"Genesee
van Cortlandt," her cousin giggled. "Good Lord! What are you doing?
You'll break your neck."
The prettily rounded figure of a young
Dutch woman with rosy cheeks and an enviable head of tumbling honey brown curls
leaned out an open window. Close by the substantial two-storey brick house a
huge tree grew, an apple tree with spreading limbs, a tree her father had been
so fond of that he had put his workmen to the trouble of enduring its presence
while they built the house.
The speaker was in fashionable undress – a
shift and stays covered by a crewel-stitched morning gown that had, in quieter
times, come from London. Behind her a couple of well-dressed and well fed Black
girls crowded, peering out the window and adding their exclamations to hers.
"Look at Miss Jenny," one of them
cried. "Just like a cat!"
On a broad limb of the tree, a limb which
had been rudely cropped in order to keep it from intersecting with the wall of
the house, her long straight black hair held with a scarlet ribbon, without a
cap and dressed only in a fine white muslin shift, was a slender, supple girl.
For a heartbeat, she steadied herself and then proceeded on small brown bare
feet along the mottled limb.
~~ From the Epic Best Historical Novel, GENESEE
http://amzn.com/B004BSH1R2
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