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  For my grandmothers and great-grandmothers, with love: Shirley Whitlow, Vanilla Hudson, Magnolia Whitlow, Lola Buckhanon, and Mary Lee Luckett. And their husbands, our men: Gus Whitlow, Tommy Hudson, Nora Whitlow, and George Buckhanon.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  I must first thank some special writers for reading parts of this book in its various incarnations, and particular members of the Chicago Writers Workshop who encouraged my native writing compulsion back to the surface: Tacuma Roeback, Diane Gillette, Allie Tova Hirsch, Maggie Queeney, Steven Ramirez, Dan Portincaso, Matthew Thomas, Laura Nelson, Aaron Frankel, and Susan Dickman. They read through the first avalanche of characters and scenes I created years back; I owe a huge debt to them for helping me sort through the wave and stick with it. This book would not be here now without them.

  The same goes for Sisters in Crime, the best organization for women writers I know of. I am so proud to be part of them. I am appreciative to organizational leaders Martha Reed and Cari Dubiel for giving me a spotlight in between books, through appearances for SinC at conferences and on true-crime television shows. My sisters’ newsletters, SinC links, programs, and events are godsends that keep me typing.

  I have bounds of gratitude for my inspiring and committed literary agent, Albert Zuckerman, and his Writers House ship, Mickey Novak and Michael Miejas, in particular, for always igniting the real writer in me and blessing me with a literary haven to be proud of. I am so happy I found them. I give thanks to my publisher Sally Richardson; editor Monique Patterson; editorial assistant Alexandria Sehulster; copy editor Barbara Wild; cover designer Elsie Lyons; and the entire team at St. Martin’s Press/Macmillan, for bringing my private work out to the public world once again.

  Some passionate editors at global and nationwide literary journals encouraged the book through their acceptance of early and revised excerpts they published for the public and me: Bianca Spriggs at pluck! The Journal of Affrilachian Arts and Culture at University of Kentucky; Shinjini Bhattacharjee at Hermeneutic Chaos Literary Journal; Erin Bass at Deep South Magazine; and the beautiful editors of gravel Literary Magazine of the MFA program in creative writing at the University of Arkansas at Monticello.

  And the cats, for everything: Nibbles, Bubbles, Ralph, Alice, Sparky, Pepper, Mona Lisa, Nittle Kitty, Red, Mr. Midnight, and Sybil.

  1

  BLEDSOE

  I think I was just past eight when it all started down in Singer’s Trailer Park.

  That woman down the way, past the well, was not my mama’s friend or my daddy’s or nobody’s there. She was just somebody, movin round us like some old relative showed up at the funerals before it’s time to eat: lookin like the dead, finishin all the jokes, nicknamin, pickin bones. But my daddy was a good man and a fix-it man and he got in between loose dogs chargin and picked up kids tripped in the dirt. He was that kind of man. Good-lookin too: brick color, long lashes, good hair.

  When he met the younger woman down the way, Mama was at church. It was a Wednesday, Bible study. And Landon—all mysterious—was out with his friends and they was probably shoutin bout guns, power, revolution, fuckin em up, fightin em off, turnin tables, drawin lines. My mama put supper for us on the stove fore she left. I wanted pizza though. Daddy agreed: he drive me out for it, throw away the box. And then I could watch things on TV Mama normally turned off. Then I could turn on the radio until Mama get home, then set it back on them AM gospel stations where the singin and music make me think about the Saturday night scary movies.

  We went out to our Malibu, sunk in the gravel near our trailer under moonrise, so the car shined more than it did in the day. With the radio on some fast song, and the smoke from my daddy’s Kools working cross the dash, and the long but easy road to town in front of us, we saw the barefoot woman walkin at side of the road, heels in her hand. If the headlights hadn’t been turned on bright, cause they had to be, we mighta missed her. Or we coulda struck her. She walked long in our direction near middle of the road like she ain’t never carved no place on one.

