In the last week of July 1944, in a hay barn in Sunflower County, Mississippi, a sweating pitcher sat on a wooden crate for four full minutes. No one moved.
Six women in gray prisoner dresses sat on hay bales along the north wall. Their hands were in their laps. Their eyes were on the pitcher. An amber liquid gently knocked against the glass as it settled. A cut lemon sat on a tray beside six mismatched jars, because the farmer had never owned six matching glasses in his life.
The farmer stood about eight feet away, hat in hand, waiting. He had told them what it was. He had said the word twice: tea. But the word came out in an accent none of them understood, and the liquid before them was the color of iodine.
The tall one stood finally. She walked to the crate. She did not reach for the pitcher. She looked at the farmer instead and said four words in careful English with a heavy accent: "You will drink first."
He didn't understand at first. He thought she was offering the host the first drink. He almost smiled. Then he saw the set of her jaw and how the other five froze behind her. The way people freeze when they watch to see if something is about to become what they were warned it would be.
He understood. They thought he had come to poison them.
To understand why she said it, and why he acted as he did afterward, you have to go back to what the war had taken from that farm, and what it had taken from them.
By the summer of 1944, the Mississippi Delta was coming apart. The land itself hadn't changed. It was still the flattest, blackest, most fertile soil in North America. Cotton grew there abundantly. But the hands that picked it were gone.
The draft emptied the county like a bucket, slowly at first, then all at once. Young white men went to the Pacific. Young Black men went to the Quartermaster Corps, the Red Ball Express, the 761st Tank Battalion. Everyone left who could carry a hoe went north to Chicago and Detroit for factory wages that sharecropping could never match.
The cotton was in the field, and no one was there to pick it.
The government solved the problem in a way almost no one expected. It brought the enemy in. Between 1942 and 1946, about 425,000 Axis prisoners of war were held on American soil, spread across more than 500 camps in 46 states. Mississippi took in several thousand.
Once the camps filled, the War Department did its calculations. Under Article 27 of the 1929 Geneva Convention, enlisted prisoners could be compelled to work, provided the labor wasn't war-related and they were paid 80 cents a day in canteen scrip. Farmers contracted with the camps and got the labor.
So in a country at war with Germany, German POWs ended up picking American cotton in full view of men whose sons were being killed by German artillery.
Most of them were men. Veterans of the Afrika Korps, U-boat crews, boys from Normandy who had worn the uniform for eleven weeks. A few of them were not men.
E.M.T. Rowe was 47 years old. He owned 1,100 acres of cotton and soybeans about nine miles outside Indianola. He was rich in land and poor in cash, the way Delta farmers had perfected it. He had a wife named Lucille, a daughter named Nell, 16 and furious about everything, and a son named Curtis Rowe, 19.
Curtis had joined the 106th Infantry Division in January of the previous year. In the summer of 1944, he was somewhere in England. His letters arrived in bunches of three and contained nothing. The weather was fine. The food was bad. He told Nell to stop reading his books.
That was the state of the house. Three people, one absence sitting at the table with them, and 100 acres of cotton opening in a season with no one to pick it.
The man from the county agent's office came on a Thursday in mid-July. He sat on the porch, refused a chair, and got down to business.
"You know they're contracting prisoners out. You want six?"
E.M.T. was silent for a moment. Then he said, "Germans. Germans. My boy is over there."
The man answered, "Your boy is over there. And your cotton is here, and it doesn't care where your boy is."
E.M.T. asked about the mechanics. The camp truck would bring them at seven in the morning and take them back at five. He would pay the government the going rate. He would provide water, a noon meal, and shade. No fraternization, no gifts, no carrying letters, no talking except about the work.
How many guards? One. One guard for how many prisoners? The man looked at the fields. "Mr. Rowe, where exactly are they going to go?"
That was the honest answer. A German prisoner in the Delta could walk three days in any direction and still be in the Delta.
The man stood up. "One more thing. The ones available to you now are women."
Nurses, mostly. Signal operators, some clerks. They had come from North Africa with the rest, and no one had figured out what to do with them yet. They needed a detail.
Women. Women.
