Shortcuts Don't Mix with Love

While a college student, Heidi Neumark took a year off to serve in a volunteer program sponsored by Rural Mission. She went to Johns Island off the Carolina coast, where she listened to the stories of the sons and daughters of plantation slaves. This is what she learned:

The most important lesson I learned on Johns Island was from Miss Ellie, who lived miles down a small dirt road in a one-room, wooden home. We’d sit in old rocking chairs on the front porch, drinking tall glasses of sweet tea, while she’d tell me stories. I never could find out Miss Ellie’s precise age, but it was somewhere between ninety and one hundred. Maybe she didn’t know herself. She still chopped her own firewood, stacked in neat little piles behind the house.

Miss Ellie had a friend named Netta, whom she’d known since they were small girls. To get to Netta’s house, Miss Ellie had to walk for miles through fields of tall grass. This was the sweet grass that Sea Island women make famous baskets out of, but it was also home to numerous poisonous snakes.

Actually, Netta’s home was not that far from Miss Ellie’s place, but there was a stream that cut across the fields. You had to walk quite a distance to get to the place where it narrowed enough to pass. Poor Miss Ellie, I thought, old and arthritic, having to walk all that way, pushing through the thick summer heat, not to mention avoiding the snakes.

I hit upon the perfect plan. I arranged with some men to help build a simple plank bridge across the stream near Miss Ellie’s house. I scouted out the ideal place — not too wide, but too deep to cross. Our bridge was built in a day. I was so excited that I could hardly wait to see Miss Ellie’s reaction. I went to her house and practically dragged her off with me. “Look!” I shouted, “a shortcut for you to visit Netta!”

Miss Ellie did not look grateful. Instead, she shook her head and looked at me with pity. “Child, I don’t need a shortcut,” she said. Then she told about all the friends she kept up with on her way to visit Netta: Mr. Jenkins, with whom she always swapped gossip; Miss Hunter, who so looked forward to the quilt scraps she’d bring by; the raisin wine she’d taste at one place in exchange for her biscuits; and the chance to look in on the “old folks” who were sick.

“Child, you can’t take shortcuts if you want friends in this world,” she told me. “Shortcuts don’t mix with love.”

 — Heidi Neumark, 
Breathing Space (Beacon, 2003)