Little Town on the Prairie

“I am a little worried about how we are going to find the money for the new summer clothes she needs, and we must manage to send her a little spending money. She should have a Braille slate of her own, too. They are expensive.”

She still could not understand why

Why, people who don’t go to revival meetings are atheists!”

Still, Laura felt that all the other girls were better dressed

they ate fried chicken. The other cockerels Ma let grow up. They would be larger to eat, later on.

Three days and nights the blizzard raged. Pa put the hens in the stable lest they freeze.

She only opened one eye and murmured, “Vi’lets.”

And as she remembered the black hands that had held the long, flat, white bones between their fingers and kept them rattling out the tunes, she would have been certain that that darky was Pa, if the darky had had whiskers.
“Pa couldn’t have cut off his whiskers, could he?” she asked Ma, and in horror Ma answered, “Mercy, no!” Then she added, “I hope not.”
“Pa must have been one of the darkies,” Carrie said, “because he did not come with us.”
“Yes, I know he was practicing to be in the minstrel show,” said Ma, walking faster.
“Well, but none of the darkies had whiskers, Ma,” Carrie reminded her.
“My goodness,” Ma said. “Oh my goodness.” She had been so carried away that she had not thought of that. “He couldn’t have,” she said, and she asked Laura

five black-faced men

Jim was so much at ease that he called out, “Supper ready, mother?”