Lucille had come to the screen door somewhere in the middle of this and hadn't spoken a word. E.M.T. felt her presence behind him, the way one feels weather coming. He said, "Send them Monday."
The screen door closed harder than necessary.
They weren't always prisoners. That's the part that gets forgotten.
Elsa Brandt was a surgical nurse. She was 32 years old, from Lübeck on the Baltic Sea. She joined the Red Cross nursing service in 1939, as many did that year, because it seemed the logical choice among few available options. She went to Poland, then to a hospital train in the east she never talked about. Then in 1942 to Libya.
The others came from everywhere. Hedwig Vollmer was 46, Catholic, thin, an old-school nurse who had been nursing since the First World War. She had dressed the wounds of men at Verdun who were nineteen years old. Rosa Aigner was Austrian from Graz and made sure everyone knew it. Gerda Möll was a radio operator who could still tap out messages on the tabletop without feeling it. Marlene Augst had been a clerk in a supply office in Tripoli. Traut Kessler was nineteen. She had volunteered at seventeen, which was illegal, but in 1942 no one was checking closely.
They were captured in Tunisia in May 1943, when a quarter-million Axis troops surrendered in less than two weeks. A British unit overran the field hospital. A sergeant apologized for the inconvenience.
Then came the part no one writes about. A transit camp in Mateur. A Liberty ship from Casablanca in October, seventeen days across the ocean. Lying in the hold below the waterline, hoping your own navy would miss you.
They landed in Norfolk. They were processed, photographed, fingerprinted, issued gray clothing, marked as POWs, and put on a train. The train took four days. No one told them where they were going.
They watched America pass by the window. This is the detail that appears in nearly every German POW memoir, without exception, in almost the same words: the lights. There was nothing dark. Cities blazed all night. Gas stations, billboards, front porches, entire cities lit up as if it were peacetime, because for these people it almost was.
Rosa Aigner stopped speaking for most of the day after Atlanta. Each of them had been told repeatedly, officially, that America was on the verge of collapse, that its factories were crumbling, that its cities were burning. Here was a country so untouched by war it hadn't even bothered to turn off its lights.
Traut asked Hedwig if it was a trick, if the Americans had lit up the cities along the rail line specifically so the prisoners would see it. Hedwig said, "Child, look how far it goes."
They reached Mississippi in the summer of 1944 and stepped off into air that wasn't air. Ninety-four degrees at nine in the morning with humidity that made the sky white. The camp was barbed wire and pine towers and long low barracks on a plain so flat the horizon looked like something you could fall off.
They had been told what would happen to them here. This is the thing. They had all been told. The instructions were thorough and repeated. Americans were criminals. Americans were uncultured scum. Americans in the South were the worst of them. Butchers, illiterates, half-savages. The women prisoners in particular were to expect not to be treated as soldiers.
A political officer in Tripoli told Gerda's unit that German women prisoners would be handed over to Black American troops as a form of humiliation, a fabricated lie designed to inspire maximum terror in anyone who heard it. The men in that room nodded.
So when the truck set them down on red dirt in front of a white farmhouse on the last Monday of July, and a large man in a straw hat came off the porch, six women straightened and looked at a point above his head. That wasn't pride. They were bracing.
The guard was a corporal named Wendell Bess, 22 years old, flat-footed, who would have traded a year of his life for a combat assignment he was never going to get. He handed over the papers. "They know the rules, Mr. Rowe. The tall one. She speaks English. The older one understands more than she lets on."
E.M.T. read the paper without really reading it. Then he looked at the six of them and said slowly, in the tone of a man who knows the other party is working hard to follow him: "You'll be picking cotton. It's hard, hot work, and I won't pretend otherwise. There's water at the end of each row, and you drink it whenever you want. Don't ask. We stop at noon for an hour in the shade. Don't cross the ditch on the north side. Don't go in the house. Do what Odell tells you."
Odell. His foreman raised a hand. Odell Pike was 61 years old, Black, had worked that land since E.M.T.'s father ran it, and knew more about cotton than any man in the county, including the ones with college degrees. He looked at the six German women with a gaze that gave nothing away.
