Excerpt
Chapter One
My name is Todd Jansan. It is morning. In my family mornings come early. We go to bed shortly after supper and rise before dawn. Mama and Daddy always get up first. Mama gets started on breakfast. If it’s winter and cold, Daddy starts a fire in the fireplace before telling me and my two sisters to get up. But if it’s summer like it is now he usually goes outside first to check on our corn and tobacco crops before waking us.
Some mornings I awaken when Mama and Daddy first leave their room which is right across the hall from mine. And some I wake up only when Daddy knocks on my door, calling my name. This morning, June 22, 1943, I awake to the muffled sounds of Mama and Daddy talking as they leave their room to start the day. I’m too sleepy to make out what they are saying but I awaken all the same. I push the curtain back from my window and look out at the stars still lingering in the sky. Soon it will be daylight. I like to watch the sky turn from darkness to light.
My family lives on a tobacco farm in the small community of Cedar Cove, North Carolina. Cedar Cove is a place with more land than people and what land that hasn’t been cleared for farming is mostly woods, thick forests and swamps.
We are the Jansan family. Most people in Cedar Cove are related to each other in some way but not us. My Grandpa Robert Jansan and my Grandmother Lillian Reynolds Jansan were both born and raised in South Carolina. They grew up close to each other, knowing one another almost all their lives. Grandpa’s father, Henry Jansan worked in the cotton mills, trying to make a living. Grandpa Robert tried to do the same. He had to quit school to help his family earn money. He always regretted it and was determined that his own children graduate from high school. They all did, but things were different for him. Everyone in the area where he grew up was poor. He said the work in the mill was hard and the pay so little it disgusted him. He always dreamed about getting out and being his own person. He might have gone on dreaming and never doing anything about it, but something happened that changed his mind. He’d been working at the mill for a couple of years hating every moment of it when one morning he saw a familiar face among the girls who ran the sewing machines. It was Lillian Reynolds. He always liked her. They’d never really dated but had sat together often during church functions. Seeing her there did something to him.