He was a powerfully built man with huge arms and legs, his body so broad he could just barely fit through a normal-sized doorway. Whatever weight he once had in his belly had disappeared, just as Laurie had gotten much thinner, from lack of hearty meals over the past three years.While Laurie had lost weight and even muscle tone, Moses worked hard and his arms were still heavy with muscles. The young man’s skin was as black as coal and he kept his hair cropped close to his head.Moses was born a slave, born on the Sinclair Plantation. Now he was a free man, the War saw to that. While the other slaves had run off to follow that Devil Sherman’s army as he burned and pillaged his way through Georgia or left to seek their fortune elsewhere, Moses had stayed.It was five days after the Yankees had left and Laurie found Moses working on rebuilding the storage building close to the main house. Laurie walked over to him and handed him a white cloth poke.“I’m sorry, Moses, but this is all the food I can spare,” she had told him as he took the sack. “It’s not much, and for that I am sorry.” She then pressed two of her twenty-dollar gold pieces into the man’s large hand. “You hide these, Moses, don’t let anyone see you with them or they’ll kill you for sure. Spend them only when you need to.”The big young black man took the sack and looked at her curiously, not understanding.“Moses, you’re free,” Laurie had told the young black man. “You are free to go where you want now. You don’t have to stay.”“Misses Sinclair, I reckon if I am free to go where I want then I want to stay here,” he had told the woman. “This is the only home I’d known and seems to me you are going to need some help.”“It’ll be hard going, Moses,” Laurie told him trying to hold back tears.“Yes’em, I spect it will be and that’s why you need me and that’s why I need you,” he answered her.Laurie threw herself into the big man’s body and hugged his large, thick body as buried her head in his chest and cried. Moses did not lift his large arms to hug her back.“Ma’am, you best not be hugging me,” he told her. “If some white man came along they would hang me and tar and feather you.”Laurie rose on her tiptoes, stretched her arms as far as she could, put her hands on each side of the young man’s head, and had to pull him down for her head to reach his because he was over a foot taller than she was. She kissed the young man’s whiskered stubble cheek.“I’m not going to let no man hurt you, Moses, you have my promise on that,” she told him and felt a sudden deep affection for the large black man.“And I ain’t gonna let no one hurt you either, Misses Sinclair. You got my word on that,” the man assured her and then hugged her back as she once again buried her face into his chest and cried.Laurie cried in the man’s large arms for a long time. It was the first time she cried in a long time. She cried for her husband, for her two sons, for all she lost, and for Moses staying with her.She stepped back and Moses unwrapped his arms from her. Laurie wiped her eyes with her dirty hands and looked up at the man’s face. She took a deep breath.“Well, we best get started,” she had told him. “We best finish building you a place to sleep.”Moses grinned. “Yes, Misses Sinclair. I figure this here shed cause it’s closer to the house than the slave quarters. Where we is gonna get the wood and nails I don’t know.”“We’ll make do, Moses, we’ll make do,” she smiled up at the man. “And it’s Laurie now, not Mrs. Sinclair.”“Well, ma’am, that just won’t be proper,” he told the woman.They were able to scavenge enough wood and nails to build the shack well enough for the man to sleep in, using mostly the planks and nails taken off the main house. Both knew it would be too dangerous for them if Moses moved into the main home. Almost three years later, Moses still referred to Laurie as “Misses Sinclair”.Four days after Moses’s shovel broke, the two had filled the small wagon Moses had built from materials and an old broken wagon he had gotten somewhere, Laurie knew better than to ask from where, with enough vegetables to take into town and sell. They covered the wagon and placed it in the rebuilt barn to keep the raccoons, and other scavenger animals away from it.Laurie watched as Moses expertly skinned and filleted some catfish he had caught earlier that day. The man handled a knife better than a surgeon did a scalpel.They enjoyed a meager meal of catfish, fried green tomatoes, okra cooked in fatback, using the last of the cornmeal, and grits outside on the porch. It was a nice evening and Moses still refused to set foot into the house after the sun started to set.He always told Laurie it was not proper for a man, especially a black man, to be in the home of a white woman who was a true lady as she was after dark. He didn’t take to coming in during the day unless Laurie set her foot down and made him when she needed something fixed inside the house, which was often as of late.Laurie knew many white so-called gentlemen who were not as gentlemanly as this former uneducated slave. He was learning however, Laurie had taken time to teach the young man how to read and write. Making sure they set aside time away from their chores for lessons. Moses was a quick and eager learner.“Well, Moses,” Laurie said as she stood up. “We best get to sleep early tonight. We have a long day ahead of us.””I don’t know how many trips that ole mule got left pulling that wagon, Misses Sinclair,” Moses told her wiping his hands on his dirty pants.“We’ll make do, Moses, We’ll make do,” she answered with a smile and gathered up the chipped plates.“Sure wish I had bursa escort me some tobaccy to smoke after a meal in that fine pipe you gave me,” Moses commented as he stood up.Laurie had given Moses her grandfather’s ornate pipe the previous year as a Christmas present. She wished she could have given him more. The year before she had given him her husband’s razor with the ivory handle, two things she had hidden with the shotgun and pistol the Yankees didn’t find. He refused at first, telling her she could get a fair price in town for them. Laurie told him she could not bear to sell them and they belonged in the family and she and Moses were the only family they had left now.