Elsa stepped half a step forward. "We understand. We will work."
E.M.T. said, "All right." Then he asked, because he couldn't help himself, "Have any of you ever picked cotton?"
Silence. Then Hedwig Vollmer said something in German, and the corner of Elsa's mouth moved slightly. She said Hedwig had picked turnips. She supposed the principle was similar.
Odell Pike said, "It is not."
Cotton picking isn't agricultural work the way people imagine it. It's not standing in a field with a basket. You bend from the waist and stay bent, dragging a canvas sack that starts empty and ends at 80 pounds. You reach into a boll whose dry husk has five sharp points capable of opening your fingers. You pull the lint out clean, without leaf trash. Then you repeat. The row runs a quarter mile.
By the end of the first day, Marlene's hands were bleeding in nine places, and Traut vomited in the middle rows where she thought no one could see her. No one complained. The calculation was the same in all six heads, and no one said it aloud: whatever this is, it's better than the camp, and if we cause trouble, they'll send us back.
E.M.T. watched from a distance and couldn't understand it. He expected arrogance or sullenness, something he could push against. What he found was six people who worked hard when Odell wasn't looking, who arranged themselves without discussion so that Traut was always at the shaded end of the row, and Hedwig, 46 with knee problems, was always the one sent for water.
On the fourth day, Odell came to the barn while E.M.T. was fixing a plow and told him that tall woman had closed a torn hand in 90 seconds with a strip of her own leather patch without looking at it, as if her hands were somewhere else.
Odell said, "That's a hospital nurse. That's a woman who's done that a thousand times."
E.M.T. set the wrench down. "Where do you think she did that a thousand times?"
Odell said, "In the same place your boy is going now," and went back to the field.
That was Thursday. On Friday, the temperature hit 104 degrees.
It happened around ten in the morning. Traut Kessler was in the fourth row from the ditch, and she simply folded, like a doll, and went down with her sack under her before anyone heard a sound. Elsa got there first. By the time E.M.T. came off the porch at a run, the girl was on her back with her legs raised on the cotton sack, her collar opened, two fingers on her neck, counting.
"It is heat exhaustion," Elsa said. Not heat stroke. She was sweating. That was good. She needed shade, salted water, a wet cloth on her neck and hair. Not cold water. Cool.
The barn was closer than the house. They carried her between them. E.M.T. had her by the shoulders, Odell by the legs. Elsa walked beside them with her hand on the girl's forehead the whole way. At some point during those forty yards, E.M.T. stopped thinking of the woman beside him as a prisoner and started thinking of her as the person in charge of this situation, which she was.
In the barn, Hedwig produced salt from somewhere. E.M.T. never knew where. They gave the girl water in sips, and within twenty minutes her color came back, and she started apologizing in German over and over until Elsa said something short that stopped her.
"What did you say to her?"
"If she apologizes again, I will report her for wasting my time."
Elsa pushed the girl's damp hair off her forehead. "She is nineteen years old. She thinks she will be punished for fainting."
She looked at E.M.T. directly, for the first time since coming to his farm. It wasn't a friendly look. It was an assessment. "Yes," she said. "For fainting."
E.M.T. put his hat back on. "No one is picking cotton today. You all stay here until the truck comes. Four hours. I can count."
He went back to the house and stood in the kitchen with his hands on the counter. Lucille, who had watched everything from the window and not come out, said he would lose two days of picking. He said, "That girl is a year younger than Curtis."
Lucille didn't answer. She went back to the sink, but that night she made a second pan of cornbread without explaining why. In the morning, the pan went to the barn with the noon water. Neither of them said a word about it.
That brings us back to the scene. The following Friday, the last day of July. The heat hadn't broken. It had settled in like a tenant.
E.M.T. had been thinking about it since Wednesday, and he hadn't talked himself out of it, and he knew it violated every clause of the contract he'd signed.
You have to understand what sweet tea was in Mississippi in 1944. If you think it was just a drink, you won't understand anything that came before.
