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Black Boy Bought 19 Acres Nobody Wanted — Then His Plow Hit Something Buried Below

Black Boy Bought 19 Acres Nobody Wanted — Then His Plow Hit Something Buried Below

Chapter 15

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"Let me think about it," he said."Don't think too long," Whitmore replied. "Offers like this don't sit around."Marcus hung up and sat in his grandmother's kitchen for a long time. The sale might even be legal, since the first vault's contents were already out of the ground. And if the seeds were dead anyway, what was he really protecting? A few hundred pounds of spoiled corn and some old hammers.He went to his room and took out the ledger. He didn't open it to the last page this time; he opened it to the third page, to the words Josiah had written in 1914 in that steady, confident hand:If hard times come, if the fields fail, if the valley loses what it knows, let this reserve give our people what they need to begin again.And below it, a line Marcus had read before, but had never really heard until now:We do not bury this for ourselves. We bury it for those who come after.Marcus closed the ledger and sat with his hands on the cover. Josiah and the others had been poor. They had lived through hard winters and worse treatment. Every one of them could have sold those seeds for cash; they could have kept the money and bought land somewhere easier. Instead, they put their best seed in the ground and walked away, trusting someone they would never meet to finish the job.If Marcus sold the reserve, he would be the first Hollis to break that trust.He went back to the kitchen. Grandma Ruth was still up, listening to the radio. He told her about the offer. He told her it would pay back every dollar she had given him.She turned off the radio. "Is that what you want?""No, ma'am."
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Black Boy Bought 19 Acres Nobody Wanted — Then His Plow Hit Something Buried Below

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