“Maybe we can buy you some good smoking tobacco tomorrow,” She told him with a smile.“Now don’t you go wasting any money you may get on me, Misses Sinclair, ya hear,” he told her. “Rabbit baccy is just fine for the likes of me. You got taxes you gots to pay soon.”Laurie placed a hand on the young man’s strong arm and gave it a gentle squeeze. “You let me worry about that, Moses.”“You know, Misses Sinclair, if you would just sell to them Yankee women and them soldiers you could make an extra dollar or two when we go to town,” Moses told her.Laurie snorted disgust, “I’d rather starve than sell to them and I’ll hear no more talk of it.”Moses smiled. “Yes, Ma’am.” He knew Laurie Sinclair was a stubborn and willful woman and he respected her for it.“We best retire now, Moses, we have to be up early and I need a bath,” Laurie told the young man. “You best bathe also. I can smell you from here,” she teased him.“Yes, ma’am,” the young man said, not realizing the woman was teasing him. “Night, Misses Sinclair,” Moses told her and walked to his one-room cabin.Laurie lay in the metal rub in her kitchen that she had filled with hot and cold water. After she had washed, Laurie relaxed in the tub. She enjoyed this time when she could be clean and relax until the water began to chill. She closed her eyes and thought of better days.Laurie thought of the days before the War, of her two sons, and her husband. The simple things. Family meals, her husband teaching her sons how to be good Southern men, the social events they attended together, her oldest son courting the pretty Savannah Trelawney girl, and as always her thoughts turned to the intimate moments she shared with her husband.She enjoyed and hated thinking of those times. Laurie enjoyed the thoughts of her and her husband kissing, the flirty banter between them, the way her husband touched her body and how she touched his, and of them making love. What she hated about it was how it would make her feel.Laurie had not felt a man’s touch on her body in over five years when her husband had come home from the war on furlough, only a few months before he was taken prisoner at Antietam. That was the last time a man had even kissed her. Laurie had kissed several of her suiters before she was married but her husband was the only man she had ever made love to. The only man she ever needed. Thoughts of her husband aroused her and she hated that feeling, knowing it could not be satisfied.It was not that men did not find Laurie desirable, she knew they did. She had men years younger than her wanting to court her or at least just be in her bed for a night or two. The men who were too old to fight in the war or were too young when the war started. Younger men who were veterans and even the men who were cowards who instead of fighting for the Cause stayed home and joined the Home Guard. There were some Yankee officers in town and she had heard the crude comments from Yankee soldiers as she walked by them when in town. Laurie would sooner burn in hell than allow a Yankee to so much as hold her hand.Laurie lay in the tub and was thinking of her honeymoon with her husband when she was sixteen and how he took her virginity. She was nervous that night and even afraid but he was gentle and loving. After the first time and they had both orgasmed, he asked her if she was okay and hoped he did not hurt her. Laurie had smiled at him and asked how long before they could make love again. Her husband laughed and told her he could go again right then. He did and they made love many times that night and the nights after.She thought of their sixth night together in the suite of their ship that was to take them on their Grand Tour Honeymoon in Europe. How she waited with anticipation naked in the bed for her husband to join her. How she felt the strong need for him to be inside her. When he joined her in bed, naked as she was, he kissed her passionately and his fingers found her light brown nipples, which were painfully erect from arousal. How he kissed his way down her body and paused to suck her nipples. How she begged him to enter her, almost in tears from the need to have him inside her, but he didn’t.He continued to kiss down her stomach and placed his head between her legs. Laurie suddenly became frightened and her thighs closed tight over her husband’s head. He gently spread her legs apart and placed his mouth over her sex. She had not even heard of such a thing but she could not deny the pleasure it gave her. She cried out in pleasure when his finger found the small nub just above her sex and he started to tickle it.His tongue entered her sex and her husband tasted her as his finger teased the pleasure nub. Laurie placed her hands on his head and pushed him into her, trying to force his tongue deeper into her sex. Her husband then took his mouth off of her and placed it over the top of her womanhood and his tongue started flicking over the nub, again she cried out in pleasure.He placed one finger and then two inside her; they slipped in easily due to the wetness between her legs. Again Laurie begged her husband to enter her and make love to her, but he didn’t. Instead, his fingers touched another spot, this one inside her sex and Laurie’s back arched and she cried out louder in ecstasy. Her husband massaged the spot inside her while his tongue teased her little nub and soon she screamed out as she orgasmed. She had never felt such pleasure in her life.She cried out so loudly that later that night she asked her husband if he thought the people in the next cabin may have heard her. He teased her and told her he didn’t think so because if they had the ship’s captain and some of his crew would have knocked down the door to the cabin thinking she was being murdered.“Where did you learn how to do that?” she asked her husband after her orgasm ended and she caught her breath.“I’m from Louisiana, Sha, we know all types of tricks on how to please a woman down in N’Awlins,” he told her in a fake Cajun accent.Laurie giggled and kissed her husband on the lips, the same lips that had been on her sex. “Do it again,” she told him and he did.

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