Sugar was rationed. Since May 1942, it was the first commodity in America to go into the ration book. Before coffee, before meat, before gasoline. Half a pound per person per week, in a good month. Sugar was the thing housewives traded coupons for, lied about, hoarded in tins in the back of the pantry.
Sweet tea consumed it in quantity. Real Delta sweet tea isn't tea with sugar added. The sugar goes in while the tea is still scalding, dissolves completely, and comes out of the pitcher heavy, almost syrupy, so sweet it makes your teeth hum. This was what you served the preacher. This was what went on the table when neighbors came after a funeral.
In a part of the world where hospitality was practically a legal system, sweet tea was a formal declaration that you were a guest in the house.
Lucille made it. E.M.T. asked her to, and she stood there with the sugar tin in her hand for a long moment, then said, "This is a lot. I know what it means. For the Germans. For the ones in that barn."
He said she was the one who made it. She used the last of the ice in the icebox, cut a lemon from the tree by the pump house, and didn't carry it out herself. She watched from the window.
So. The barn. Noon. Six women on hay bales. The tray. The pitcher sweating in the heat.
E.M.T. said, "It's hard work. This will help," and set it down and stepped back. Nothing happened.
They waited. They looked at him. He watched Elsa translate quietly for Marlene and Traut, and he saw something move across all six faces at once, something he didn't have a name for yet.
Gerda was the first to say it in German. Rosa answered in German. E.M.T. only learned years later what she said: "Nothing that color is a drink."
Then Elsa stood. She came to the crate. She looked at the pitcher and didn't touch it. Then she looked at him and said, "You will drink first."
The silence in that barn was absolute. E.M.T. Rowe never forgot it for the rest of his life, because he understood it all at once. Standing there, holding his hat, he understood. These six women had been carried across an ocean by people who had spent two years telling them this was exactly how it would happen. No beating. No wall. A gentle man and a strange sweet drink offered in a remote barn, with no witnesses, from a man whose son was wearing a uniform against their army.
From inside that story, his kindness didn't look like kindness. It looked like the last thing you ever see.
He picked up a jar, poured it three-quarters full, ice cubes cracking and falling, and drank the whole thing standing up without stopping. Then he set the empty jar on the tray with an audible sound. He said, "It's tea. It's tea and sugar and lemon. That's all."
Elsa Brandt looked at him for a long moment. Then she poured herself a jar and drank.
Witnesses described the same thing independently. Her eyes widened. She made a sound. She looked at the jar as if it had insulted her. She said something quick in German over her shoulder.
Hedwig came first. Then Gerda. Then all of them, crowding around the crate as if it were a well.
"Look, sweet." Traut repeated the phrase four or five times. Marlene, who spoke almost no English, produced the phrase "like cake but with water," which Elsa translated with great dignity. E.M.T. laughed out loud for the first time in about six weeks.
They finished the pitcher in under four minutes. Six women who hadn't tasted refined sugar in any quantity since a field hospital in Tunisia in the spring of 1943.
When it was done, Elsa straightened up, put her hands behind her back, and said formally, "Thank you. We did not—" She stopped and started again. "We were told what would happen to us in America. We were told very carefully."
E.M.T. said, "I've heard some things about you all too. What were you told?"
Elsa was silent. She said finally, "Some of it is true. I don't know how much. I have thought about it a great deal and I don't know how much."
That was the first honest conversation. It was also, in its own way, the last easy one.
Six weeks later, the war reached that farm and took hold of it with both hands.
The news spread the way it does in a county where there are maybe four things to talk about: E.M.T. Rowe was feeding Germans from his kitchen while his son ate from a tin overseas. There was a version of that at the store in Indianola, and a sharper version at the church. His answer never changed and never got longer. He said, "I signed a contract with the United States Army that says I feed them. They can take it up with the Army."
That was true. But it wasn't the reason, and everyone knew it.
There was another thing said in a low voice, worse, about "the nature of women." E.M.T. heard this once from a man he'd known since grade school. He didn't hit him. He just stopped speaking to him, and they remained that way until the man died in 1958.