  Daddy slowed down. He recognized the woman. We could all recognize each other, when we wanted to. I wanted to keep goin. We had green beans and yams and fried corn and some trout on the stove, but they was there the last week. Maybe the week before. Recently. It was fishin time. We wasn’t gonna go hungry, I knew. Still …

  Daddy waved his hand out the window cross to the woman. The woman looked up out of, like, this daze. She waved back. She still didn’t seem to know him. He knew her though.

  “You goin back to Singer’s?”

  “I am,” she said. She squinted through the bright lights in her eyes.

  “It’s dark out here to be walkin like this,” my daddy told her. “I’ll lift you.”

  “Oh no,” she said. “I’m fine.”

  “Barefoot out here?”

  And then the woman looked cross both sides of the road fore she walked to us.

  “Get in the back, Solemn.”

  I left my door open for her. She slid in my place. I took up in the back. In time with old music, I tapped my feet at back of the woman’s seat. Daddy turned us farther from pizza in town right back into the gates of home.

  I couldn’t hear they conversation, over the music and the speakers thumpin out bass on me. It felt good. Like my own fists workin themselves up and down Daddy’s spine when he was stiff. He gave me dollar bills for my little hands to run down his back, cause now I was too heavy and my feet was too big to walk on it like I used to. But a word or two bout “that nigger” put me in grown folks’ talk. I looked at my daddy’s eyes in the rearview mirror and noticed a glint in em.

  “He switched up on you like that?” he asked the woman. “Put you out your own car, made you walk all the way back here?”

  “He’s unpredictable,” the woman said. She was the color of a prune. “Gets these mood swings. A simple night out can turn into a mess. Can’t reason with him none.”

  “I’ve known him for a little while now.”

  “Who?” I asked. They didn’t hear me.

  “Well, you should know he got a temper,” the woman confided.

  “I heard a little bit of it,” Daddy said. “We all pick up boys in these parts. Do what we can. I heard nobody wanted to work with him too long.”

  “Imagine being married to him.”

  Daddy passed our trailer and moved down a steep we never had to go down.

  “I’m near the woods,” the woman said. “Past the well. One of the last ones.”

  It wasn’t no camp lanterns on the last ones. Mama told me to call em “compact” to be polite, cause one time she heard me call em “shacks” and said I was careless. These crows flocked and slumped at edge of the well, sleep. Just when I thought they was all too identical and might only be decoration, all they gray eyeballs shot out at once. The car stopped and the music stopped. And Daddy turned down the radio to say bye.

  “I thank you,” the woman said. “It’s chilly in
the air, and I’m just now gettin over somethin’. Makes it all worse, huh?”

  “No problem,” Daddy told her. “That woulda been too far to walk.”

  “And I’d already come so far. I got some cognac in the house, if you want.”

  I wondered what was cognac, cause I’m always up for a new thing.

  “I gotta get my daughter some pizza … my wife don’t cook on Wednesdays.”

  “Oh?”

  “Bible study.”

  “Oh.”

  “Best I’m gonna do tonight is sneak a beer in with the pizza.”

  “Understood,” the woman said. And I think she called me “pretty.”

  But there was somethin bout a woman punishin her own feet with a dirt road when she coulda worn shoes, namin her husband “that nigger” when her own name went unsaid, and seein my father a good man made her sound more than I think she intended it. He spinned up the path back to our trailer, and dropped me off.

  “Yo mama cooked,” he told me. “Lock the door.”

  I knew how to be by myself. Daddy was always away playin cards or talkin at the well while I fussed on my own with my balls and Barbies. In the quiet time when crickets chirp and porch lights fade out one by one, I had a plate of cold yams and soggy fish on my lap. I snuck off half a cheese Danish cake I couldn’t have no coffee with in the mornin. My cat squat with her paws at the rim of her litter box. A toad stuck to the window in front of the TV, scootin round in its film. Daddy came back ’fore the church van pulled up.

  “Who was she … the woman?” I asked him, a sloppy grin on his face and a syrupy sweet on his breath and beads of sweat at his lip. It was a puzzle. In just that little bit of time, such a normal known face became so incorrect.

