Unfair

This story is © copyrighted to Adrienne Wolter in 2003 and onwards. It was written on Sunday, September 28th, 2003, for an English assignment (hence the usage of words like 'intern' and 'uprooted' and 'debris'... had to use all the vocab, lol). Do not take this story.

Unfair

I panted as I worked in the field.
I was picking cotton. To work until nightfall. I could not stop for food, I could only work. Row upon row of cotton plants awaited my harvesting. I did this every day.
The sun beat down upon my shoulders and I rolled my head for a few seconds, hearing the joints that were in there somewhere popping.
I started to sing. You see, that is how my people and I got through this intolerable lifestyle. We sang of home, a home we had been rudely uprooted from like potatoes in a field. Sometimes we sang of our awful camp and the white men who had interned us being taken away or turned to ask and debris. Sometimes we sang out plans of escape to others who knew our tongue. Our captors knew that singing kept us going, so they let us do it.
Far away, at the edge of the fields, the white men were meeting with another man. He had come from a cage pulled by horses. In the cage were more dark-skinned people. He pointed out on the field at me and other slaves working near me. They called us slaves. I did not know what that word meant in their language, but I did know that it was degrading.
It was around midday. We had been called for water. I took a scoop in my hands from the empty food trough that the white men used for water, and drank it thirstily. This moment of rest ended abruptly when they shooed us away so that another section of the slaves working in the field could come for water.
The sun sunk slowly in the sky as I plucked the wooly cotton from the plants and put it in one of my buckets. When they were filled I carried them back to the barn beside the barracks, as slowly as the white men would allow, panting again.
Night hit, and I saw all the slaves around me carrying their buckets back to the barracks. I followed suit, putting my buckets in the barn and going to my straw nest that I had made for myself.
I would wake up at dawn tomorrow and continue what I had been doing today.
Some ‘slaves’ tried to escape. The conditions here were very bad. We were deprived of the civil rights given to every citizen of this country. This country that saw us only for our skin and not as equals. I did not want to escape, because they always caught us. And then they would cut off one of our feet and make us keep working. I naively accepted this unconstitutional thing that I hesitate to call a life.
There was nowhere else I could go, anyway.