Inside the farm's boundaries, things took a different turn. In September, when the harvest eased, Elsa asked if they could use the plot behind the barn where nothing but Johnson grass was growing. She had thought through her argument carefully and presented it in clipped terms. The land was wasted. The leafy vegetable season was coming. Six people who knew plants were sitting idle two afternoons a week.
E.M.T. said, "Fine, on one condition. Whatever's left over goes to the camp kitchen first. All of it. For every prisoner there. My table takes what's left."
Elsa looked at him a second longer than was needed to judge him and said that was acceptable.
The seeds came from the camp canteen and Red Cross parcels. They planted turnips, mustard greens, and cabbage because they were the season's crops. Then Rosa Aigner produced from the lining of her coat a roll of paper containing dill seeds she had carried from Graz. Gerda planted kohlrabi, which Odell Pike inspected with obvious suspicion and later admitted wasn't bad.
In October, E.M.T. took a cutting from the old brown turkey fig tree by the pump house, a tree his mother had planted in 1911, and gave it to them. Hedwig Vollmer planted it in the north corner of the garden where it would get sun and some shade. She pressed the dirt around it with both hands as if she were putting a child to bed.
They sang while they worked. Folk songs. Nothing military. Nothing worth reporting.
Nell Rowe, sixteen and angry at everything, started finding excuses to be near the barn in the afternoons. Within a month, she could sing two verses of a simple German song without understanding most of the words.
Lucille held out until the second week of October, when Marlene repaired the hem of Nell's church dress better than Lucille could have done herself. Lucille went out to the barn, thanked her in about four words, and left. After that, cornbread appeared every day, and by November, buttermilk came with it.
The telegram arrived on December 28, 1944. Curtis Rowe's unit, the 106th Infantry Division, had been on the front line for eleven days when the German army launched the Ardennes offensive. Two of its three regiments were surrounded on the Schnee Eifel. American forces surrendered on December 19. Between seven and eight thousand men. The largest mass surrender of American forces in the European war.
The telegram said missing in action. It said nothing else because no one knew anything else.
E.M.T. Rowe read the telegram standing in the yard with the Western Union boy still holding his bicycle. Then he went inside and gave it to Lucille. Lucille read it twice, put it on the table, went upstairs, and didn't come down for a day and a half.
The women weren't there. It was between Christmas and New Year, and the camp had kept them in the compound. When the truck brought them back on January 2, they came up to the house and saw all the curtains drawn at ten in the morning. Odell Pike met them at the barn and told them what had happened.
What happened next is the part of this story that E.M.T. Rowe told a historian in 1974 with great difficulty.
Elsa Brandt walked up to the house. She wasn't allowed near the house. She did it anyway. Corporal Bess, to his credit, looked at the sky.
She knocked. Lucille opened the door, and the two women stood there.
Elsa said, "Missing is not dead."
Lucille didn't answer.
Elsa continued. Missing at this point in December meant prisoner. They were moving thousands of men east on foot right now. The paperwork wouldn't be complete for weeks. Six weeks, maybe eight. A Red Cross card from Geneva would come, and it would come slowly, and that was not a bad sign. That was how it worked.
She was speaking quickly, her English starting to stumble. She kept going. "I have worked in this system. I know what is true and what is not. He will be cold and very hungry, but he will be alive."
Lucille Rowe said, "Why are you telling me this?"
Elsa said, "Because I have told German mothers this for five years, and it was true most of the time."
Then she went and picked cotton stalks in a January field for eight hours.
Hedwig Vollmer wrote a letter that week to a nun she had trained with in 1919, who was, as far as she knew, still at a hospital in Kassel, asking her to make inquiries. The letter went into the military mail and was censored, and it almost certainly was never delivered. She wrote it anyway and told E.M.T. she had written it, which she didn't have to do.
Traut Kessler, nineteen years old, came to E.M.T. in the second week of January and said in English, "My mother was in Hamburg. 1943. The fire. She worked on the rubble all year." Then she stopped. "So I know that 40,000 people died in Hamburg in eight days in July 1943, and one of them was a woman Traut Kessler had not seen since she was seventeen, and she learned it from a letter that took five months to reach a camp in Mississippi."
The Red Cross card arrived on March 11. Curtis Rowe was at Stalag 9B. Alive. The mailman carried it to the barn himself.
