Work arrangements were flexible. If the sawmill was especially busy one week, Leon would ask Floyd to shift some of the Negroes from fields to mill, and if the mill work was slack, mill hands were given into Floyd’s employment as he needed them.

Sarah had the most general knowledge of anyone of Beulah Land activities, both business and social. She kept the account books of plantation and sawmill and cotton gin. Lovey held a tight rein on all house workers, but Sarah was at least aware of what was being done, and while she never required anything so formal as an arranged meeting with Lovey or Clarice or Myrtis, they were in frequent communication as they met or passed in room and hallway and yard, with the quick exchange of question and answer.

All special requests and occasional complaints came to Sarah. A gentle woman, Sarah had yet made it clear that no one other than she gave orders on the management of her household. No servant, and certainly not Lovey, was to be bothered directly. Exceptions to this general understanding were Clarice, who made it her business to be heedful of Penelope’s wants; Bianca, who did nothing but look after Nell; Stella, who cared for Felix; and, of course, Pauline, who was not considered a servant at all, but Selma’s companion. Juanita, who had been Rachel’s nurse, was now free for other duties because the child needed little attendance, but she still considered Rachel her special charge and saw to the care of her clothes and her room. Sarah had no one whose principal function was to attend her. She liked to do things for herself unless she was ill, and she was almost never that. She had been brought up to do for herself, and she enjoyed the privacy it gave her to do so still, living as she did in the midst of nearly two hundred people, all of whom looked to her either directly or indirectly.

After allowing himself to be put off and put off again in what he acknowledged was the pleasantest and most anxious way, Casey Troy finally laughed at Sarah’s urging yet another postponement and said that he had finished all his commissions in the neighborhood except those to be executed at Beulah Land, and that he must come to them now or never, for he intended going on to Savannah no later than September.

“Very well,” she said, laughing with him. “Come now and stay until you have made a whole gallery of Kendrick portraits! But I warn you, you must catch us all as you can, for it is the very busiest time.”

“What hours would I be most likely to ‘catch you’ all?”