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had reversed: Lizzie had been set free, and now Josephine was the one enslaved in a world of poverty and uncertainty. Since neither God nor her daddy was taking care of her anymore, Jo would have to take care of herself—beginning with growing her own food. She turned her back on Lizzie and started chopping at the dirt so Lizzie wouldn’t see her sudden tears. “Like this?” she asked, trying to mimic Lizzie’s actions.
    “Wait! Let me get another hoe, Missy Jo, and I’ll show you the right way.” Lizzie fetched the hoe leaning against the garden fence, then bent to ruffle her fingers through a row of tiny plants, like delicate green lace. “These here are carrot plants, Missy Jo. The rest—like this here—are weeds. I’m chopping out the weeds so the plants have a chance to grow. But I need to be careful not to be chopping the plants or there’ll be nothing to eat. I use the pointy part of the hoe, see? Like this.”
    “Is this right?” Jo asked, trying to imitate her.
    “Yes, ma’am.” They continued down the rows, working sideby side. It felt wonderful to Josephine to be doing something useful. But she could tell that Lizzie was nervous, glancing up at the house as if to see if Mother was watching them. Jo decided to make small-talk—one of the feminine arts that Mother had tried to instill in her daughters and something that Josephine had never been good at doing, especially with young men. Of course, she was never supposed to talk to the slaves at all except to issue orders.
    “Why is there a fence all around the garden, Lizzie?”
    “You don’t want rabbits getting in here, Missy Jo.”
    “We have rabbits around here? So close to the house?”
    “Yes, ma’am. More than ever. Massa Philip’s hound dogs liked to chase them off in the old days, but . . .” She paused, glancing up at Josephine as if she might have said the wrong thing. “Otis sets snares around the fence and sometimes catches us a rabbit for dinner,” Lizzie said.
    The thought of eating rabbit meat repulsed Jo, but Lizzie was finally relaxing a bit, so Jo kept quiet about that. “What’s that wooden cross for?” she asked instead, pointing to a pair of branches tied together. Rags fluttered from it in the breeze. Was it part of a slave superstition?
    “You mean that?” Lizzie smiled. “It’s a scarecrow, Missy Jo. Or at least it’s supposed to be. It needs fixing up just like everything else around here, or it won’t scare nothing away. Them crows are supposed to think it’s a person so they’ll stay away from our garden.”
    “What about those bunches of sticks that look like Indian teepees?”
    “Them are for the pole beans to climb on when the plants get a little bigger.”
    “There’s so much I don’t know,” Jo said with a sigh. “I’ve lived here at White Oak all my life and the food simply arrived at my table. I’m sorry to say I never thought much about where it came from or about the whole process of guarding it from birds and rabbits and weeds while it was growing.”
    Maybe there had been holes and empty places in her old life, too, and she had just never noticed. Holes in her practical knowledge ofhow her food was grown and gaps in her usefulness, as well. How had knowing how to play the piano or paint with watercolors or engage in polite conversation helped her or her family through the bitter years of war? And how would those skills help anyone now?
    Josephine reached the end of the row and looked back at her work. It didn’t look nearly as straight and neat as Lizzie’s row, and Lizzie had reached the end much faster and had started down the next row. Jo gripped the hoe with renewed determination. “When will these carrots be ready to pick?”
    “Not for a long, long time, Missy Jo.” She managed a brief smile. “In another week or so we’ll have to thin them out so the carrots can get nice and fat.”
    “How do you do that?”
    “Pull out some of the plants and leave the