  “She a neighbor of ours,” Daddy told me. “You don’t know her sweetheart.”

  “Why was she just walking down the middle of the road all by herself?”

  “I don’t know,” my daddy said. “But don’t tell your mama for me, you hear?”

  And I never told. And a few more Bible study nights after that he disappeared, left me with a cold supper and a secret. But it was always too dark for me to go out at night to prove if the crows was real or not. So, I always went down there in day to see if the woman was. And even though it came to be hard to recall why that well came to be my place to be, I knew Pearletta Hassle most certainly had been real.

  And maybe we wasn’t happy as I had thought we was. Maybe was poor, too.

  No matter how dark it got, stars and moonrise and love for the world can light it up. And little later on, that didn’t mean I could really see much past the papery man swingin his baby by one arm down by the well. Not too careful at all. Not too uncareful, either. Too slow to be up to no good. Too fast to be up to nothing. And I ain’t planned on runnin so fast and hard I fly past my own house cause I was confused. Cause when I flew, it felt to me like the Malibu was there behind me on that night, but I ain’t so sure …

  I wasn’t sure of too much of nothin after that, except somebody round there was gonna have to make some money to set us all free from going crazy or dropping dead.

  ONE

  Around time Solemn Redvine was between ten and twelve, when her favorite song was Jennifer Lopez’s “Waiting for Tonight,” at the turn of the century, inside merciless July, in Bledsoe, Mississippi, where the Drinking Gourd never lies and the moss always grows north of the trees, where the morning glory field has no fortress, where people connect the face they miss into the stars of the night, where an outhouse is a staple and not a shame, where feet grow tough enough to steady on gravel, where the mosquitoes can be told apart, where every walk or run is déjà vu, where mourners travel as far for a funeral hat as they travel for the mourn, where Saturday night’s last call is just a few tiptoes from Sunday school’s start, Gilroy Hassle got mad at his wife Pearletta because he thought the baby in their trailer didn’t look like him. So he tried to break her neck and knock her out. Then the baby child got lost down a Yockanookany River cobble well.

  Solemn saw the last part.

  That night, scent of cornmeal-coated, onion-packed salmon cakes incensed the Redvine trailer. Solemn’s daddy gulped down his cakes, with canned peas and sugared Uncle Ben’s. Then about town, he told the family. He had a duffel bag at his hip, on to one of the two or three bars to gather with the rest of the odd-jobbers, jacks-of-all-trades, and salesmen of random things. Solemn’s brother, Landon, marched to a ranch house or barn somewhere. He schemed with young Black Power resuscitators. They gathered to complain about having no civil rights. The cat, Dandy, was out and about, for a mouse or a mate. When she found one, she liked to meow like a cock to let the whole house know.

  After supper, Solemn caught up lightning bugs in a rinsed-out Vlasic jar. A baby one wriggled through the slit Landon carved into the lid for their air. Just to catch it back inside with the others, Solemn went through a couple of stumbles. One ended with a gummy film of pink skin torn into her right knee. Its scab commemorated her birthday, every July, as the time or moment in her life gave rise to a frothy, slushy outlook on it all—daring and sudden dark figures in the corners of yo eyes, senses lost, head upstream of the next rumor and ahead of the outcry, bored, knowin what’s gone happen next without turnin the page or comin back after commercial, a whole new odor now—

  From the trailer, it was a few diagonal acres to the flatland development’s only steep, upon a pond. Solemn’s placement in the pattern of the mobile homes was a distinction of sorts. Supposedly, she was on the better side. Down the steep lived the few trailer park folks nobody ever saw out to barbecue, drink outside, drain their tanks, mow their lawns, or pop fireworks on the Fourth. Bledsoe summers could be spectacularly cruel or gloriously pleasurable. Those ones at that end stayed oblivious either way. Those ones either could not afford to or did not think to erect awnings, post tents, attach patios and decks. Those ones never strung Christmas lights—no snow to punctuate their parts, but still. They didn’t rear tulip trees for the honeybees to flirt with. Those ones didn’t bother to scrub campers to a higher value in their eyes. They kept it spare.