Then April came, and the war ended, and the film came out of the camps. Buchenwald fell on April 11. Bergen-Belsen on April 15. Within two weeks, newsreel footage was showing in American cinemas, and by summer the War Department made a political decision: the German POWs held in the United States would be shown the footage. They called it "rehabilitation."
Camp by camp, prisoners were marched into mess halls and made to watch. The six women at Camp Como watched the footage in the last week of May.
No one at the Rowe farm described in detail what happened the morning after. What E.M.T. said decades later was that they worked all day and no one sang, and Rosa Aigner was sick twice, and Hedwig Vollmer, who was 46 years old and had nursed men through two world wars and never sat down for ten months without permission, sat down in the middle of the row and stayed there.
He didn't ask them about it. He said it wasn't something you ask about.
Elsa was the only one who brought it up with him. She did it in June. She said she had heard things during the war. She had been on a hospital train in Poland in 1941 and seen something from the window in a scene she had chosen at the time not to think about. She said she was good at not thinking about things, and she had honestly believed she was doing a good job in a bad situation, and now she had to decide what to do with the rest of her life having learned what not-thinking had been a part of.
She said, "Don't tell me I was not the guilty one. Please do not say that."
E.M.T. said, "All right."
Curtis Rowe came home in July. Stalag 9B had been liberated on April 2 by the 44th Infantry Division. He had lost 41 pounds. He had spent four days in a boxcar without water in January and had frostbite in two toes and would have stomach problems for the rest of his life. He was 20 years old.
He had been home eight days when he came out onto the porch one morning and saw a truck dropping off six women in gray dresses in his father's yard. No one had told him. Lucille had meant to but hadn't found the sentence.
He stood up from his chair. E.M.T. was halfway across the yard by then, calling his name, and Curtis was looking past him at the women who had stopped where they were and were standing perfectly still, the way they had for ten months.
Then Curtis Rowe came down the steps and stopped in front of Elsa Brandt. He looked at her for a long time. Then he asked, "Are you a nurse?"
She said, "Yes."
He said, "There was a woman outside Bad Orb. A farm woman. We passed through her yard on a work detail in February, and she gave me bread. She didn't give it to all of us. Just me, because I was closest. She did it quickly, looking over her shoulder. If anyone had seen her, she would have been in very serious trouble."
He stopped. His hands were shaking. "I think about her every day. I don't know her name. I will never know her name."
Elsa said nothing.
Curtis said, "I don't know what to do about that."
E.M.T. Rowe said, "Son, come and sit down."
Curtis worked with them for the rest of that summer. He never quite became their friend. He learned four German words and used two of them. But in August, when Traut Kessler couldn't lift a full sack, he took the other end of it without being asked and without looking at her. That was as close to a resolution as that matter ever came.
The repatriation orders came in the fall. It took longer than anyone expected. Most German POWs weren't sent home directly. Many were transferred to Britain and France for another year or two of work before release. The women at Camp Como left in stages beginning in November.
Their last day on the farm was a Friday. E.M.T. shut down work at two o'clock. Lucille brought out everything she had, and there was no room for pretense about regulations. Corporal Bess ate at the same table with his cap over his shoulder patch so he wouldn't have to think about it.
There was sweet tea, because there would always be sweet tea. Lucille had been saving sugar since September for exactly this.
E.M.T. gave each of them a photograph. He had paid a man in Indianola to come in October and take it. Six women standing in the garden behind the barn, the fig tree waist-high in the north corner, the barn roof behind them, the white Delta sky above.
He gave Elsa a tobacco tin with turnip, mustard, cabbage, and dill seeds. The dill Rosa had carried from Graz to Libya to Tunisia to Mississippi, now bloomed twice in Sunflower County soil.
He said, "This isn't sentiment. It will grow there. The ground is colder, but it will grow."
Elsa Brandt held the tin in both hands and said, "In 1943, I thought I would be killed in this country. I know that. I would like to say something true, and I cannot think of anything."
E.M.T. said, "Then don't."
