Cross Creek by Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings

I bought Georgia of her father for five dollars. The surest way to keep a maid at the Creek, my new friends told me, was to take over a very young Negro girl and train her in my ways. She should be preferably without home ties so that she should become attached to me. My friends traced a newly widowered father of a large family that he was unable to feed as a unit. He was happy to "give" me Georgia, with no strings attached. A five-dollar-bill sealed the bargain. Two months of life with her made me wonder why he had not given her to the first passing gypsy caravan, or drowned her decently.

It is possible that in catching one young, I had picked from too early a litter. No one knew her exact age, but it was somewhere between ten and twelve. At any rate, Georgia was unteachable. I could remember having polished silver, made beds, dried dishes and dusted furniture on educational Saturday mornings at that age, so I knew the thing was possible. It was pure theory as far as Georgia was concerned. She was happy, in fact too happy for a brown child whose lifelong lot it would presumably be to earn her bread by the sweat of her brow. Georgia never moved fast enough to sweat. She had a passion for butterflies and I could never understand how she could put out her hand with enough speed to catch one. I decided that she just sat in the sun watching the butterflies, and sooner or later by the law of averages one lit on her hand and her fingers closed over it so slowly that it was not alarmed. At the moments when she caught the butterflies, the unwashed breakfast dishes were usually sitting as inert as she.