Alice was stooped over a tarnished mirror in the attic, dutifully plastering her face with makeup. Her Sunday clothes were hung neatly in one of the communal wardrobes in the attic room. She was still wearing her wide-brimmed straw hat, if only to keep the impetuous mass of ginger curls away from her face until she had finished painting it. The attic was decidedly less well-kept than the rest of the mansion as it was the only room in the building that did not necessarily need to be cleaned. Everyone had their own ‘territory’, and Alice got the last scraps as she was one of the newcomers to the farm. She was shunted into the corner, but it was a corner with a wardrobe nearby and enough floorspace for her to squat down in front of a propped-up hand mirror with a brush and an infallible determination to, somehow, keep the beauty products she smears onto her features in place for more than a few hours of hard labour. Once she was finished, Alice tied her apron and whipped off her hat to stare miserably at her orange frizzy mass. She struggled with a hairbrush for a few minutes before resigning herself to simply managing her parting. She sucked in a deep breath and strode purposefully out of the door, taking the steps two at a time as she rushed out into the cool autumn day. 

The first task was laundry. Alice was always in charge of changing the sheets in the coloured barns, primarily because she was the only one who was not particularly bothered by handling the linens of negroes every week. She whisked up a large wicker basket from one of the piles in the utilities rooms scattered around the mansion and skirted across the freshly polished floorboards as serenely as possible. Crossing the threshold into the farmyard itself, Alice raised a forearm to cover her eyes from the blinding sun and pressed the basket into her waist. She took long strides and crossed over to the black barn in mere moments. Once there, she knocked on the door - a bemused man opened it for her. Even though Alice had only been on the Tackett farm for a month, almost all of the african american residents knew her by name. “Mornin’ Miss Alice,” murmured the farmhand warmly, stepping aside to let her in.

“Good morning Leonard, how’ve you been? Did everyone remember to take off the linens-[i]no they did not[/i].” Alice huffed and looked at the array of unmade and half-heartedly stripped beds before her. “I keep telling you people to get it done [i]before[/i] I show up so’s I don’t have to lurk around in your bedroom for too long,” she sighed, promptly getting to work whipping blankets and bedsheets off tired old mattresses and into her wicker basket. “Say, Leo, where is everybody? They ain’t all at church still?” Alice asked, peering at the largely vacated barn with curiosity. The farmhand responded with a vague shrug of his shoulders as two calloused digits scratched behind his left ear.