  Gilroy and Pearletta Hassle were among the ones who stayed in. Solemn looked for Pearletta—from time to time. She sensed remembrance of a time her father had given the woman, barefoot, a ride home. Solemn remembered the way their car had gone, the direction the woman’s trailer pointed. In her mind, she was a spy. She checked on the woman often. But when she snuck out in dark to go find that woman’s trailer, down the steep and past the well, the all-around trees with no shadows sent her home quick.

  Solemn saw Pearletta was very round at a summer’s Solstice, but back slim by the following start to school. Solemn had seen plenty of pregnant ladies, but none with crow’s-feet and gray roots. Pearletta was worn. Any new mothers Solemn saw were all fresh from prom formals and yearbook photos. And other pregnant ladies gave parties. They bought home soft, colorful bags. Whether she was round or not, Solemn only saw brown grocery bags and black plastic sacks in Pearletta’s hands. She and the man in her trailer kept the blinds closed all the time—even in the day. The couple gave no shower or announcement or viewing invitations or birthday party for the baby. No one even knew if it was a boy or a girl. No one saw it until a Star-Herald obituary announced it was gone.

  But let’s not skip ahead.

  Solemn was close to her again, once. Pearletta hung clothes on the line until the end of the pregnancy. Pearletta thought to pass Solemn her line for a jump rope. But when Solemn thought the woman saw her through fluttering sheets, she ran away. Pearletta did see Solemn. And again. More even. Once she bumped into Solemn on one of the walks she took to manage her hips. The woman smiled at the girl she called “pretty.” She didn’t stop to talk. After the baby came, the man started to drive Pearletta to a town Laundromat. Solemn wanted to come back and watch the sheets blow, know the woman saw her, trot away, play it. Before dark, Solemn could hear the baby cry from the trailer windows. She sat on the well to
listen until it got too dark. She thought to ask Pearletta if she could babysit the baby, to hold the child and stare into its eyes. But Solemn was young. And Pearletta had never shaken hands with her mother. It was inappropriate to ask without that.

  To go back, these were plain black people. They made a heaven for a time.

  Even when their safest part of the world began to crumble and tumble on down, it still smelled of fresh paint, like a stretch of new city projects some decades ago instead of now. They didn’t own the land. As good neighbors they had come there in spurts to hide from an untrusted ending to Vietnam, a death penalty reborn to America, a season of cicadas come down to Mississippi, and shirked offers for their hands in the tenant farms aplenty. This was cheap, so much nicer. The rest of them followed a few of them who found a distant portion of a tiny place called Bledsoe, on outskirts of the bigger place Koscuisko. There, lynchings had been possible but spared. There, none had yet erected mailboxes or signposts of ownership. There, the dejected and homeless and faithful could cover their heads. It was just there, a part of town with no townspeople. So some had come there with old rusted pickup trucks and improvised tents and donated trailers and short mobile homes HUD had just begun to regulate. But they didn’t own the land.

  They piled up like pioneers headed somewhere and fugitives run away. They dug multiple outhouses to share all-around including upkeep. They cleaned and reinstated a well. They made babies and families. They pooled the kids among them to a few schools they could actually go into now, so long as they could figure out a way to get there without asking a white person to come pick them up. They didn’t vote.

  There, every head of a household could be proud. They were all owners. In less than ten years they got so used to it they talked about it outside of it too much. When sounded as loud to strangers as eyes on potatoes once the pantry is spare their contentment and joy sheared down. They got found out. And they never owned the land. A young Eastern European immigrant turned tenant farm capitalist turned real estate developer in Vicksburg got mind to buy their sprawling prairie, install electricity and piping, cajole Bell South to bless them with phone lines, assure them: “Oh no, y’all can stay.” In lieu of fenced plots (“Too expensive”), he wound rope around staves. Then he charged bit by bit for the people’s rights to stay there, until their forty acres accidentally had its own spot on a Mississippi map as well as its own name: Singer’s Trailer Park.