The truck pulled out of the drive at four in the afternoon, turned onto the county road, and disappeared in about ninety seconds, because the land is flat and there is nothing to hide a truck behind.
The Germany they returned to had lost most of its cities. Elsa's parents' house on the Baltic was still standing; the street behind it was gone. Rosa Aigner reached Graz and learned her brother had died at Monte Cassino a year and a half earlier, and no one had been able to tell her. Traut Kessler was twenty years old. She went to the neighborhood in Hamburg where her mother had died, and stood there.
The first letter reached the farm in the spring of 1947, opened, stamped, and redirected three times. Elsa wrote that she was working as a nurse again in a hospital in the British zone, that they had almost no morphine or coal, that she was working with two Polish doctors who didn't like her and were right to. She wrote that she had planted the seeds in a window box because she didn't have land yet. She wrote that the dill came up first.
She wrote the line that E.M.T. Rowe kept for the rest of his life, and that his daughter Nell later had photographed and framed because the original was crumbling at the folds.
"I have told this story perhaps a hundred times now, and no one believes the part about the tea. They believe the hard work and the heat and the barbed wire. They do not believe that a man whose son was a prisoner in our army stood in a barn and drank first so that we would not be afraid. I have stopped trying to convince them. I say it simply and let them think what they will."
They exchanged letters for 31 years.
E.M.T. Rowe farmed that land until 1968, when his hips gave out, and he sold everything except the house and 40 acres to a man from Greenwood. Lucille died in 1971. Curtis took over the 40 acres and planted soybeans, and never spoke about Bad Orb to anyone except rarely and briefly with his father.
Elsa Brandt never married. She ran a surgical ward in Lübeck until 1972. In 1966, she pushed her hospital to accept the families of incoming Turkish workers as patients, over the objections of a number of her colleagues. When someone asked why she cared so much, she said something about Mississippi that no one in the room understood.
She came back once, in October 1969, at 62. She flew to Memphis, rented a Ford, and took Highway 49, with a road map on the passenger seat. E.M.T. Rowe, 72, was waiting on the porch. He had been there since eight in the morning for an eleven o'clock arrival.
They went out behind the barn. The garden was gone. It had been gone for 20 years. Wild grass and volunteer soybeans had taken it over. But the fig tree was still there. The cutting Hedwig Vollmer had pressed into the ground with both hands in October 1944 was 18 feet wide and had to be cut back from the barn roof every two years.
It was October, so it was very hot. Still, Elsa stood under it for a long time. Then they went up to the house, and E.M.T. made iced tea, poured two glasses, and took his first. She watched him do it, and watched him realize what he was doing, and they both burst out laughing and couldn't stop for a while.
Hedwig Vollmer died in 1961. Rosa in 1965. Gerda Möll was in Munich and sent a card. Traut Kessler, 44, living in Bremen, had a photograph on her living room wall of six women in prison clothes standing in a garden in Mississippi. Her children grew up looking at it and asking about it, and she explained it the same way every time.
She would say, "They told us the Americans would poison us. Then a farmer gave us tea, and it was so sweet. We laughed. And that day I realized that almost everything I had been told about the world had been chosen for me by people who wanted something from me. That is the whole thing. It was never about the tea."
Every government in that war sat down and decided what its people would believe about the humans on the other side. Then it printed it and taught it and repeated it until it became part of the fabric of reality. Our government did it too. And it worked. It worked on six mature, trained, well-traveled women so well that a glass of tea in a barn looked like an execution.
What can't withstand it is proximity. Not argument. Not evidence. Proximity. Ten months of the same routine. A person handing you a pitcher of water. Watching a man give up a full day of cotton because a nineteen-year-old girl fainted. That's what broke it. It took ten months, and there was no shortcut available.
E.M.T. Rowe died in March 1979. The county paper ran his obituary on page four, mentioning the church, the soybeans, and his service on the tax board. It didn't mention any of this.
Elsa Brandt outlived him by nine years. In her last summer, her niece asked her what the best day of the war was, expecting the answer to be the end of it. She said it was a Friday in July, in a hay barn, in a country she had been taught to fear, when a farmer she didn't trust drank first.